Ursula Whitcher is joining us today to talk about their novel, North Continent Ribbon. Here’s the publisher’s description:
On Nakharat, every contract is a ribbon and every ribbon is a secret, braided tight and tucked behind a veil. Artificial intelligence threatens the tightly-woven network. Stability depends on giving each machine a human conscience–but the humans are not volunteers. In the midst of strife, individual people struggle to hold onto their jobs and protect their lovers, those trusted few who could draw back the veil.
Part of the Neon Hemlock Novella Series.
What’s Ursula’s favorite bit?
My favorite part of North Continent Ribbon is the beginning of a crime: a hasty courthouse wedding.
I needed a crime because North Continent Ribbon is a book about convict labor. On the planet of Nakharat, every train, ship, or space elevator car—every big, fast-moving vehicle that could kill you—has an embedded human conscience. Each of those trapped humans is a criminal.
I built North Continent Ribbon like a mosaic, with each of its short stories saying something different about who the Nakhorians are and why they fear machine intelligence. I knew the final story had to stare injustice straight in the face. My protagonist, Aizuret, would be condemned to become the conscience of a spaceship—and figure out how to unionize the other ships.
At this point in my planning, I ran into a problem. I wanted Aizu to make a very relatable bad decision. But in many ways, Nakhorian society is better than our own. They have widespread carbon-neutral public transit! Hungry people can visit any city cafeteria! And unlike the United States that I grew up in, Nakharat never had a War on Drugs.
For inspiration, I turned to history. Some years ago, in one of the weirder intellectual tangents I pursued before realizing I was simply very queer, I read through a huge stack of eighteenth-century sexuality records in the proceedings of London’s Old Bailey. There were depressing accounts of servants and roommates spying on (alleged) sodomy. There were also a startling number of bigamy cases: when divorce was difficult, people simply moved one town over and married someone else.
I’d established that Nakhorians took oaths and vows extremely seriously. Bigamy would definitely be a crime. Aizu could get depressed, move one continent over, and try to begin again. But I had one problem left to solve: I had already established that, in a grand space-opera tradition, Nakharat allowed for fixed-term marriages. I had to create a character who wouldn’t hedge her bets.
Here’s what happens when the judge asks Aizu and her fiancée how long their marriage will last:
Rayet and I exchanged glances. Rayet seemed unusually tentative. She was offering me a last chance to regret. But I didn’t want to. I didn’t want her to think she was an impulse or a bad holiday decision. That would have been insulting. A year and a day seemed almost as bad.
I could have said four years, or eight, or a dozen years and months and days. But I was young, so young that at every step I felt I could bounce away from the planet, weightless, and a dozen years felt like a less complimentary version of forever. I couldn’t imagine forever with Rayet. But I wanted to. I said, “A permanent contract.”
Rayet tucked her chin in the tiny nod that meant, “I am winning this round,” and also, “Yes.”
I love this feeling. Aizu is falling towards her doom, but in a way that feels like flying.
Aizu won’t actually commit her crime until she meets someone different—a kind woman, someone who likes babies and dogs and the cheerful, thankless work of neighborhood political organizing—and tries to marry again. But she and I agree that the exhilarating, delicious part of her terrible decision is right here, at the beginning, with Rayet.
LINKS:
BIO:
Ursula Whitcher is a queer writer, poet, and mathematician who lives in
Ann Arbor, Michigan. When not doing down-to-earth things like drinking
black coffee, naming cats after medieval saints, or writing about
unionized spaceships, Ursula tries to use the physics of string theory
as a glorified calculator.
