Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy discussion

This is our discussion of the contemporary alternate history/science fiction novella

The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander
(2018)

This is story involves an alternate history, beginning circa World War I.

The Radium Girls mentioned in the story were real: women hired to paint glow-in-the-dark Radium onto watch hands & dials for US Radium, Corp, in Orange, New Jersey, and who subsequently became ill from radiation poisoning. (US Radium ceased operation in 1970.)

Topsy was a real elephant, too, though the story takes some liberties in making her contemporaneous to the Radium Girls.

I haven't read a lot of Bolander before.

I really liked her cyberpunk story "And You Shall Know Her By The Trail of Dead" (Lightspeed Magazine), which was nominated for a Hugo in 2016. Her 2017 "Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies" (Uncanny Magazine) not so much.

As to this story....

I want to read this! But I don’t have a copy yet ...

G33z3r wrote: "...Topsy was a real elephant, too, though the story takes some liberties in making her contemporaneous to the Radium Girls."

I did not realize Topsy was a real elephant who (view spoiler)[was actually electrocuted at Coney Island. I went to the Wikipedia page and you can actually watch the short film of the elephant's electrocution, although I wish I hadn't. (hide spoiler)]

I finished this one yesterday but don't want to spoil it for anyone so I'll restrict my comments to a general nature.

Like G33z3r I really enjoyed Bolander's short story "And You Shall Know Her By the Trail of Dead" which is like cyberpunk dipped in acid. It's very violent, in case you are thinking about reading it (the link is in G33z3r's post above). I like the way Bolander writes; her prose reminds me a little of Catherynne M. Valente.

Non-spoiler

I found "The Only Harmless Great Thing" tough to get started with. It's written with multiple PoVs, each in a different time. They switch back and forth pretty quickly at first, making it hard to lock onto the narration.

The first, which is written obscurely in elephant-ese, is an omniscient PoV of elephant lore. (I'm honestly still not sure if there is one or two elephant narration in the story, one far-past and one far-future, or if it's all one. Is Furmother-With-Her-Tusks-(Whole|Cracked) a distant past legend and the rest post-humanity future? Thoughts?)

The second PoV is Kat, who is a future geneticist and/or nuclear watchdog. (I think she's a genetic engineer looking to use a nuclear waste warning project as an excuse for a genetic modification project she wants funding for.)

The third is Regan, one of the Radium Girls (circa 1917) in an alternate past painting watch faces with glow in the dark radium paint; (The elephant Topsy also has a couple of PoVs in this story's timeframe.)

Anyway, I thought it was worth plowing through the startup effort to get to the heart of the story.

So, anyone finish this?

SPOILERS

I liked Regan's story the best. One of the Radium Girls retained, in this alternate history, to train elephants to replace humans as radium dial painters (because either elephants are resistant to radium poisoning or no one cares about elephants, and US Radium doesn't care which of those excuses you believe.

(Somewhere there's probably a US Radium press release saying "There is absolutely no scientific evidence of a link between radium and illness," because we've read those pro forma PRs hundreds of times since.)

Regan & Topsy are in essentially parallel situations....


The Kat story, on the other hand, is set in the future and is odd. "It's a story, and people remember stories....". Kat's working with some folks who want to mark for posterity the location of radioactive dump sites. They can't agree on universal signage that will survive changes in language & custom. In this future, elephants are recognized and sentient and have a language based on trunk sign-languaghe Kat proposes elephants that glow in the presence of radiation because people now associate Topsy, and by extension all elephants, with radiation. Mostly, she wants to conduct her little genetic engineering experiment on the elephants.

There have already been experiments to create several animals that glow in the dark, based on proteins from Jellyfish. E.g., pigs. I suppose that's where Bolander gets the idea.

I finished. I didn't have a strong preference for any of the POVs over any of the others, but Regan's was more of what I expected from Bolander, most stylistically similar to "And You Shall Know...."

Did you notice that EVERY male character in the story was a bad guy? Even the bull elephant.

G33z3r wrote: "Non-spoiler

I found "The Only Harmless Great Thing" tough to get started with. It's written with multiple PoVs, each in a different time. They switch back and forth pretty quickly at first, making..."

I think the furmother-with-tusks is a story about the past, the first Story I suppose told by Mothers in the future who apparently do end up glowing. So really three timelines. When I figured out is it three timelines regardless of POV I found it pretty easy to switch between. However due to the crazy jumping I feel like you really had to go back and read the first few pages over again to read the initial parts of each POV with the knowledge of the whole.

RJ wrote: "I finished. I didn't have a strong preference for any of the POVs over any of the others, but Regan's was more of what I expected from Bolander, most stylistically similar to "And You Shall Know......"

I did but....I think that's kinda the point? Its the men who do these things to the females. As is always the case with Bulls.....As a female reader in Trumps America this rang so true so real. It really really spoke to me of my own life and how I want to raise my daughters

The comment where she says about it being a side not in history books that these things happened...but that's not how this particular ending goes....such a gut punch - b/c in our world all the horror and hideousness are fully true but the is no justice or retribution.