K.L. Schroeder is joining us today to talk about their novel, No One to Hold the Distant Dead. Here’s the publisher’s description:
Inga Nyström chose to leave Earth and help the colony of Nordenmark escape a looming ecological disaster. But by the time she arrives, the catastrophic degradation of the planet’s terraformed environment has already passed the point of no return, and she finds its people defeated, sleepwalking through a slow-moving death.
What’s more, the technology that brought Inga to this distant colony-beaming her consciousness out of her original body and into a synthetic one-has misfired. There are haunting gaps in her memory, pieces of herself lost to the void. As extinction takes species after species, Inga and the people of Nordenmark must find a way to survive, and a reason to live, in the spaces death leaves behind.
What’s K.L. Schroeder’s favorite bit?
No One to Hold the Distant Dead is a story about death and grief, memory and extinction, and yet it’s a challenge to decide on one bit that I truly love the most. There’s a quote by Annie Dillard I read once – “One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.” I took that to heart, and so everything I knew or could find that was dark and weird, everything grim and strange with ties between the living and the dead went into this novella. The Institute for Terrestrial Biology where the characters Inga and Amit work grew out of old creepy anatomy labs and quiet vivariums in University basements where I worked as a lab technician. The fictional book Amit gives Inga, Gods of Pre-Anthropocene Earth, grew out of poring over myths of death-associated deities like Meng Po and Garmr and Tia and Ta’xet. The character Kali grew out of the impossibly cool women I’ve met who read tarot cards and smoke clove cigarettes and aren’t afraid of anything. There’s a lizard named Hecate who is the favourite bit of many, and the plot builds on fascinating and terrible real world things from veterinary medicine and environmental sciences like chronic wasting disease and archiving disappearing biodiversity and the dwindling glaciers of the Rocky Mountains. I want to say my favourite bit was being able to look at all these different facets of death and dying and explore what we do when faced with loss via Inga’s story. But that’s the whole book, so it’s kind of cheating to say that.
So I tried to think of what has stuck with me most, and there are two bits of the book that came to the surface of my memory. One is when Kali, our furious and beautiful proprietor of the goth bar smashes a glass and shouts at Amit and Inga, who are sitting together commiserating over the ecological collapse on Nordenmark. She roars, “The ego of you scientists, thinking yourself gods. You can’t hold back death. This universe ends in silence.” Which is a line that came about because of the Wikipedia timeline of the far future. It’s a fascinating page to look through: it has predicted times for when native earthworms will reach the Canadian-US border again after the Laurentian ice sheet drove them back (100,000 more years), when Earth and Mars will fall into the sun (7.6 billion more years), and estimates of when there will be no more new stars formed in our universe, and the last stars will slowly burn out (1 trillion years). I sent it to a group of friends once and one remarked that it was oddly comforting to look at these events with massive timelines. I agreed. It is an odd comfort to see estimates of when the universe will inevitably fall apart. Maybe it’s because the influence of evil people seems lessened in the face of something so powerful as a star becoming a red giant, that no matter what happens the sun will engulf all our bones at some point. Maybe it’s seeing ourselves as part of processes that are larger and older than our own lives. For Kali, I think she sees death as an integral part of life, and is angry at Amit wanting to circumvent it.
The second bit that sticks out is when Inga and Amit first meet. I love how they are on the same wavelength right from Amit saying “Welcome to hell”. Inga just rolls with it and a few minutes later they’re making little jokes about extending lifespans of lizards and people and taking care of Hecate. I loved writing their friendship. It’s difficult sometimes, they don’t always agree, they fight and have falling outs, but they always show up to care for each other in the dark times. And I think these two bits go together, that through death and grief and extinction and the sun slowly preparing to leave the main sequence and engulf all our bones, that caring for each other in a finite and perhaps infinitesimal existence is the only way that it matters. Otherwise we’re just plodding, aimless, towards the heat death of the universe (1010^76 years from now).
So while a giant bat skeleton named Modgunn and a flock of robot crows and caribou-lichen coevolution and beaming consciousnesses across the universe are so, so cool, it’s Inga and Amit’s friendship that is my favourite bit. I hope readers enjoy it too.
LINKS:
BIO:
K.L. Schroeder is a speculative fiction writer, microbiologist, and aging goth forged in the cold dark winters of Canada and Sweden. Their short fiction appears in the horror anthology Northern Nights and the climate fiction anthology And Lately, the Sun. No One to Hold the Distant Dead is their first novella.
*Mary Robinette an affiliate of Bookshop.org and will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. This does not increase your cost; it simply helps support her work