I have a new story out today in Nature Magazine’s “Futures” column, titled “Five Things I Hate about Phobos.”
The story’s about love and the potential of loss, and ultimately asks the question of whether our eventual but inevitable demise is a tragedy or somethinge lse. You can read it (and a brief author’s note) online here in all its glory: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03505-9
In the spirit of the listicle-style title, I’ve come up with what you might call “Five Things about Five Things I Hate about Phobos.” If you’re into that kind of meta stuff, read on!
1. It’s set on Phobos
Okay, pretty obvious from the title, probably, right?
That’s Phobos the moon, not the personification of fear and panic in classical Greek mythology.
Mr Fear and Panic makes a cameo, though, at least sort of, with the narrator commenting on how messed up it is that anyone would actually want to live on a moon named after him.
A moon which, incidentally, has an orbit that will eventually decay so far that it will crash onto the surface of Mars or break up into tiny pieces around a hundred million years hence.
2. It’s my fifth appearance in Nature
Which I actually didn’t notice until I checked just now!
That makes the title — and this post — even more numerologically concerned, especially given my Discordian tendencies. And that’s yet another connection to Classical Greek mythology, given that Eris, the goddess of discord and strife, is Discordia’s principal deity.
Most of my other stories appear in the sidebar on the Nature site when you read the current one, or you can dig them up from my bibliography here, as well.
3. It’s got nonstandard pronouns
One of the characters in the story, Tashi, uses zie/zir pronouns.
If you’re not familiar with these, they work just like any other pronoun. Zie is the singular third person form (like he or she), and zir is both the object (him/her) and possessive (his/hers) form.
Zie (often also spelled ze) is a gender-free pronoun most commonly used online, so you can think of it as similar to they/them. Although if someone uses zie, that doesn’t necessarily mean zie identifies as nonbinary, or even considers zirself “gender free” at all — and it definitely doesn’t mean you should use they/them instead when referring to someone whose pronouns are zie/zir.
4. It draws on traditional Japanese aesthetic ideas about impernanence
The word “wabisabi” is somewhat of a buzzword in English design circles, used to describe a sort of vague “imperfectness” that’s treated as a catch-all for a Japanese-inspired aesthetic.
Actually, though, “wabisabi” is two specific terms mashed together: wabi (侘び) and sabi (寂び). Because these words share similar elements aesthetically, they are often connected into a single word: wabisabi (侘び寂び)
To be fair, judging from the number of Japanese-language articles titled things like “The difference between ‘wabi’ and ‘sabi’,” confusion over this often-paired set of terms is rampant even within Japan. (Which makes sense. How many people can easily rattle off a clear explanation of art nouveau as a design aesthetic?)
However, although these words are often paired, and both have something to do with accepting impermanence, they’re pretty different terms.
So what does wabisabi mean, exactly? According to the article linked above, from Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shinbun, wabi is “the emotion you feel when things are calm and quiet,” while sabi is “the emotion you feel when something is old or withered.”
Those definitions match up relatively well with the ones in jisho.org (my favourite Japanese-English dictionary), where wabi is “austere refinement” or “enjoyment of a quiet life,” and sabi is “elegant simplicity.” Taken together, then, wabisabi can be considered a feeling conveyed by something that’s simple, calm, old, and withered. More generally, it’s used as shorthand (at least in English) for “imperfect” things, especially those which were broken and then repaired.
Although life on Phobos in my story isn’t exactly elegant or refined, it’s hard to imagine the life of space-dwelling people to be anything other than simple in the near future. And accepting that — along with the fact of our own inevitable demise — would be pretty important.
On the other hand…
5. Celebratory light show!
A central part of the story is a festival held by those living on Phobos. This festival involves electrostatic charges and corona discharge on the satellite’s surface — which are a real thing, at least according to this Nasa study from 2017.
In the story, those living on Phobos gather on its surface and sing, holding hands around a crater in a ceremony called The Harmonia (remember Eris? Her Roman equivalent was Discordia, which is Harmonia’s antonym. Levels within levels, man! Levels within levels…).
The narrator of the story finds this uncomfortable at first, but although they don’t admit it in so many words, you can read between the lines and see that their participation in the ceremony is the point at which the story pivots from “I hate this place” to “I’d hate to see this place disappear.”
Do they get to the point of acceptance? Well, you’ll have to read the story yourself to find out.