twelve thousand flowers
Jan. 1st, 2021 05:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ursulaMy story "The Association of Twelve Thousand Flowers" is now for sale, as part of the January issue of Cossmass Infinities. The story involves unions, sex work, murder, ride-shares, elaborate descriptions of hair ribbons, exuberant bisexuality, and a planet that isn't ours.
The impetus for this story is a three-strand braid. The first strand is a story that disappeared: in an early draft ofhrj's novel Floodtide, the protagonist met a prostitute who later died of plague. I noticed how alert I was to the trope where a fallen woman dies out of narrative inevitability (though here the inevitability was all about the deadliness of plague, and not about fallenness). I made a mental note that maybe I needed to write my own story about sex work, because when you're angry without a specific antecedent, that's often a good impulse for fiction.
The second strand is a very well-crafted story that definitely makes me angry: Sarah Gailey's "Stet". "Stet" is about a woman who is furious that a self-driving car has killed her child, and wants someone to be accountable. I find this story frustrating, because the problem isn't the self-driving part, it's the car part: if a car driven by a human kills your child, your child is still dead. The society of "Twelve Thousand Flowers" has solved the moral problem posed by "Stet" in the worst possible way: it has designated humans to take responsibility for vehicle crashes, whether those humans could have prevented them or not.
The third strand is a historical fact I learned from Hanchao Lu's excellent book Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century. Lu writes a lot about who rickshaw drivers were and where they came from. He talks specifically about prostitutes (the ten thousand flowers, in Shanghai that was) arranging rickshaw rides for potential customers, so those customers wouldn't get distracted before they reached the brothel. That little bit of clever historical planning gave me one of the key emotional relationships of "Twelve Thousand Flowers": a friendship between a sex worker and a cab driver, each marginalized in different ways.
I made two big changes while drafting "Twelve Thousand Flowers." In my very beginning draft, Rauzanet's first client was a man, and their interactions more purely transactional. This is probably realistic, but I needed to make things stranger and more sensual to let the story breathe. The second problem was that, as a narrator, Rauzanet always puts her best foot forward. She's really good at what she does, and she wants you to know that--wants it so hard that in my first draft she obscured just how sex-negative her society really is. I fixed that by giving her a confrontation that sets up the story's core argument:
This story isn't actively about math, but it is about work. One of the characters has taken a job that keeps her away from her family for long stretches of time. One of the places I thought about, while writing that character, was Alberta. That's a place I've been for work. It's a place my dad worked in, too--he lived in a hotel for weeks at a time, doing engineering design for oil pipelines, in a year the US economy was struggling. We had dinner together once, when I was flying into Edmonton from one state and he was flying out to another, and traded paperbacks. I thought about the wide-open Edmonton sky, writing this story.
The impetus for this story is a three-strand braid. The first strand is a story that disappeared: in an early draft of
hrj's novel Floodtide, the protagonist met a prostitute who later died of plague. I noticed how alert I was to the trope where a fallen woman dies out of narrative inevitability (though here the inevitability was all about the deadliness of plague, and not about fallenness). I made a mental note that maybe I needed to write my own story about sex work, because when you're angry without a specific antecedent, that's often a good impulse for fiction.The second strand is a very well-crafted story that definitely makes me angry: Sarah Gailey's "Stet". "Stet" is about a woman who is furious that a self-driving car has killed her child, and wants someone to be accountable. I find this story frustrating, because the problem isn't the self-driving part, it's the car part: if a car driven by a human kills your child, your child is still dead. The society of "Twelve Thousand Flowers" has solved the moral problem posed by "Stet" in the worst possible way: it has designated humans to take responsibility for vehicle crashes, whether those humans could have prevented them or not.
The third strand is a historical fact I learned from Hanchao Lu's excellent book Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century. Lu writes a lot about who rickshaw drivers were and where they came from. He talks specifically about prostitutes (the ten thousand flowers, in Shanghai that was) arranging rickshaw rides for potential customers, so those customers wouldn't get distracted before they reached the brothel. That little bit of clever historical planning gave me one of the key emotional relationships of "Twelve Thousand Flowers": a friendship between a sex worker and a cab driver, each marginalized in different ways.
I made two big changes while drafting "Twelve Thousand Flowers." In my very beginning draft, Rauzanet's first client was a man, and their interactions more purely transactional. This is probably realistic, but I needed to make things stranger and more sensual to let the story breathe. The second problem was that, as a narrator, Rauzanet always puts her best foot forward. She's really good at what she does, and she wants you to know that--wants it so hard that in my first draft she obscured just how sex-negative her society really is. I fixed that by giving her a confrontation that sets up the story's core argument:
She stomped on the pedals. Her velokab lurched forward, straight toward a tourist hugging an overstuffed duffel. The tourist dropped their bag. I started to scream. But the velokab’s sensors cut in and jerked sideways, sliding the kab into traffic a hand’s-breadth behind a fat gray truck.
I watched the kab drive away, bobbing and turning through the traffic like a candy wrapper floating down the river. I made myself relax my toes and my fingertips. I thought about breezes on water. But my breath was still knotted up like a Company contract. I had almost stolen somebody’s life, because she hurt my feelings.
You’re shaking your head. You wouldn’t hold me to account. The judges wouldn’t either, no matter how smug they are, in their snow-white wigs. That’s what kab drivers are for: to be responsible. A velokab can more or less pilot itself. But machines can’t make moral choices. Or strategic ones either, supposedly. That’s why, if a kab ever crashes, its driver is supposed to pay the price.
When people talk about humans taking responsibility, they always seem to mean somebody else.
This story isn't actively about math, but it is about work. One of the characters has taken a job that keeps her away from her family for long stretches of time. One of the places I thought about, while writing that character, was Alberta. That's a place I've been for work. It's a place my dad worked in, too--he lived in a hotel for weeks at a time, doing engineering design for oil pipelines, in a year the US economy was struggling. We had dinner together once, when I was flying into Edmonton from one state and he was flying out to another, and traded paperbacks. I thought about the wide-open Edmonton sky, writing this story.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-01-02 12:20 am (UTC)