Notes from the edge
or, perspectives from a tear-streaked window
And in that inky firmament, a million, billion stars.
Recently I learnt of the term Climate Fiction, or CliFi, via the stunning world building articles and short fiction of Substacker Claudia Befu over at
.It turns out that over the years I have been working silently on something that slots neatly into that genre. Well, it’s SciCliFi (gulp), I suppose. But perhaps that’s encapsulated by CliFi. Claudia?
Regardless, I’m hesitant to start a serialisation of another story on here so soon, or even to just dump a chapter, especially when there’s still the swirl of mystery around a certain meteorite1. But with a lack of significant dreams2 this last week, I want to try something different as a means to think about character, setting and voice. So I’m going to fling out some words from my own corner of CliFi.
The words are from Jisa Mirabar, protagonist and storyteller in this tale.
I’ve mentioned Jisa previously. She was running through the streets of a world beaten by rain3, carrying something within her palm—information, secrets, something she shouldn’t possess.
Jisa has lived her life in a city in ruin. A city cloaked in rain and darkness and one that has been built upon by another, an upper metropolis that straddles the clouds and allows those within it to live in daylight, pretending that all the ruin in the world below doesn’t exist.
Jisa, like a million others, is trapped in this city below.
A drip-drip of that information will bleed out through her story, of course. It has to. But there’s a divide that I want to convey with Jisa and her chapters. And perhaps this is amateur, perhaps it harks back to those sometime years ago when I had an inkling of story and prose and what I wanted to tell but I didn’t have the tools, so came at it with a blunt naivety that might still be rusting and denting whatever sculpture of words have been formed.
I don’t know.
But for now, this is how it is: her inner mind is one transfixed by finding beauty in the world, even in its harshness. There is hope within her, even if she isn’t aware of it. There is a melancholy that swirls in her veins, hidden below skin.
There is a person within, profoundly different from the person without.
And the only way I can see this—and again, blunt tools, yada yada—is to live her past, within her. That is what I want the reader to do too.
What I’m saying is, I’m telling her backstory from the first person.
I love backstories. Sometimes I feel as though I'd rather read a backstory than a, err, forwardstory. I could read a whole book of backstory. But can that exist without any notion of the forward?
So anyway …
Here are two snippets of two separate scenes.
The first is Jisa meeting someone from that world above, a person who can promise her something she thought forever out of reach. Someone she finds herself all too easily at ease with.
In this, we see a closer glimpse of Jisa’s world, the city of Siridan.
… I loop my arm through his and set us moving, to blend into the crowd that seethes past. “Come on,” I say, and we merge, become carried in their sway, become passengers of routine. As we cross the junction, he says nothing. I just feel his warmth, the already comfortable silence outstripped by the hustle of a thousand people chatting, of vendors peddling their wares, of street merchants hollering that their stalls offer the finest escape from the oppressive cold and damp.
We cross Ondorro Street and cut right onto Undorro Lane, silent in our path but with a steady heat growing inside the pit of my stomach. The laneway is a flurry of people, the busiest of the myriad alleyways so characteristic of the district. This is Dridok after all, the grovel hole of Siridan. The district that tries to rescue itself through its penchant for food and night markets, for bustling bars and seedy dens.
…
The eras of smuggling, of wars, the fallout of digging too deep and for too long, the causes and consequences of the ruin, these are things present throughout the city, but more so here perhaps. The network of tunnels that connect dens like warrens are one such scar, an array for movement of all manner of contraband: drugs, of course, and weapons … but also people. Some of those tunnels cut right out into nothing, an archaic entrance or a foolhardy exit that once would have sat far underwater. There is irony in the sustained rains being unable to have ever quenched that great riverbed. The bedrock just laps it up, sucks it down, funnels it away through the shafts we bored.
But then, later, we see through Jisa’s eyes after she has been gifted (?) a change of perspective, looking down from that world above, the city of Vi.
… I am torn by emotion. Tears of guilt have streaked the glass as I have sat huddled against this precipice, satiated in awe. I shiver, knowing all that lies below and of my lifetime spent looking up in disgust. Yet here I sit, looking out at this spectacle not in disgust but in reverence. Reverence of this panorama, of the craftsmanship, of the interlocking architecture, of the sheer colours and departure from mine own reality. And the black sky—how my senses are shut down to inconsequence when I stare into the beguiling infinity above, unmarred by the planet’s soiled history—that blanket I am so used to. And in that inky firmament, a million, billion stars. They are a sight I have never seen. I could stare at each one, try to count them, try to trace the constellations I have seen only in pictures, or read about in books that Warv pushed under my nose as a child. Instead I just gape, paralysed by their beauty.
Whether fruit or not, those are some words. And with that, I shall leave it.
For now.
Well, there have been some. But do you really want to read about how I had to change into 30 different shirt and waistcoat combinations because none of them went with my suit jacket and the—oh my, but why?—turtle neck I was wearing was clearly a bad choice and so I went home to sort this out but—panic!—there were only minutes before The Event that I had to arrive at and somehow I was still faffing for the combination that would work and there was a car journey to be had and possibly a tram going the wrong way and I’d be late, so late, and where was my wallet anyway? Ahh, classic dreamland anxiety.
Why can't a backstory simply become the story that is being told?
2. Yes, I would have been very interested in that dream!!