Review: The Past is Red, by Catherynne M. Valente

[Russ Allbery]

The Past is Red
by Catherynne M. Valente

Publisher: Tordotcom
Copyright: 2021
ISBN:      1-250-30112-2
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     151

Tetley is nineteen and is the most hated person in Garbagetown. That's
kind of horrible, but life is otherwise great. As she puts it:

  I'm awfully lucky when you think about it. Garbagetown is the most
  wonderful place anybody has ever lived in the history of the world,
  even if you count the Pyramids and New York City and Camelot. I have
  Grape Crush and Big Bargains and my hibiscus flower, and I can fish
  like I've got bait for a heart so I hardly ever go hungry, and once
  I found a ruby ring and a New Mexico license plate inside a bluefin
  tuna. Everyone says they only hate me because I annihilated hope and
  butchered our future, but I know better, and anyway, it's a lie.
  Some people are just born to be despised. The Loathing of Tetley
  began small and grew bigger and bigger, like the Thames, until it
  swallowed me whole.

Garbagetown is a giant floating pile of garbage in the middle of the
ocean, and it is, so far as anyone knows, the only "land" left in the
world. Global warming has flooded everything until the remaining
Fuckwits (as their future descendants call everyone who was alive at
the time) took to the Misery Boats and searched hopelessly for land.
Eventually they realized they could live on top of the now-massive
Pacific Garbage Patch and began the Great Sorting, which is fifty years
into Tetley's past. All of the types of garbage were moved into their
own areas, allowing small micronations of scavengers to form and giving
each area its own character.

  Candle Hole is the most beautiful place in Garbagetown, which is the
  most beautiful place in the world. All of the stubs of candles the
  Fuckwits threw out piled up into hills and mountains and caverns and
  dells, votive candles and taper candles and tea lights and birthday
  candles and big fat colorful pillar candles, stacked and somewhat
  melted into a great crumbling gorgeous warren of wicks and wax. All
  the houses are cozy little honeycombs melted into hillside, with
  smooth round windows and low golden ceilings. At night, from far
  away, Candle Hole looks like a firefly palace. When the wind blows,
  it smells like cinnamon, and freesia, and cranberries, and lavender,
  and Fresh Linen Scent, and New Car Smell.

Two things should be obvious from this introduction. First, do not read
this book looking for an accurate, technical projection of our
environmental future. Or, for that matter, physical realism of any
kind. That's not the book that Valente is writing and you'll just
frustrate yourself. This is science fiction as concretized metaphor
rather than prediction or scientific exploration. We Fuckwits have
drowned the world with our greed and left our descendants living in
piles of our garbage; you have to suspend disbelief and go with the
premise.

The second thing is that either you will like Tetley's storytelling
style or you will not like this book. I find Valente very hit-and-miss,
but this time it worked for me. The language is a bit less over-the-top
than Space Opera, and it fits Tetley's insistent, aggressive optimism
so well that it carries much of the weight of characterization. Mileage
will definitely vary; this is probably a love-it-or-hate-it book.

The Past is Red is divided into two parts. The first part is the short
story "The Future is Blue," previously published in Clarkesworld and in
Valente's short story collection of the same name. It tells the story
of Tetley's early life, how she got her name, and how she became the
most hated person in Garbagetown. The second part is much longer and
features an older, quieter, more thoughtful, and somewhat more cynical
Tetley, more life philosophy, and a bit of more-traditional puzzle
science fiction. It lacks some of the bubbly energy of "The Future is
Blue" but also features less violence and abuse. The overall work is a
long novella or very short novel.

This book has a lot of feelings about the environment, capitalism,
greed, and the desire to let other people solve your problems for you,
and it is not subtle about any of them. It's satisfying in the way that
a good rant is satisfying, not in the way that a coherent political
strategy is satisfying. What saves it from being too didactic or
self-righteous is Tetley, who is happy to record her own emotions and
her moments of wonder and is mostly uninterested in telling other
people what to do. The setting sounds darkly depressing, and there are
moments where it feels that way in the book, but the core of the story
and of Tetley's life philosophy is a type of personal resilience: find
the things that make you happy, put one foot in front of the other, and
enjoy the world for what it is rather than what it could be or what
other people want to convince you it might be. It's also surprisingly
funny, particularly if you see the humor in bizarrely-specific piles of
the detritus of civilization.

The one place where I will argue with Valente a bit is that The Past is
Red thoroughly embraces an environmental philosophy of personal
responsibility. The devastating critique aimed at the Fuckwits is
universal and undistinguished except slightly by class. Tetley and the
other inhabitants of Garbagetown make no distinction between types of
Fuckits or attempt to apportion blame in any way more granular than
entire generations and eras.

This is probably realistic. I understand why, by Tetley's time, no one
is interested in the fine points of history. But the story was written
today, for readers in our time, and this type of responsibility
collapse is intentionally and carefully constructed by the largest
polluters and the people with the most power. Collective and
undifferentiated responsibility means that we're using up our energy
fretting about whether we took two showers, which partly deflects
attention from the companies, industries, and individuals that are
directly responsible for the vast majority of environmental damage. We
don't live in a world full of fuckwits; we live in a world run by
fuckwits and full of the demoralized, harried, conned, manipulated,
overwhelmed, and apathetic, which is a small but important difference.
This book is not the right venue to explore that difference, but I wish
the vitriol had not been applied quite so indiscriminately.

The rest, though, worked for me. Valente tends to describe things by
piling clauses on top of adjectives, which objectively isn't the best
writing but it fits everything about Tetley's personality that I think
this is the book where it works. I found her strange mix of optimism,
practicality, and unbreakable inner ethics oddly endearing. "The Future
is Blue" is available for free on-line, so if in doubt, read some or
all of it, and that should tell you whether you're interested in the
expansion. I'm glad I picked it up.

Content warning for physical and sexual abuse of the first-person
protagonist, mostly in the first section.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2021-08-18

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-30112-2.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>