Three apocalypses

kw: book reviews, speculative fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction

It took me a while to warm up to Michael Cunningham's writing. His new book Specimen Days is really three related novellas. One takes place about 1900, one about 2020, one about 2150. Each has as its main characters a woman (broadly speaking), a youngish man (sort of...), and a pre-teen boy. The woman's name in each case is a variant of Catherine. The man's is Simon, though in 21-whatever, he is more of an android. The boy's name varies. The novellas are titled "In the Machine," "The Children's Crusade," and "Like Beauty." The stories are linked also by being in, or beginning in, New York City, and by the presence of a rare ceramic bowl.

In the first, Simon is unfaithful, but dies before marrying the woman. The boy, his brother, carries on his job, finds himself hexed by Simon's voice in a stamping machine, and is himself injured by the machine. The woman's life is saved as a result, for when she leaves her workplace to tend to the boy, she isn't present when the Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire of 1911 takes the lives of 147 seamstresses.

The woman is a forensic pathologist in the second, and Simon her lover. She works a police terrorist hotline (I suspect the job hardly exists at present), taking calls from those who wish to report mayhem before the fact. Two boys in succession call in, then go out to blow someone up. A third boy targets her. Though she talks him out of his pipe bomb, the life she knew ends, nonetheless, though in this case it could be a beginning.

Nobody is really "human" in "Like Beauty". Simon is an android. The woman is an alien refugee, a lizard-shaped mammal from a nearby stellar system. The boy, who appears halfway through, is a precocious survivor who leads them to their destiny with the man who created Simon. This Simon is faithful to the woman, though he finds she is a century older than he.

Cutting away the fluff, they are the same post-apocalyptic story. The Industrial Revolution was an apocalypse for rural families, though it took a few generations to work itself out. The near- and farther-future stories occur during drawn-out apocalypses of their own.

I confess I did not read all of "In the Machine." It is rougher, edgier, with a bit more vulgarity (we're talking more than dirty language here) than I care for. This is ugliness with a purpose, however, just as the ugliness in the political novels of Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck were purposeful: the generation needed a thump in the head. So does ours. We are either active agents, or specimens...