This series focuses on stories that are both enjoyable and do something that I find interesting from a technical perspective. This week, let’s discuss why we need to nuke Siberia from orbit immediately.
I was initially on the fence about reviewing “Behind Her, Trailing Like Butterfly Wings,” by Daniela Tomova and published in Apex Magazine. It’s an interesting story of group survival in a world being gradually consumed by space-time anomalies called “mouths,” but the conflict normally needed to sustain a plot is so deeply repressed that it’s barely there for most of the piece. (It comes back with a literal vengeance at the end, though.) Since nothing of particular note from a technical perspective jumped out at me, either, I decided to move on.
Only it turns out I didn’t really move on. Some stories stick with you in unexpected ways, and the hauntingly desperate grasp for meaning by the characters in the story in the face of a slow-motion apocalypse is hard to forget even as the rest of the story fades from your memory. Eventually, I realized that was as much the central conflict in the piece as the narrator’s search for answers. In a way, this story is the darker, sadder twin of LEGO Man. (In two ways, actually, but the second would be a spoiler.) It’s a subtly written piece, full of hard questions about the nature of hope, and I think it’s worth your time to read and mull over. I don’t think I spent enough time thinking this story through the first time around, and it took a few months for my subconscious to get that message across to the rest of me.
So what does this have to do with nuking Siberia from orbit? Well, after you’ve read the story, read this article and you’ll understand why it really is the only way to be sure. It’s a rare author who can shape a story out of the fears of our collective subconscious, and a much rarer one who can do so with fears we don’t even have yet.