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Into the World of Might Be
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Albedo One's issue 39 - a prime issue with stories from Mike Resnick, Uncle River, Mari Saario, Annete Reader, Martin McGrath and J. L. Abbot, an in-depth interview with multiple Hugo Award winner Mike Resnick, and review columns from Juliet E. McKenna and David Conyers. Buy it now for only €5.95 and support Albedo One! |
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What an interesting story! If you like contemplative fiction and a poetic style of writing backed by some interesting and complex philosophy then you’ll love this story. Those into hard SF with lots of techno babble may not enjoy it as much. The story is told almost exclusively as a stream of consciousness from the points of view of a man and a woman in a Skylab orbiting the moon. Both stories are told in short sentence fragments and the points of view provide only a minimal description of their world. For example, the names of the man and woman are never revealed and there are only small hints as to their past. They are taking part in an experiment in isolation and weightlessness to see what would happen if a man and a woman are left alone in space for six months as they orbit the moon. There is a radio but it is not to be used except in an emergency. Surprisingly, it would also appear that the ground controllers do not have any way of contacting the spacecraft for passive observation or to initiate a conversation remotely. At first everything is going well but, after just a few weeks in this environment, the man and the woman start to exhibit some strange behaviour and start to see some very odd things. As the story is only told from their points of view it is impossible to know what is real and what is imagined. There is also quite a bit of tension and fear between them as they see each other reacting to these strange events. The tension builds throughout the story until it meets the crisis point and moves on to the next stage but even at the end you can never be sure as to what has really happened. The style of writing is wonderfully claustrophobic, evoking a very strong sense of what it is like to be in such a confined and isolated environment. The style also ensures that only the minimal information is revealed to the reader – just enough to be able to guess at what’s going on but never enough to be sure whether any of it is real or imaginary. As we learn more of what might be going on, the story dips into some deep philosophical issues about time, space and the mind. Impressively, the story maintains the reader’s interest throughout. If you require the physics of a story to be absolutely correct you won’t like this story as there are a couple of minor errors, such as being able to see the crater Tsiolokovsky for hours on end despite the craft being in orbit around the moon, but this is just nit picking. The story is not about physics and spacecraft, it is all about the mind of the couple whilst they are so thoroughly isolated. The story is very short – at a guess it’s about 20,000 words – which might not really merit a book in its own right. It’s probably only marginally long enough to be considered a novella, and only through careful formatting and presentation has it been published to appear more substantial in word count. For the story that is being told, it is, however, the right length, so the author should be congratulated for having the courage to keep the story to its optimal length and not being tempted to pad it out. For the awards (all out of 5) I give:
My final summary: an excellent read but keep an open mind because it’s not so much about the plot as it is about the experience. Into the Beyond (2009) Review by Wayne J. Harris |
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