Anodyne
Wednesday, June 23, 2004
 
Remember the unwritten science fiction novel everyone kept hearing about, four or five years back? The one with the neon-strung ultralights, and the artists' colonies on Gambier and Anvil and Hornby, and the Republic of Quebec and the big black towers from space?

Found a 1000-word fragment on the hard drive and tinkered, and lo and behold it's underway again. It's called Hanging Fire (thanks, Cornelia Parker!) and it goes a bit like this...

Early one cold February morning in 2035, a young woman waited on a railway platform built out over the sea. The wind that had almost scrubbed the Gambier Island ferry’s morning run was heaving breakers, chilly green and glacially cold, at the pilings under her feet. The steady sound of the waves and the damp, salt-splattered dress clinging to her thighs brought the ferry crossing back to her mind: the boat’s uncovered deck heaving and plunging about in the stormy winter sea; cars and trucks shifting ominously from side to side; lattices of windblown frost on bumpers and windshields, salty spiderwebs that sparkled as the sun slowly rolled into the sky. The smell of vomit was everywhere in the passenger lounge. It was no better out on deck: freezing walls of green water came exploding in across the rail like bombs. She recalled, too, the appalled faces of the embarking passengers in the mainland terminal, their shock at the pale wet figures filing past them like refugees from some remote and vicious war.


- posted by cjb @ 9:25 PM


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