tl;dr

A brilliant alternate history novella about exploitation and our tendency to forget the tragedies of the past.

opening remarks

I have vague memories of reading a short story by Brooke Bolander on Strange Horizons a few years back.  My hazy recollection tells me that I enjoyed the story.  I’m not sure what that means in regards to The Only Harmless Great Thing, but I dig the cover.

knee-jerk observations

In an alternate 20th Century America Topsy wasn’t electrocuted in 1903 at Coney Island but instead he, and his elephant brothers and sisters, replaced the radium girls when it was discovered that painting watch dials with radioactive paint was shitty for your health.  Skip 90 years and elephants are again being asked to help humanity, this time to warn other humans away from buried deposits of radioactive waste by glowing in the dark.  Kat is leading the negotiations with a representative of elephant-kind, and it’s not going too well:

The novella alternates in time between Regan, the radium girl dying of cancer, teaching Topsy to paint the dials, to Kat and her discussions with the elephant representative nine decades later.  We also get Topsy’s unique perspective on the world:

This is partly a story about exploitation, not just of elephants press-ganged into service, but the original women who were not told the truth about the paint’s poisonous qualities.  And it’s about humanities astonishing capacity to avoid, to ignore the lessons of the past, as distinct from the elephants who make it their mission to always remember:

It looks like that Topsy doesn’t escape her original fate.  What’s not clear to me is what year she’s electrocuted in Bolander’s alternate history.  There is mention that the electrocution will take place in the newly constructed Luna Park, which would mean 1903.  But that doesn’t marry up with references to Topsy and her pachyderm sisters helping out the war effort.

This is tragic and awful yet beautifully written:

As Kat notes it’s not even an avoidance or apathy to the truth that’s at play here; it’s the way story-tellers (Disney for instance) mould the truth into a palatable narrative, merely to discard the grubbier, not so happy parts of the story.  It’s only decades later when someone ignorant of the truth – me for instance – checks the Wikipedia page, or reads an article, that we fully comprehend what happened.

The Gist Of It

The title of that story by Brooke Bolander which I had vague memories of was Tornado’s Siren, published on the Strange Horizon website in 2012.  It’s therefore been just under 6-years since I’ve read anything by Bolander.  It’s not that I’ve been avoiding her work, it’s that, for the most part, I don’t pick-up the online magazines where she’s published.

My attention for the last five or so years has been focussed on novels.  This is why the Tor novella range is so damn important.  Like the parent who hides vegetables in a sausage roll, they package shorter fiction in a novel casing.  If not for this novella it might have been who knows how many years until I would have read a story by Bolander.  That would have been an awful state of affairs because she is a remarkable writer as evidenced by The Only Harmless Great Thing.  It’s not just that she brings together the electrocution of Topsy and the exploitation of the Radium Girls in such a way that you wonder why no-one has done it before; and it’s not just her ability to seamlessly transition between the perspectives of an elephant, a furious, betrayed radium girl and a guilty, frustrated researcher (90 or so years in advance of the other two points of view); no, what struck me was how Bolander was able to convey complicated, penetrating thoughts about the stories we tell ourselves and the truth we ignore in such a small space and with such elegant, evocative and passionate prose.  Bolander has used alternate history not for the usual what ifs and thought experiments but to critique the way we forget and avoid and – to use her word – transmute the past into something that’s digestible, that’s doesn’t upset or offend.  And she does it by forcing you – me – to remember a moment of awful animal torture and capitalist greed, events that we don’t speak about because as Kat says tragedy has a short half-life.

I could go on but Bolander, through the novella, says it far more powerfully than I ever could: elephants remember, we forget.