Who Goes There?

Naomi Kritzer debuted at the tail end of the ’90s, and for a while seemed to fly under the radar; but in the 2010s her career saw a rise to prominence the likes of which is unusual for someone who had been in the game for a hot minute. She won a Hugo for her 2015 story “Cat Pictures Please,” one of the defining SF short stories of the 2010s in my opinion, and in the past decade she’s enriched the field with a keen understanding of human communities, sociology, and psychology. Her fiction can often read as only nominally SF in the sense that the world depicted is mostly the one we now recognize, only then changed by a single but major factor; conversely you could argue the grounded nature of much of her fiction, the plausibly speculative nature of it, would make it very definitively SFnal. “The Year Without Sunshine,” which won the Nebula for Best Novelette earlier this year and more recently the Hugo for the same category, is an example of such SF, to the point where the SFnal element of the story is not immediately apparent. This is a dark but also quite hopeful depiction of a future which is not far off at all—not tomorrow, but maybe next year.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the November-December 2023 issue of Uncanny Magazine, which you can read here. Since it’s such a recent story it has not been reprinted anywhere so far.

Enhancing Image

The problem firstly is that the sun seems to have been blocked out by a perpetual cloud; how far-reaching this environmental change is and what even caused it remain unclear. The secondary problem is that power’s gone out—not for a few hours or days but for weeks at a time. We’ve all gone through power outages, but most of us don’t know what it’s like to be without electricity and internet for long enough that more “primitive” methods of communication and sustaining power become necessary in a life-or-death sense. Alexis, the narrator, is not in any immediate danger, although getting in touch with her neighbors makes her realize that one or two people in her neighborhood need electricity to survive. One older couple, Clifford and Susan, live with the latter hooked up to oxygen, Susan suffering from emphysema. Clifford had bought a small generator for Susan’s oxygen concentrator, but once that generator runs out of fuel Susan’s probably not gonna live much longer. Thus the plot hinges on Alexis and other neighbors coming together to find some way for Susan to stay on oxygen, in a society without power, connection to the outside world, and even with the government rationing medicine such that anything deemed less than absolutely essential becomes a rarity. This is a simple plot, if you think about it, but Kritzer makes it work.

The very beginning of the story almost reads like a red herring, with the action taking place in Minneapolis, in circumstances that almost (but not quite) read like what people in that city had to go through back in 2020, between COVID lockdown and the George Floyd protests. Indeed I’m convinced Kritzer could not have written “The Year Without Sunshine” any earlier than the end of 2020, and in that sense this is a story that very much feels of its time—up to a point. Of course it turns out the pickle Alexis and company find themselves in is a bit more severe and all-encompassing than a virus; incidentally COVID is alluded to at the beginning, but I don’t recall it being mentioned by name. After the power and internet go out for long enough one of Alexis’s neighbors, Tanesha, sets up a “WHATSUP” booth, where people can leave notes for each other, but also trade items and services, “coffee for condoms, cat food for diapers, a bike repair for a plumbing repair.” Because it turns out everyone has something of value to someone else, and everyone has at least one skill that would make them valuable to a community. Ostensibly this is a story about climate disaster, but it gradually reveals itself to be about building community; to some extent it reminds me of Stephen King’s The Mist, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say Kritzer has a lot more faith in organizing and direct action than King does. Should note that “The Year Without Sunshine” might be the most overtly left-leaning story I’ve covered here in a minute, which isn’t to say it’s preachy, but it does help if your politics are in the same general area as Kritzer’s. Good thing, I suppose, that her politics are similar to mine, at least if her fiction is anything to go on.

“The Year Without Sunshine” could’ve easily been thinly disguised theory-as-narrative, but Kritzer trusts us to understand what she’s going for with how her characters interact with each other and how they try to make things work in a world that seems on the verge of ending. Granted that Alexis has an “eat the rich” shirt (which, in a humorous moment, she reflects that she shouldn’t be wearing casually in a city where there are trigger-happy right-wingers), it’s not hard to figure out that Our Heroine™ is somewhere on the left; but she spends very little time theorizing and much more on trying to find a practical solution to a practical problem. We see how society has broken down somewhat after the sun and internet have gone out, and how the implicit divide between the city proper and the suburbs have become more stark. I say this as someone who’s spent pretty much his whole life in the suburbs, so I can be self-deprecating about it, but let’s say suburbanites don’t come off well in this story. There’s a haunting scene where Alexis and company venture out to the edge of the suburbs, in search of resources, and they don’t like what they find:

The roads were quiet—mostly bikes and walkers, a few city buses. Everyone, including us, had parked cars sideways to block the streets leading into their neighborhoods, then left them there, then had the gasoline salvaged or looted out of them so the cars definitely weren’t going anywhere. Traffic on the roads picked up when we got to the edge of the suburbs, even though all the gas stations were still closed. Also, in addition to the car barricades, we saw something hanging from the streetlight that for a second I thought was a body. It wasn’t a body: it was a mannequin, though, so it was definitely supposed to look like a body. It had a sign around its plastic neck saying LOOTER.

Quite a few people are willing to band together, even just to help one of their own—but evidently not everyone. “The Year Without Sunshine” doesn’t have a “villain,” properly speaking, but the good guys find themselves stuck between two antagonistic forces, first the government and then those in the community who see themselves as better than their neighbors—the social Darwinists who think property matters more than human life. We all know those people. I’m sure it’s a coincidence, but I think it’s funny that such an overtly left-libertarian story would win a Hugo at a Worldcon held in Scotland. The government’s presence dissolves over the course of the story to the point where there doesn’t seem to be any law enforcement or oversight at the end, or at least such presence becomes more peripheral as the community becomes more of a proper commune—and pretty much all this happens in the service of helping one person with a severe disability. It’s also worth mentioning that while Susan’s disability serves as the crux of the conflict, she’s still very much allowed to exist as her own person, as opposed to a woe-is-me signal for the able-bodied characters—something which still happens too often in fiction. In a commune (and a commune should be the desired final outcome for leftists, mind you, with the state having dissolved or gone into exile), the more capable should look after the less capable, but even the less capable have ways of contributing.

There are debates, of course. People have started using bikes way more often, and you can even generate enough power for a small generator if you have enough people biking, like hamsters on wheels, but how would you convince people to do such a thing without pay? As Alexis finds out, it’s actually not that hard to convince several people to take shifts for such a thing if it means helping someone else materially. She thought some form of payment would be necessary (in a world where paper money was not basically worthless), “but it turned out to be exactly like ripping up yards to plant potatoes, people were willing to just do it.” A tougher question was how the commune would protect their resources, because nothing is free and resources have become more finite than before. Should they use lethal force to protect resources? Should the commune form its own militia? As nice as pacifism is as an ideal it’s not very practical, sad to say. Something has to give. I’m not totally convinced the commune in this story is realistically able to find a quasi-pacifist solution like it does here (basically using non-aggression as a foundation and refraining from using guns as a first resort), but it does feed into the story’s overall optimism about people working together, even in a borderline apocalyptic scenario. Science fiction historically has sorely been lacking in humanism, but that’s really a topic for another time, the point being that Kritzer’s brand of libertarianism or anarchism very much goes against the norm in American SF.

There Be Spoilers Here

I don’t wanna spoil this one much, as it’s so recent, but I will say that while the conflict does eventually escalate it doesn’t go in quite the direction you might assume. Safe to say Kritzer’s view of humanity is more optimistic than average, and also despite what the grimness of the story’s title would imply. Read it for yourself and see!

A Step Farther Out

I don’t like to review stories I deem too new; an unofficial rule here is I would prefer to wait at least a year after a story’s publication. “The Year Without Sunshine” is not quite a year old yet, so I’m making an exception with this. I’ll be honest and say that I don’t like to give in to recency bias, not to mention that with recent works by authors who are very much alive and active there’s an implicit urge to coddle the work in question, especially if you’re getting paid for your review. Well nobody’s fucking paying me. When I was catching up on stuff for this year’s Hugos, which I was voting for, I have to admit I wasn’t impressed with what would be Kritzer’s other Hugo-winning story this year, “Better Living Through Algorithms.” I thought it was fine, but nothing special. “The Year Without Sunshine” does, however, go to much farther lengths, being more thought-provoking but also tapping more into Kritzer’s trademark humanism. It barely counts as SF, depending on how you look at it, but for how it sums up what the 2020s have been like so far I think it’s essential reading.

See you next time.