2022 Hugo Awards: The Past is Red/Across the Green Grass Fields

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Continuing WWAC’s coverage of the 2022 Hugo Awards, here are reviews of two more Best Novella finalists: The Past is Red by Catherynne M. Valente and Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire…

The Past is Red by Catherynne M. Valente

Cover of The Past is Ret by Catherynne M. Valente. Illustration shows a cartoon depiction of vast heaps of rubbish rising from earth's sea and spelling out the book's title.

Catherynne M. Valente has done well for herself in this year’s Hugos: she is represented in Best Short Story by “The Sin of America”, in Best Novelette by “L’Esprit de L’Escalier” and in Best Novella by The Past is Red. The book is an expansion of her 2016 short story “The Future is Blue” which was published in the climate change-themed anthology Drowned Worlds.

The Past is Red is divided into two parts. The first comprises the original short story and introduces us to Tetley Abednego, a young girl from a post-apocalyptic world where dry land has long since been submerged below sea level, forcing humanity to live either on ships or on vast heaps of rubbish. In this society, garbage is more than a foundation, it is the centre of the whole culture – hence why its inhabitants are typically named after brands from packaging.

So I slept with St. Oscar the Grouch for my pillow, in the shadow of a mountain of black chess pieces in Gamegrange, under a thicket of tabloids and Wall Street Journals and remaindered novels with their covers torn off in Bookbury, snuggled into a spaghetti-pile of unspooled cassette ribbon on the outskirts of the Sound Downs, on the lee side of a little soggy Earl Grey hillock in Teagate. In the morning I sucked on a few of the tea bags and the dew on them tasted like the loveliest cuppa any Fuckwit ever poured his stupid self. I said my prayers on beds of old microwaves and moldy photographs of girls with perfect hair kissing at the camera. St. Oscar, keep your mighty lid closed over me. Look grouchily but kindly upon me and protect me as I travel through the infinite trash can of your world. Show me the beautiful usefulness of your Blessed Rubbish. Let me not be Taken Out before I find my destiny.

The antediluvian era persists as a distorted folk memory involving a long-gone race, the Fuckwits, whose obsession with mass production and massive consumption caused the sea to swallow the land. The event is honoured in song: “Who liked it hot and hated snow? The Fuckwits did! The Fuckwits did! Who ate up every thing that grows? The Fuckwits did! The Fuckwits Did!”

The short story, and so the first part of the novella, follows the exploits of Tetley as she is booted out of Electric City – a wealthy area of the garbage-island that still holds electric power and, consequently, the Fuckwit ethos – and goes on a journey. Her travels take her to Brighton Pier, which has long since been converted into a mobile sea vessel and holds a culture based on tawdry seaside entertainment and garbled renditions of Shakespeare.

But really, there seems little point in summarising the plot of “The Future is Blue” when quoting a choice paragraph or two will do the same job more succinctly. To a large degree, the writing style is the story: Tetley’s narrative voice can be summed up as the result of filtering the post-apocalyptic wordplay of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker through a charity shop toybox, evoking a world where high culture and low culture, philosophy and childish banalities, have become inseparable.

The prose is equally adept at conveying cartoonish expressions of emotion (“My heart fell into my stomach, got all digested up, and sizzled out into the rest of me all at once”) and offering witty observations amidst the sugar-rush silliness:

Actors are liars. Writers, too. The whole lot of them, even the horn players and the fortune-tellers and the freaks and the strongmen. Even the ladies with rings in their noses and high heels on their feet playing violins all along the pier and the lie they are all singing and dancing and saying is: we can get the old world back again.

The second part of the novella – which is much longer than the first, comprising around four-fifths of the book – is an all-new continuation of the original short story. Ten years have passed since the incident at Brighton Pier; Tetley is now 29 and meeting new characters who bring with them different philosophies on life. While the first part involved a dispute over whether Garbagetown should share its resources or pool them into a search for dry land that may not even exist, part two moves to other conflicts. One topic that comes up is whether Garbagetown should have a king, as discussed by Tetley and Big Red Mars:

“…[W]hether existence is a bloodbath or a bubble bath could hinge on whether a little child got kissed good night with a story and a glass of water or sent to bed without snuggles or a snack or a cohesive philosophy of justice.”
“Yes, but why have a king at all?”
“Someone has to make the rules, Tetley?”
“Do they, though? They’re all dead, so none of their rules kissed them good night with a story or whatever you were going on about just then. Seems like someone should have thought of a rule that goes Do Not Fuck Your Only Planet to Death Under Any Circumstances. Seems like that should have been Rule Number One.”

Moving from monarchy to anarchy, another character – Babybel Oni – expresses a nihilistic perspective. “There’s never going to be a world again,” he says to Tetley. After he goes on a long rant about the pointlessness of existence, he declares his desire to be a Fuckwit: “I want to ruin everything! That’s my birthright. But I never, ever will. I’ll never get to ruin anything.”

But the character who does the most to broaden Tetley’s horizons is Mister, an AI stored on a solar-powered device that has survived the world’s flooding. The process of Tetley gaining access to Mister is a major plot thread, with the poignant detail of Mister initially mistaking Tetley for its long-dead owner. Finally, Mister opens up communication with someone unexpected – someone outside Garbagetown. Someone whose existence implies that perhaps dry land really does exist after all…

Notably, The Past is Red’s Hugo nomination came the same year that Charlie Jane Anders published her Sweetweird Manifesto, presenting an alternative to so-called “grimdark” storytelling:

The core idea of sweetweird is: the world makes no sense, but we can be nurturing, frivolous and kind. We don’t have to respond to the ludicrous illogic of the world around us by turning mean and nasty, or by expecting everyone else to be horrible. At the very least, we can carve out friendly, supportive spaces in the midst of chaotic nonsense, and maybe help each other survive.

In The Past is Red, Valente shows a similar ethos to Anders. As frivolous as it might seem on the outside, the story’s emotional core is derived from a very real set of cultural anxieties. It is appropriate that Oscar the Grouch turns up as Tetley’s patron saint, as Jim Henson really did lay out the template for this sort of story: the colourful silliness of the Muppets, the fantasy adventures of Labyrinth and Dark Crystal, and the goofball-apocalypse satire of Dinosaurs all have traces in The Past is Red.

The novella avoids easy ways out. One particular plot thread threatens to become cosily sentimental, but this is pointedly rejected at the end in favour of a harder-nosed resolution. While The Past is Red might seem like the literary equivalent of a kid’s confectionary-laden birthday cake, it knows that its readers expect a touch of the sharp and the sour beneath the sugary outer layer.

Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire

Cover of Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire. Illustration shows title and author name in front of a picture of a tree.

Regan is a young girl who, after a series of incidents render her a pariah at school, retreats into the forest to escape. There, she finds a magic doorway that takes her to the Hooflands, a pastoral otherworld inhabited by such legendary creatures as unicorns, minotaurs and fauns. She is taken in by a clan of centaurs who – equine appearances aside – strike her as being just a normal family:

Regan’s cheeks flushed and her ears burned with secondhand embarrassment as the young centaur drooped, pinned by her mother’s hand. She shot Regan a look filled with shame, and it was so familiar, so essentially human, that Regan relaxed. These people might be centaurs, creatures out of myth and storybook, but they were people. They could be embarrassed by their own actions and by their overbearing parents. They weren’t awe-inspiring. They were just people.

In this world, it is humans like Regen who are seen as beings of legend. Her opposable thumbs alone make her a useful person for the thumbless denizens of the Hooflands to have around, but more than that, Regan finds that some of her new neighbours believe her to be the saviour of their world – even if this involves going up against the Kirin queen who rules. “You are the future of the Hooflands”, says centaur Daisy. “It is your destiny. The doors open only when we’re standing on the cusp of greatest need, and you wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t chosen you.”

Across the Green Grass Fields is the sixth novella in Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series, a set of interconnected portal fantasies in which there is an otherworld for just about every central character (and which, incidentally, is up for the Hugo Award for Best Series). Despite this, the novella is unburdened by continuity and has the feel of a fresh start. Even the choice of setting is distinctly back-to-basics: while previous books visited worlds of cartoonish illogic or elaborate Gothic melodrama, the Hooflands are, quite simply, a place populated by legendary beings who happen to have hooves. It could be described as a paired-down Narnia, with half the population all of the religious moralising surgically removed.

That said, McGuire does work some intriguing pieces of worldbuilding into her story. Regan comes to see the centaurs as nobler than her fellow kind, akin to Jonathan Swift’s Houyhnhnms: she contrasts her world, “filled with bullying, backstabbing humans” with “this brighter, cleaner world of horse-people and honest answers.”

Even aspects of centaur society that initially take her aback, like their mating practices (female centaurs hook up with males who they pay to copulate with, so the women go back with a foal and the men go back with a fee) come to strike her as sensible once they are explained to her. But the centaurs also have their darker side: they are unable to communicate with certain other species, namely kelpies and perytons, and look down upon the latter as savages. Regan, who is able to speak to all of the hoofed folk, is in a position to act as mediator.

These details, however, do not prevent the general impression of Across the Green Grass Fields as being somehow incomplete. Part of this feeling comes from the disparity between Regan’s adventures in the Hooflands and her life back in the mundane world.

The first quarter of the novella is devoted to Regan’s pre-portal backstory. We learn that she has trouble fitting in at school, partly due to peer pressure, and partly due to failing to hit puberty at the same time as her friends. Eventually, her mother explains all – Regan has XY chromosomes and androgen insensitivity:

“You’re not a boy,” said Maureen soothingly. “If you feel like you’re a girl, then you’re a girl. You’ve always been our daughter. You’re just also part of a small percentage of the population who are considered intersex, meaning your body has its own ways of regulating things like hormone production. Some intersex people are more clearly a blend of what doctors would consider male and female attributes; that wasn’t the case with you. There was no surgical intervention or modification after you were born–not that your father and I would have approved that if the doctors had wanted to do it. You are exactly as you were meant to be.”

Having learnt this, Regan makes the mistake of confiding in Laurel, the cool girl at school. “You line up with the girls during PE, and you come to slumber parties with girls – you’ve seen me in my pajamas!” exclaims Laurel in disgust. “You’re a gross, awful, lying boy!” This sensitive topic is handled with care and detail, yet has remarkably little bearing on Regan’s exploits among the centaurs.

Granted, there is a thematic overlap between her status as shunned misfit at home and valorised misfit in the Hooflands, and one sequence relates her physical condition to her ability to escape from captivity (“if she’d developed the hips and breasts she’d been envying on the other girls… she might not have been able to fit”). But there is a conspicuous absence of a Wizard of Oz “and you were there…” factor to truly tie things together.

The clearest connection between the two worlds of the story is that, back home, Regan loves horses. This is more significant than might be thought: Across the Green Grass Fields seems, in large part, a conscious celebration of the genre of girls’ horse fiction, a body of work often overlooked by genre historians who might otherwise indulge ore stereotypically boy-oriented escapism about cowboys, pirates or laser guns. The Wayward Children series is an analysis of fantasy as well as an exercise in it, after all.

The story’s status as part of a larger series also goes some way to justify its incompleteness, and makes it easier to forgive the novella for leaving rather a lot of questions hanging. As, for example, when the omniscient narrator prompts us to contemplate how things are going for Regan’s family:

By that time, Regan had come to grips with the fact that she was going to be very, very late getting home from school; that her parents had, most likely, decided she was missing, and put up flyers at the grocery store. She was young enough yet that the idea of anything further didn’t occur to her; she didn’t realize they would be terrified, or that her father might be questioned in the matter of her disappearance, coming as it had in the wake of another student accusing Regan of being a boy who’d been attending school in girl’s clothing for years.

This receives no payoff by the end of the novella, but there is ample room for such matters to be explored in subsequent volumes, where Regan can rub shoulders with the other Wayward Children.

While it never quite comes together as the standalone story that it initially appears to be, Across the Green Grass Fields has plenty on offer to make it a worthy addition to McGuire’s much-loved series. The plot thread of the quest against the queen reaches a satisfying twist ending, and there are moments of fantasyland logic worthy of Lewis Carroll: witness how the kelpie character explains to Regan that, while he eats humans, he has enough horse-sense to avoid eating the human who might save the world.

Fans of the series will lap it up, and the novella also serves as a jumping-on point for new readers – just so long as they do not go in expecting a complete story.

Series Navigation<< 2022 Hugo Awards: A Spindle Splintered/Elder Race2022 Hugo Awards: A Psalm for the Wild-Built/Fireheart Tiger >>
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Doris V. Sutherland

Doris V. Sutherland

Horror historian, animation addict and tubular transdudette. Catch me on Twitter @dorvsutherland, or view my site at dorisvsutherland.com. If you like my writing enough to fling money my way, then please visit patreon.com/dorvsutherland or ko-fi.com/dorvsutherland.

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