World Running Down by Al Hess

cw: suicide ideation, mental illness, body dysmorphia, cancer, death, dying, terminal illness, body image, ageing, depression, hopelessness, anhedonia etc

Ok, this is too many genre books in a row.

I get that.

But sometimes when you read one genre novel and it’s great – especially when you kinda hate the day to day reality of your own life – it’s hard to slip back into reality.

I know this is the case for me, I don’t know about other people.

I don’t read multiple works of SF in a row when I’m feeling good about myself and the world.

I don’t read about things that couldn’t happen in the present day when I’m able to conceive of and imagine a life for myself in the present day where I don’t feel fundamentally and irrevocably unfulfilled. Feeling alone without feeling lonely. Not caring enough to feel lonely. To feel lonely you have to feel like there are people, out of reach, who would accept you and like you and make you feel like you know you’re not a problem. To feel lonely you have to have hope. You have to have a sense of loss, or absence or something missing.

I don’t have that. I don’t think.

–///–

I saw an old friend today (sept 11th 2023) for the first time since I moved to Canada in January 2019. So almost five years.

What do you say?

What do I say?

Do I lie and pretend I don’t spend almost every second of every day (except for when I’m directly and successfully distracted, which gets harder and harder and less rewarding to do) thinking that I wish I’d killed myself years ago, or do I mention this and try and make a joke about it?

Or do I just try to toe the line somewhere in between, where I pretend I could maybe be stable and alive for a longer term, but not really mean it? Do I – basically – lie?

Yes. That’s what I do, every time.

I lie and lie and lie and it’s exhausting.

I wish I didn’t have to do it, but it’s polite. It’s expected.

It’s almost impossible to not do.

I don’t think escapist fiction – with happy endings – is meant for people who are happy (unless they’re too intellectually or emotionally lacking to understand that sadness is an option), and even when genre fiction is good (well constructed, artful, featuring rich characterisation and imagery, neatly and emotively plotted (as in when it’s literature, as in when it is art)), reading it still feels – to me, at least, certainly after I’ve read three of this type of book in a row – like a dereliction of duty to the self, to culture, to reality…

When literature features people and places and narratives and items and literal scenarios (rather than emotional ones – all emotional scenarios exist) that don’t exist in reality, yes, it can be – and it is – both fun and valid to play with and engage with them, but too much and (for me, at least), I realise that is is not functioning as casual escapism, but intense escapism. Less a joy and more a need. Not a fun thing to do, but a cruel necessity. The book becoming seen as a friend, even tho (of course) it’s not a friend. It’s a book. But it could be a friend. It could be a good friend. A book doesn’t make me answer questions. A book is a friend who doesn’t ask me how I am.

That act of reading, then, it becomes relentless, needed and irrevocably essential escapism, the denial of which will only push me deeper into the ground, into the well, into the hole.

I am so utterly without joy, without hope, without a solid frame of liveable and believably tolerable futurity in my day to day life that novels that make me forget it feel like about all I can handle. They feel like something I can’t stop reading.

If I remember who I am and where I am and how I am I think I will just have to lay down face forward in a bath. And I don’t have access to a bath.

It has to end it has to end it has to end

I cannot continue to live like this.

I am dying a soul death and the only way I can feel pleasure and joy and hope is vicariously in the narratives of the non-naturalistic novels I keep compulsively reading.

But I’m not reading crap, and the thing about good genre fiction is that it discusses and dissects and explores reality, so reading good science fiction, like World Running Down by Al Hess, is only escapism in a simple sense.

It doesn’t stop one from wrestling with any meaningful or serious or weighty fucking issues, it doesn’t take one away from a reality where people are unfulfilled, where people are stuck in lives and bodies and places they fucking hate and only unlikely or unrealistic shifts and meanderings ever change that …

I didn’t spend 300 pages in Al Hess’ Salt Lake City adjacent (I think?) post-apocalyptic spaces and forget forget forget about my reality (which I hate) or myself (which I hate), but I did get to enjoy a moving, emotive and engaging vision of a possible – and neither pleasant nor unrealistic – version of the future, one where none of humanity’s problems have been fixed, and though people speak in distinct and undeniably period-specific 2020 (absolute latest 2021) slang, the dialogue aside (and maybe the ending, which I’ll get to, which I was slightly troubled by when considering it as more than a somewhat medieval (yet, one must admit narratively satisfying) “the good end well and the bad end badly”) was a really excellent novel.

–///–

In summary: I’m not reading reams and reams of science fiction because I’m happy. I’m doing it because I’m resistant to reality, because mine isn’t very good.

Neither is Valentine’s, the protagonist-hero in this fresh post-apocalyptic novel about salvagers on the great American salt plains, seeking trade-able goods to take to the small, v Mad Max type rundown towns or to the huge, v sleek and slick and highly policed (¿¿yet somehow also quite progressive??) cities that still exist, a few generations after all the world’s best and brightest (sorry, richest) flew off on giant spaceships looking for a new planet to call home.

The Earth, though, is not dead, and though it may not have healed or stopped being injured or even stopped being shit, it hasn’t continued getting worse; or maybe it has and the characters Al Hess introduces a reader to have all decided to ignore that fact, focusing instead on the impossible – or near-impossible – dream of obtaining citizenship to a city, where healthcare, food and shelter is provided by the state for free [at the point of use].

Though Hess never goes into detail, we are led to believe that life in the city is a sort of fully automated luxury communism type thing is rather than a front for cynical and continued exploitation elsewhere, but even if that is largely the case, there’s still a stratified society in the cities, whereby humans take precedence over the large population of supposedly-not-sentient androids, who are Westworld/Blade Runner type super-realistic (and coated in lab-grown flesh or something like it?) and treated as second class citizens.

Valentine, personally, is super keen to get his citizenship so that he’s able to access trans-affirming healthcare, and when he is offered a salvage job by a person with the connections/cash to offer him citizenship as payment, he leaps at the chance… only for it to turn out that the missing android sex workers he’s been sent to “salvage” have very much reached sentience and very much don’t want to go back to their legal owner’s brothel. So, tho it opens a bit like a reverse Mad Max: Fury Road, the novel quickly slips out of that and becomes much more itself, which is a text about love, about personhood, about what emotionality and emotional response is and why both matter.

–///–

Valentine’s love interest is Osric, a one-time super powerful (and very much sentient) AI who previously controlled several factories who has been illegally imprisoned in a fleshy android body after he got angry and accidentally crushed a worker’s hand on a production line. Being used to feeling alive within a network of his big-brained AI peers and connected to much faster tech than contained under his android skin and muscles, Osric is stunned and confused… but slowly Valentine teaches him the benefits of having a body and the comfort that can be found in physical touch. (And also they fuck.)

It is, though, a genuinely beautiful love story and it is frequently moving, and the novel somehow manages to use the discomfort of the AI in a human(ish) body as a parallel with the trans protagonist’s discomfort in their own body without this ever feeling either overwrought or oversimplified.

Hess writes of feeling unwelcome and trapped in one’s own flesh with an understandable and a reliable tone; Osric and Valentine are not the same, of course, but Hess’ evocation of the moral missteps people are often forced to make due to blunt economics intersecting with personal need is engaging and potent, and very real.

Recognising the individuality and personhood of the androids he is sent to salvage means that Valentine has to choose between essentially forcing other people into indentured sex work, or obtaining the healthcare he needs to feel comfortable in his body. It’s the kind of moral conundrum that is life, in our reality as much as in the future…

We all fucking sell ourselves in the hope we’ll one day be able to buy ourselves a version of ourselves we can live with. And some people get to, but most people don’t. Or they do, I don’t know. I’m a bad person to ask because I don’t speak to many people and I’m also miserable.

I work too much and I keep doing it because I hope that one day I’ll be able to not work too much. But there’s no fucking guarantee that will happen. If I died tomorrow, I would have wasted so much time. But if I don’t die tomorrow will.i stop wasting time? Working all the time means I don’t have time to actually make plans or make actions that make life liveable. Fuck. It’s not hard to understand, but it’s hard to action, innit…

–///–

very extreme trigger warning re terminal illness & suicide ideation, hence the blacked out text:

I wrote a poem today (it’s not a good sign when I’m writing poems tbh) about how I’m jealous of a guy I know who’s my age and is dying of terminal cancer. About how I’m jealous of that. Writhing with fucking jealousy about it. And I meant every fucking word because it’s fucking true. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

–///–

I’m reading too much science fiction.

Because it means that even when I enjoy it, even when I love it, if it’s good – if it’s literature – I can’t leave myself behind enough when I read it. I want to disappear.

But I don’t want to read shitter books.

I want to live a better life. I don’t know how to do that.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

–///–

World Running Down is excellent. I loved it. Buy it.

–///–

MENTION THE ENDING:

World Running Down has a morally grey ending that is positioned as unequivocally happy and I don’t know if it’s meant to be, I don’t know if Valentine moving to the city and getting trans-affirming healthcare and helping sentient androids gain their own citizenship is meant to be read as a positive, as the city is broadly a cruel and stratified and mean place, whereas the smaller towns outside the city function as mutual aid filled communes, real communities, where groups of people work together as a clan, whereas in the city people are reduced to nuclear family units, which is obviously worse, I imagine; lifespans are longer and food is plentiful in the city, but there’s not that community, that group, that thing which I also don’t have but imagine must be good, right? It must feel good to belong, to be around people who are your people and you are theirs, rather than alone and outside and cold and sad all the time. Ah.

Sorry.

I don’t know.

I’m too fucking miserable atm.

Gotta make some changes NOW

Gotta make some changes yesterday, yeah

Lol, I bet I don’t 🤪🤪🤪😂😂😂🤠🤠🤠

Order World Running Down direct from the publisher here