The Charles Fort quote at the start of Black Helicopters possibly provides a clue to the novella’s intentions. According to Wikipedia, Fort was a researcher in anomalous phenomena. Black Helicopters is over toppling with anomalous phenomena. We’ve got secret organisations, CIA skulduggery involving psychics and drugs, a Lovecraft inspired apocalypse and sections set in the medium and far future.
None of it really comes together, which makes the novella feel more like an outline for a novel than its own story. In fact there’s this constant feeling that’s there a bigger story bubbling and seeping through the cracks. But for me it never emerged.
I just never felt that I was on the same wavelength as the novella.
And yet there’s something about its intangible, non-linear, madcap nature that’s lingered with me. It’s a story that I want to discuss, partly because I’m curious to know what others thought of it, partly because I feel that through discussion the novella will start clicking into place and partly because Black Helicopters is the sort of challenging, ‘maddening’ (as Gary Wolfe puts it) story that should spark debate and conversation between genre folk. It’s a shame that the novella isn’t more wildly available.
Whether I fully understand Black Helicopters, whether I’m on its wavelength, the novella has left an impression. Ephemeral. Frustrating. Tantalising. Let the discussion begin!
Hi Ian, here’s my take on Black Helicopters, having read it several times now: Caitlin’s structure is as much a commentary on the events of the novella as a stylistic choice; two personages who are actually one person, who can move back and forth in time, dealing with some kind of eschatological event (the star that fell screaming from the sky) but it’s hard to know if the organizations of X and Y (who seem to play a cosmic game of chess themselves) knew it was coming. But once I realized that Bete and Ivoire were actually one person that made it a little easier to understand. The world does not end when the star fell from the sky, but it changed, and Ivoire decided to reenact the event – on Mars – nearly 200 years in the future, but it seems her motives would not be understandable to mere mortals. I think we are meant to believe that Ivoire is a being outside of time, like Ptolema, but more than long-lived. The shifting structure is meant to emphasize that time and place are simply relative constructs, the game is larger than just our lives, or even our planet. It seems to me purposely mind-bending (which is definitely maddening in an actual sense) as if to remind us how temporally-centered we are (and how arbitrary a construct that is); parts of it remind me a bit of PKD and I think there’s a strong Fringe (the TV show) influence in there too along with her usual references, and there’s a lot of herself in it too, I can see pieces of Caitlin in Sixty-Six, Ptolema and Ivoire.
This is fantastic. Thank you!