Who Goes There?

Nancy Kress debuted in the ’70s, and became a big deal in the ’80s mostly on the back of some very good short fiction. Her 1991 novella “Beggars in Spain” (then expanded into a novel) is one of the most decorated of its kind in SF history. Her 1985 aliens-on-Earth vignette “Out of All Them Bright Stars” won a Nebula. She, along with Connie Willis, has been one of the most frequent and popular contributors to Asimov’s Science Fiction, and incidentally both women are very fond of writing at novella length. So today we’re looking at a Kress story that’s neither a novella nor published in Asimov’s. “Inertia” might be the best Kress story I’ve read so far; it’s certainly the complete package, containing thought-out speculation and human drama that struck a chord with me. That this story only got away with a Locus poll spot feels more than a little criminal.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the January 1990 issue of Analog Science Fiction, which you cannot find anywhere at the moment. I’m sure it’ll be added to Luminist at some point, but thankfully I had bought a used copy of this issue some months ago. Gardner Dozois tended to overlook Analog stories, but he recognized this one’s quality enough to include in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Eighth Annual Collection. “Inertia” was also reprinted in A Woman’s Liberation: A Choice of Futures by and About Women (ed. Sheila Williams and Connie Willis) and Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse (ed. John Joseph Adams). This last one, I’d argue, is a little misleading.

Enhancing Image

A note to put upfront is that “Inertia” discusses the lives of people with disabilities, with mental illness, and more subliminally works as a reaction to what was then the worst years of the AIDS epidemic. This is not light reading; indeed its dark hues stand out in a magazine that’s more known for rigorous but not emotionally intense fiction.

It’s the future (not too distant a future), and the US has mostly gone to shit. Riots have become a frequent occurrence and the country has basically devolved into a police state; but that’s only the case for “Outside.” There are sealed-off internment camps across the country containing those infected with a disease that at first glance sounds like Leprosy; it’s a skin disease in which the infected is scarred with ropy patches of skin, but without getting ahead of myself there’s more to it than that. The disease is communicable and so the infected are walled off in “blocks,” basically left to die since the government is no longer looking for a cure. It’s here that we’re introduced to the elderly narrator, her daughter Mamie, her teen granddaughter Rachel, and her in-law Jennie. “Jennie, the daughter of Mamie’s dead husband’s brother, is Rachel’s cousin, and technically Mamie is her guardian.” We start with two announcements in this little family unit: that Mamie is getting engaged to some guy named Peter, and that Jennie is bringing in someone from Outside—a doctor named Tom McHabe. The latter will turn out to have a profound effect on these characters.

“Inertia” both is and is not a dense read. The plot, if one were to recite to someone, is not complicated. It starts out as a slice-of-life narrative in what is admittedly a dreary setting before someone from Outside comes in and changes everything, and the story picks up inertia. There is, however, a lot of scarily plausible speculation, and these characters are never anything less than human. AIDS had been public knowledge for no quite five years when Kress wrote this story: the Reagan administration had deliberately ignored HIV/AIDS until it became literally impossible to do so, the result being that people were dying of a virus nobody knew anything about, and once it was made public there was a tidal wave of misinformation that would have long-term ramifications. Nowadays conservatives wanna downplay this, but the reality is that the Reagan administration had condemned a swath of the American population to death for the non-crime of homosexuality, and there were many politicians and pundits who came up with some truly monstrous ideas as to what ought to be done with AIDS victims. Putting thousands of people in internment camps is not even the worst thing that could’ve happened. In case you doubt me about the connection, we get a reference to AIDS in-story, although not by name, it being called “that other earlier one” that was sexually transmitted. Of course we know you could contract AIDS via blood transfusion, but in the ’80s it was typically known as something that happened between queer men.

Life in the camps is far from ideal, but it’s surprisingly functional. There are no riots. There’s no huge wealth disparity. There’s no war, naturally. People are able to provide for each other, even if they have to work every day for it. This is not an anarcho-communist paradise, mind you, because these people live in poverty and with an infection that might prove fatal, but as McHabe soon makes it clear, life Outside is often worse. You may recall that “Inertia” was reprinted in an anthology focused on stories about the apocalypse, and honestly I don’t think it qualifies. At the most you could say society in the story is on the brink of total collapse, but that the apocalypse has not happened—at least not yet. Journalists and pundits speculated that the camps would soon descend into total mayhem, but to their disappointment this has not happened. Obviously something is different about the people living in the camps, something that compels them to cooperate rather than start fighting in the streets (Kress does not seem to think people are inherently good), which is why McHabe is here. The government stopped finding a cure years ago, after several people in the camps were tested on and killed as a result (Mamie’s husband had died “of an experimental cure being tested by government doctors”), but that doesn’t stop people from coming in to conduct their own research illegally.

About the characters. I don’t think we ever get the narrator’s first name, but she’s as vividly drawn a protagonist as any you’ll find in the best short fiction, with bonus points for being an SF protagonist who’s both a woman and probably in her sixties. Rachel and Jennie, despite their age, are not the rebellious sort, and this pleasing demeanor will have plot importance. The big outlier among the women in the story is Mamie, who unlike her mother and daughter is far from content. For one, she finds out almost as soon as they’re engaged that Peter is cheating on her, although this doesn’t stop her from soon making up with him—probably more from her fear of being abandoned than anything Peter did to make it up to her. Given her outbursts and her fear of abandonment it’s quite possible Mamie has what we’d now call Borderline Personality Disorder. It’s unclear if she was always like this, whether it was being forced Inside, the death of her husband, or something that has always afflicted her; but then if a revelation later in the story is anything to go by it’s implied that Mamie always lived with mental illness, only that something exasperated her condition. Then there’s McHabe, who in a typical Analog story would be the protagonist, but here he’s a supporting character whose aims are noble but tragic.

Something odd I noticed is that Kress wrote this story in first-person present tense, which is uncommon and honestly hard to justify; you need a rather specific reason to write with this combination, otherwise it reads awkwardly and raises unnecessary questions. I suspect it’s because, given the context, it raises the emotional intensity of the narrative, but it also reinforces the notion that what Kress is talking about is happening in the now—that her future story is firmly rooted in what were then current events. The inhumane treatment of AIDS victims was a part of the background the story was written against, and this would be the case for many more years. It still holds true because homosexuality is still demonized in many pockets of the country, and those who suffer chronic illness are often denied proper accommodations. It’s funny because there is no homosexual activity in the story itself (the characters are drearily straight), but it’s something those who didn’t live under a rock would’ve picked up. Don’t get the wrong idea, though, “Inertia” has aged depressingly little; it actually holds up better than some of the award-winners from this period.

There Be Spoilers Here

The reason McHabe went Inside is to tudy the neurology of those with the infection, because it turns out this infects the brain as well as the skin. The people in the camps have not descended into anarchy because (assuming McHabe is correct) they’re constantly depressed—not clinically depressed, as he puts it, but mildly enough that they’re not quick to take action on anything. The infected are able to maintain a society with minimal resources because the infection messed with their brain chemicals such that by and large they’ve become docile. Curiously, this applies to neurotypical people, and the longer someone has had the infection the more chill they are; but again, this is assuming they would’ve been “balanced” before. Mamie probably had mental illness prior to getting infected, which seems to have thrown her more off-balance, and the consequences of this will prove to be disastrous for our characters. McHabe’s idea is to cure people of the skin disease part of the infection, but to leave the brain alteration as is, such that these people can hopefully rejoin “normal” society and “infect” as many people as possible. He thinks the infection, if rid of its harmful aspect, can be useful. The narrator is doubtful about this.

Mamie, in one of her manic episodes, betrays McHabe to the authorities, resulting in his execution. It speaks to the savagery of government authority at this point that McHabe is killed pretty much on the spot. It’s traumatic, but it’s also the push that compels Rachel and the narrator to escape to Outside, or die trying. There’s a passage at the end that really struck me, as someone who very likely has BPD myself, and it might speak truer than even Kress had intended—to those with mental illness, but also those who feel trapped by their conscience, by the tug-of-war between their thoughts and what they feel they ought to do. “[Rachel] is sixteen years old, and she believes—even growing up Inside, she believes this—that she must do something. Even if it is the wrong thing. To do the wrong thing, she has decided, is better than to do nothing.” It’s a spin on Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” and in my opinion it’s at least as emotionally compelling, at least as thought-provoking, in no small part because unlike Le Guin’s story Kress’s has plot and characters. There’s a concreteness that pushes it out of the realm of pure allegory, and emerges arguably stronger for it. This is a deeply bittersweet ending.

A Step Farther Out

Theodore Sturgeon argued that a great SF story should ideally have both compelling human drama and a thoughtful speculative element. The reality is that a lot of good and even great SF stories only have one or the other, and Sturgeon’s own “A Saucer of Loneliness” is an iconic story despite its SFnal element being tangential. “Inertia” meets this ideal, though; it’s a deeply felt and rather angry story that was written in response to one of the American government’s biggest failures in living memory. While you can make an educated guess as to when this story was written, though, it remains relevant and gut-punching because the American government does not value the lives of its own people, especially people who live marginalized lifestyles and those who live with disabilities. This will continue to be true so long as the government only puts stock in people of a certain income, skin complexion, and balance of brain chemicals. Kress repeatedly shows herself to be a friend of the downtrodden, and “Inertia” is one of her most effective and overt studies of the people we leave behind.

See you next time.