Torgersen, Brad R.: Ray of Light
Ray of Light (2011)
Written by: Brad R. Torgersen
Genre: Short Story/Science Fiction
Published by: Asimov's
Rating: Worth Reading, with Reservations
I've got mixed feelings on this Hugo & Nebula nominee. On the plus side, I really liked the sincere ease of Torgersen's storytelling. He's got quite a readable voice and considering this is the only story from Analog nominated for the Hugo, that's saying something (Analog has a tendency to publish hard SF stories and little else. At least they used to. I've not heard otherwise). He also provides some really nice visuals in this tale of an Earth that's been forced into an ice age and therefore humanity has fled to the oceans, living near the hydrothermal vents, the only place left on Earth that's warm enough to live.
The water flowed like ink from the tops of the smokers. Tube worms, white crabs and other life shied away from my lights.
Another thing the story has going for it is that even though it's "hard" SF, it's got quite the focus on character and relationships. The tale is told through the viewpoint of Max Leighton, a former NASA astronaut, who's on the search for his teenage daughter. She and her friends stole a sub, and he thinks he knows where to find her. What's he worried about, and what every father would worry about, is that it's too late, and that his daughter is already dead.
The tale alternates between the present day's search and flashbacks to key moments in Jenna's upbringing. I really liked the first flashback and how it was used to tell the reader how humanity came to live at the bottom of the ocean, because the questions were raised four-year-old Jenna. That's a clever trick, allowing the allow the impart information that the narrator obviously knows and has no reason to repeat in an infodump. Except, of course, to answer his daughter's questions. So that was a great touch. And while the story didn't reach me emotionally, the father/daughter relationship felt genuine, and that helped carry the story.
Where I personally had trouble, and this is ironic, given this story is an Analog tale, is that I got hung up on the believability. At first, the aliens in the flashback were startling and more than a little weird (in truth, I'm surprised to find aliens in an Analog story; I'd rather humanity be living at the bottom of the ocean because it's our own damn fault), and I wondered why the world couldn't put together a joint mission to remove the mirrors. I wish the story had at least acknowledged that this was considered or tried or something.
But then I got hung up on Jenna's (and by extension, her generation's) obsession with the sun. Look, these kids were raised underwater. They've never seen the sun, save for what's in videos. Torgersen may be arguing that the sun itself is something primal and necessary, that humanity doesn't need the sun to know it's there and that we need it. Certainly, Jenna's mother needed it, and while I loved that the lack of light was the cause of her depression, she wasn't born and raised in the ocean.
Jenna was. And I really had trouble believing that the sun wouldn't seem like some impossible fantasy rather than a religious truth.
We who'd been through the freeze-out from the surface, we'd seen the destruction and the death brought by the forever night. We felt fortunate to be where we were. Alive.
But our kids? For them, the ice layer on the surface had become a thing of myth. An impenetrable but invisible bogey monster, forever warned about, but never seen nor experienced. For the Glimmer Club, I suspect, it got to the point where they wondered if all of the adults weren't crazy, or conspiring in a plot. How did anyone really know that the surface was frozen over? That aliens had blocked the sun?
To blindly accept a fundamental social truth upon which everyone agrees, is just part of what makes us human.
But in every era, however dark or desperate, there have also always been hopeful questioners.
The above passage cinched my problem. Why is it that the frozen surface is so hard to believe in, rather than the sun? Given their surroundings, I just feel like the sun would be the thing the kids would mock their parents about, you know? But this story turns the sun into this religious thing, and the kids' desires really reminded me of humanity's need to fly. Indeed, I think the parallels are very clear.
But I just can't swallow the psychology behind it. At least humanity could see the sun, moon, and stars. At least they saw birds flying through the air. That inspired that dream. To me, the sun for Jenna's generation should be no more realistic than a fairy tale. Or, for some people, no more realistic than the idea of God.
Then there's the ice age itself. The story suggests that the aliens have been to Earth before, and THAT's the cause of the previous ice ages (cute idea, but it rather rubbed me the wrong way, as if the ice ages would've never happened without alien intervention). Okay, fine: but didn't the ice ages last a REALLY LONG TIME? And that, more than anything, had me frowning at the ray of hope ending we get, where everything's hunky dory and humanity has a renewed hope in living.
So yeah, this one's a mixed mag. Obviously, it's been liked far more by others, because this did get nominated for both the Nebula and a Hugo. It also touched a bit on the feelings I felt while reading Robert Charles Wilson's Spin, a former Hugo winner (Best Novel). I wonder if Torgersen was inspired by that story at all?
Of course, I may be thinking too hard about this tale. Whatever the case, I'm not adverse to reading more of Torgersen's work, but I'm not completely sold yet either.