Talking Big

By Jay Innis Murray

This sleek novella was published last month by Coffee House Press as part of their new NVLA series. The tag line for the series is an artistic playground where authors challenge and broaden the outer edges of storytelling. This novella is one of the first two in the series, and it is a superb start. The outer edges of storytelling are a difficult commercial terrain. Kudos to all involved in bringing this series to the world. You can check out the series here.

The book page on the Coffee House website can give you all the plot summary you need right here. It is enough to know the narrator claims to be a man imprisoned in a world that is dominated by a series of robot tyrants called The Plotinus (or whatever the plural of Plotinus would be). He is in a cell, deprived of all comforts and freedoms (even bereft of a view or sense of what is outside of his cell). He is visited periodically by friendly people (a Vector and later a Vectoress) who give him foods and items of clothing in violation of rules (apparently) and at the risk of the wrath of the rolling Plotinus robot.

That in short describes his world. He fills it with wandering musings and prose poetry. One of his only visitors is a hornet who comes in through the ventilation system. He falls in love with it.

I noticed that her body was striped with amber, and that her eyes were the color of blue apothecary bottle glass. A cobalt blue threaded with gold. Her face is elegant. She has what was once called a frimousse, meaning an irresistible, somewhat feline look: good cheekbones and a delicate, nicely proportioned chin.

There is a lot of descriptive fun like that. And strange, fragmentary, glimpse-of-an-iceberg world-building like this from late in the novella.

All at once and for no apparent reason, I am of a sudden recalling a thing Gazali had read about Mars in one of his contraband magazines that we all found particularly fascinating. Adolescents sent to Mars to procreate were unable to conceive and to this purpose were sequestered in hothouses among a profusion of fruiting plants, pollinated by a clone called a mothwing (it is not a moth) and a bird (perhaps a number of birds) without whose voices newborns cannot survive the first week. These birds feed on a fungus that, allowed to run rife within the hothouses, endangers the mothwing. The birds are raised in auxiliary rooms well-provided with a flower named Ahmad’s buttercup (after Ahmad Azari, the first Arabian astronaut). The buttercup depends on a rich soil taken from a forest in what remains of Tunisia. A soil brought to the planet by a fleet of starships. It is possible that none of this is true, but it made sense to me an Gazali. (Why would anyone waste their time inventing a story such as this?)

Why indeed? Know that this type of fiction book is not a waste of time for anyone, inventor or reader. It is urgently needed.