Elizabeth Hand: Glimmering

I began writing Glimmering in 1994 as a near-future science fiction novel about a climate change–induced apocalypse. Today, 15 years after its 1997 publication, it reads more like a documentary. Terrorist air strikes against a New York City landmark, devastating storms and rising sea levels, fundamentalist terrorism of various stripes—eco, Christian, Muslim—viral pandemics, mass extinctions, melting ice shelves, rolling brownouts, economic meltdown, 3-D entertainment on a mass scale, music downloads, handheld computers—I loaded the book with these not because I anticipated they’d be part of my own near-future, but because I wanted to create an over-the-top, perfect storm scenario that would support a cautionary SF novel of the type I’d loved reading when I was a teenager in the 1970s, books like Dhalgren , The Sheep Look Up, Heroes and Villains . (The strange celestial effects which gave the book its title have yet to occur, and I completely missed the impact of cell phones, global email—then in its infancy—and social networks.)

In my wildest nightmares—and I’m a lifelong pessimist who’d written extensively about apocalyptic scenarios—I never imagined that the world of Glimmering would arrive so quickly, and with such devastating impact.

In 1993 I saw Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America: Millennium Approaches , in its Broadway preview. The experience galvanized me to attempt an ambitious novel that would deal with the AIDS epidemic then ravaging the world, as well as to tackle the growing impact of climate change. I wanted to keep the focus tight, on several protagonists from very different backgrounds; seemingly unconnected characters from different parts of the world whose lives intersect on the eve of the new millennium in New York City. This trope has become familiar over the last decade, mostly from films like Crash , Traffic , Magnolia, and the like. It wasn’t exactly unknown in fiction, but I wasn’t familiar with many SF novels that attempted to tell a story this way. The book received mostly good reviews, especially in the UK, where it was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and was discussed as a possible contender for the Booker Prize.

Mostly, however, readers seemed bemused by a near-future novel whose main protagonists were three gay men (two with AIDS, at the time a death sentence), and a straight fundamentalist singer-songwriter who begins to lose his faith after an obsessive sexual encounter with a refugee from Eastern Europe. The cataclysmic events of 9/11 had not occurred when the book first appeared at the tail end of the go-go ’90s, and the novel’s extremely grim view of an imminent future was way out of step with the era’s excesses and ill-considered optimism.

Things have changed.

The UK critic Graham Sleight first suggested to me several years ago that the book now reads as alternate history, and put the idea in my head to bring it back into print. In September 2009 I gave a lunchtime talk in the former one-room schoolhouse here, to members of the Lincolnville Improvement Association. I spoke about climate change, and used Glimmering as an example of demonstrating various “sci fi” ideas which had actually come to pass.

Afterward, a man came up to me and said, “I’m probably the only person in that room who knows exactly what you’re talking about.” He was Robert Olson, senior fellow at the Institute for Alternative Futures, a D.C. think tank. He hadn’t read Glimmering , but he and his wife Marge, summer people in this part of Maine, and I became good friends. When he did read the novel, he made several very cogent suggestions as to improving it. A short time later, Victoria Blake of Underland Press agreed to publish a new edition.

Originally I wanted to reprint the book as is, but as I read it for the first time in fourteen years, I decided to revise it. Most of the changes consist of cuts—a huge amount of extraneous description was left on the cutting-room floor. I implemented Bob’s suggestion for the disastrous event that causes the glimmering, as it’s more scientifically feasible than the one I’d come up with. Then, in an email, Bob threw down the gauntlet for me to “man up” to the dire vision I’d put on the page.

I think “the end of the end” is a legitimate theme, but I’m not giving up on encouraging you to bring your talents to bear on a more positive vision of what could be. There is darkness ahead. We’ve waited too long on climate change and other global problems to prevent that. The question is whether the crises ahead will make us increasingly dysfunctional or mobilize capabilities we do really have but that go far beyond what we now believe we can do.

So the biggest change is in the tone of the book’s ending. My children Callie and Tristan were very young when I wrote Glimmering . Both are now in college (my son studying environmental science), and face the consequences of living in a world that in too many ways mirrors the one I envisioned. Their parents’ generation helped fling open the Pandora’s Box that has caused such devastation to our planet; I have taken the author’s prerogative, and snapped the box closed in time to keep its final gift to humankind alive and intact.

For this new edition I give heartfelt thanks to my agent, Martha Millard, proprietor of the world’s only full-service literary agency; to Victoria Blake and Joel Schneier of Underland Press; to Stan Robinson, for his generosity in providing an introduction to this new edition; and to John Clute.

Most of all, very special thanks to Bob Olson, for his encouragement and suggestions for a more positive end of the world than I could envision all those years ago.

Elizabeth Hand’s novel Glimmering is a science fiction novel written in the mid-1990s and set at the time of the millennium, just a few years later. As such it is an example of “near future science fiction,” which is one of the central subgenres of science fiction. It’s a subgenre that focuses attention on the present moment of a book’s publication, and in particular on that part of contemporary life that can only be captured by describing it in the future tense, so to speak. All of the emergent properties of the present are revealed slightly in advance of the fact; this subgenre of science fiction is therefore a kind of “proleptic realism”—and given the rapid and accelerating sense of change in our world today, it is in many ways the most accurate realism, even perhaps the only possible realism.