+++

I don’t know much about Ryan’s work, just that he has the Midtown Tetralogy over at Orbis Tertius Press [who I know of cos they rejected Purple Muon Castle a while back, which was obviously a terrible thing for them to do but, really, if I made voodoo dolls of every press that’s rejected my work then all we would have left is Schism and that’s not very fair – actually I think Schism rejected one of my stories once, for their gobbet magazine, so they’d be gone too] and that his surname might be Slovenian.

Or maybe Czech.

If it’s Slovenian, I think it’s pronounced Muh-day. But I’m not a hundred per cent sure on that.

[Just checked and apparently Madej is a Polish surname. Will need the author to confirm this though].

Back to Aurora…

I was attracted to this one after seeing the cover and reading the title. Anything to do with space – outer, inner, hovering enigmatically in the atmosphere, other – I’m interested.

Plot summary?

Can’t find one with the basics, but these are the two blurbs attached to the book on its Lulu page:

“A dream of metamorphosis as ancient as nebulae, viewed through orbital telescopes, that know more about ‘human nature’ than we do.”

Louis Armand Author of ‘The Combinations’ & ‘Entropology’

“Ryan Madej’s perverse novel reads primarily as a love story, alternating between the deviant and the divine, or as close as one can get from the physical realm. A journey through madness from the mundane to the otherworldly.”

Charlene Elsby Author of ‘The Devil Thinks I’m Pretty’ & ‘Violent Faculties’

Neither gives me much to go on so this spec could really go off the rails in terms of who the main characters are and general setting/locations [just like the last three I’ve done tbh].

Though there are some clues in the blurbs:

‘A dream of metamorphosis’

Someone or something will change in a big way. Or perhaps the human race will adapt itself socio-politically. Or be adapted by force?

‘Viewed through orbital telescopes’

The main character might work on a space station, doing maintenance on these telescopes. Spying on the humans down below. Or the AI operating the telescopes will be the observer, making the humans redundant in their own transformation. Hmm. If it is change on a civilisational level then the individual human becomes irrelevant. They can either be carried along, pretend it’s not happening, or charge head on at the robot mega wave.

‘Perverse novel reads primarily as a love story’

Implies human characters, not AI, but functioning in what capacity? Love against the background of mammoth change?

‘Deviant and divine’

Pervert philosophy? Serial killer quoting Bataille? That doesn’t sound very convincing. I would prefer a serial killer who can’t perform the act of killing anymore, mangling quotes of Bataille cos they’ve never read him. Would a serial killer feel kinship with someone like B? Hard to say. If the killing is going well, he may look down on him, for failing to cut off anyone’s head. If he’s hit a rough patch, he may just be confused. What do I do B? How do I get out of this?

Actually, I’ve just remembered that deviancy doesn’t have to mean killing or weird sex acts. It can be a social thing too. Perhaps the main character is obsessed with the Aurora and spends all waking hours staring up at it, to the detriment of their other relationships?

‘A journey through madness from the mundane to the otherworldly’

The MC may be fucking the telescope. And transcending through the process as each time they do it, the act becomes more mundane, and where else is there to go after that?

Otherworldly probably won’t be referring to aliens. Unless they are nebulous or unknowable. And attempting to know them leads to madness. But then you risk the brainlessness of Arrival, where an advanced alien race doesn’t seem to understand that they need some kind of translation app to communicate with us. [There might be a reason for that, I’ve never seen the film, just read the Wikipedia page].

I don’t know, it feels like this book isn’t the kind of book to introduce real, physical aliens and give them a base psycho-sociology like the Klingons or Romulans in Star Trek.

Is psycho-sociology the right word?

I mean, a unifying societal trait that acts as the norm e.g. Cardassians are sneaky, Klingons are warriors of honour, Romulans are also sneaky, Bajorans are religious etc.

My gut tells me this is going to be more abstract/philosophical. There will be an orbital telescope, according to one of the blurbs, but beyond that I suspect the MC will be branching heavily into metaphysics and perhaps losing themselves in the swirl of the aurora.

Okay, I’m gonna give this a shot.

Warning: this will not…CANNOT…be correct.

Spec: The MC is living in a hut somewhere in the Northern part of Sweden. Or Yellowknife, if the author is based in the US. She has her own telescope, which she uses to look into the aurora. Really look into it, as if there is a secret to the universe in there. When she’s not doing this, she’s re-reading a Kenneth Anger biography [her favourite book], watching Issac Arthur videos online, and creating hallucinogens from local plants and herbs. Meanwhile, a man wanders through the wilderness and into a nearby town, claiming to have spoken with the beings inside the lights. The MC finds out about this and interviews him, but is irritated when he swears that the lights are completely uninterested in humanity. Later, in her shack, she argues with herself, one side saying the lights are right to not give a shit as humans are parasitic to all other life, while the other defends humanity on the grounds that she herself is okay and entropy is part of the universe anyway. The argument ends with her smashing a window, picking up a shard of broken glass and waving it up at the green lights in the sky, screaming, ‘you never phoned me,’ over and over until the strange man appears and knocks her out.

This is spiraling a bit, but the blurb said madness so…

She wakes up in the dark, hearing the disembodied voice of the man explain that the orbital telescope has been keeping in touch with him and that’s how he knows so much about the lights. Freeing herself from poorly-tied restraints, she advances on the man with a massage stick. Surprisingly, he does nothing, just lowers his head a little. ‘Balance is expected,’ he whispers. She can’t hear him and, unsettled, swings the stick. An hour later, the man comes to and asks if he can stay a while. The MC says no, then changes her mind after the man tells her the truth behind all nebulae. Over the next week, they realise that they both like Kenneth Anger and watching space videos and, despite insisting that loneliness is key, fumble their way into a sexual relationship. After that, the drug-taking intensifies, as does the greenness of the lights. The man suggests hiking up the nearest mountain and communing with the aurora, but the MC is unconvinced. She says she cannot leave the shack because the lights do not want her to. An argument develops then ends abruptly as the MC stabs the man to death with a skewer. ‘We have to stay here,’ she says, arranging his corpse neatly on the armchair. ‘The lights told me that.’ Later, she understands what she has done and screams into the sky. Then goes back inside and consumes all the hallucinogens she has left in the store cupboard. Drifting into a dense fog where the clouds are shaped like zodiac signs, the MC spends the last fifty pages either dying or transcending or teleporting into the aurora, which is far colder in its welcome than she was expecting. Her last thought: this is not the last thought. I’m seeing things. I will surpass this death pool.

That’s it, the end.

I’m giving the actual plot of this spec a five per cent chance as it’s way too specific in all its details, but there are some aspects that I think might be plausible.

The aurora has to feature in there somewhere, even if it’s merely a metaphorical anchor point. I mean, it has to be connected to either the orbital telescope or a physical sight in the sky near where the MC lives.

Unless it’s just seen in videos?

That would add a distance to it. A sense of mediation. As in, this magical-looking thing in the sky is seen by the vast majority of the human race through the eyes of a machine. And sometimes it looks kind of cartoonish.

That distance could tie in thematically with…doomed nihilism of the MC? They are desperate to find something up there, they understand the immense scope of the universe, they desire to touch it, to metamorphosise within it, but all they have finally is YouTube vloggers and their identikit editing techniques.

A few minutes later…

I think I might be onto something with that last point. The same feeling I have when I watch space videos or Star Trek, the growing lag between theoretical science and actual advances, the depression when you look around and realise how far we are from the anarcho-communist series of systems I personally cling to the ankles of and how bad it would be if humans actually colonised space now.

Foxconn in the Byrgius crater, guaranteed.

Will Aurora really lean into doomed nihilism?

Don’t know. Maybe as an initial counter-point, to be overcome by the MC as she transcends into something better. Or something greener, at least.

Re-reading it, the spec I wrote is pretty bleak. Not sure why it comes out like that, I just read the journey into madness part and the love story in the blurbs above and that’s where I end up.

I should never write Star Trek.

And madness doesn’t have to lead to stabbing.

It could just be the MC and the guy and a bucket of hallucinogens, staring up at the green lights. Mad from everyone else’s perspective only.

Aurora is out now.

You can buy it here.