Who Goes There?

Rebecca Campbell was born and raised in Canada, although last I checked she’s been living in the UK for a minute. Unusually she made her debut with a novel, The Paradise Engine, in 2013, which has not been reprinted as of yet. So far it’s her only full novel, with the rest of her work being short stories and novellas, and she’s been pretty successful in that area. Today’s story was itself expanded into a novella, Arboreality, a couple years later. Campbell is part of a generation of writers who breathed new life into SFF short fiction in the 2010s, when there was an online magazine boom and a healthy market for bringing these stories into physical print. In hindsight this was a bit of a golden age for the field. Even 2020, just five years ago, now strikes me as a healthier publishing environment than what we’re now facing. Well, “An Important Failure” caught my attention because it won the Sturgeon, although curiously it did not get a Hugo or Nebula nomination. My feelings on this story are a bit mixed, which I’ll try to articulate, but I did have to sit on this one for a couple days.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 2020 issue of Clarkesworld. It’s been reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Volume 2 (ed. Jonathan Strahan), The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 6 (ed. Neil Clarke), and The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2021 Edition (ed. Rich Horton).

Enhancing Image

“An Important Failure” starts oddly. The opening scene is not really a scene at all, but a little exposition dump about “the Little Ice Age,” so called because in the 17th century there was, in North America, a slight but important overall drop in temperature; this coincided, and indeed may have been caused by, the (mostly unintended) mass deaths of indigenous peoples who came into contact with European settlers. Many of the natives, who were completely defenseless against the diseases the settlers carried with them, died, and when they did they left empty land behind them. The changing of the land itself, the revival of woodlands, will be instrumental to the rest of the story, but this is not apparent at first. Even more seemingly tangential is the mentioning of the famous luthier Antonio Stradivari, who lived in the 17th and early 18th centuries, who crafted instruments (mostly violins) by hand. These instruments were so finely made and so durable that many of them still exist today, naturally in the hands of wealthy collectors. Hand-crafted wood instruments logically require some very fine and aged wood to be chopped and carved, so that the felling of trees is necessary to the production of these instruments. Campbell introduces a key theme, although not the plot, in this opening scene.

I said at the beginning that 2020 already feels like a long time ago, and Campbell agrees. Life in 2020 was itself changing radically, even in ways we may not have considered at the time, and this story is about one of those ways, namely the altering of the landscape. Of course when I say “landscape” I mean the environment of the Vancouver woodlands and little islands, the closest American equivalent I can think of being Oregon and Washington, which hell, are driving distance from Vancouver anyway. The point is that this is a very Canadian story.

On her blog Where is Here?, Campbell wrote:

I started writing [“An Important Failure’] while watching the bushfires in Australia back in January, and finished it in June, while in lockdown. The world seemed to transform several times in those months, and the story reflects my disorientation. It’s a story about processing change—how we do it, how we fail to do it. It’s also about the giant trees of [British Columbia]—the “Champion Trees” of UBC’s big tree registry. The miraculous old growth they show you on fifth grade field trips to Cathedral Grove, or just off the road between Lake Cowichan and Port Renfrew. They’re vulnerable, of course: logging, poaching, climate change, wildfires. They’re so old, they belong, quite literally, to a different world.

While I’m mixed on the plot (I’ll get to that in a second) and the tone Campbell goes for, I do like how she writes about the setting around her characters, even if I’m not too keen on the characters themselves. I’ve never been to Canada, let alone the region of it Campbell writes about, but (and maybe this is partly because I’ve been reading Robert Frost again recently) I feel as if I could travel to these locations and smell the air, the greenery, the wildlife. (I actually don’t even live close at all to Vancouver, I’m on the wrong coast. I live much closer to Toronto. Oh well.) This is a lovely piece of environmentalist SF, although when I say “SF” I do think speculative fiction is a totally valid label here, rather than science fiction. I say this as someone who’s not fond of “speculative fiction” as a term. We don’t get aliens or time travel here, but rather speculation on how the world might change for a luthier over the span of a couple decades, starting in the 2030s. It’s a near-future story, and wisely Campbell doesn’t pull anything that outlandish, even though we seem now to be living in an outlandish and DeLillo-esque world. The plot itself is also, at its core, pretty straightforward, although the implications and the juicy little details are what really make it worth reading. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, indeed it reminds me too much of certain other stories I’ve read, but I liked it.

Mason-Chris (the third-person narrator mostly calls him just Mason while some characters call him just Chris) is a luthier-in-training, fittingly somewhere in his twenties at the start of the story, who we’re introduced to as participating in some illicit lumber work. Mason going outside the boundaries of the law, and even once or twice betraying his own sense of morality, for the sake of his art is a personality quirk that will drive the rest of the plot. We then go back a bit to the birth of a girl who would become a very talented violinist, “magnificently named Masami Lucretia Delgado,” who Mason and his boss Eddie meet when she’s a precocious 13-year-old player and something of a charity case. They make her a violin that the government loans to her for three years—only three years. The transient nature of this bothers Mason such that he vows to make a violin for Delgado and give it to her as a present, which she will be able to play for the rest of her life and which in fact will last decades (perhaps centuries) after her death. Crafting such a violin is, of course, easier said than done, especially since Mason is working in the midst of climate catastrophe, deforestation, and certain species of tree being on the verge of extinction. Campbell speculates (I think correctly) that the physical world will continue to change in the decades to come, and not for the better.

I’m conflicted, because I do have a soft spot for stories about artists who dedicate an unreasonable amount of time and effort to their craft, especially if we get to see the downside to that level of dedication, but Mason himself is… not that interesting? It could be that the nigh-omniscience of the narrator means we’re given a bird’s-eye view of the action but not much insight into what these characters are thinking, but despite following this man from his twenties into middle age I never felt like I got to know him much. His obsession with Delgado is also rather inexplicable, and it doesn’t help that we get to know very little about Delgado as well. From the time she was a small child she’s been obsessed with being a violinist, and her physical ailments (she’s described as frail, overall, but with strong hands and shoulders, just right for playing a certain instrument), but she doesn’t seem to have much else going on in her life. She’s shown to have what you might call a one-track mind, and Mason is similarly preoccupied with crafting the “perfect” violin for her, pretty much to the exclusion of everything else. It’s a level of obsession that doesn’t strike me as believable, although it’s possible that the novella expansion fleshes these characters out. Basically, you have probably seen this kind of story before, albeit on a different subject. There’s a rough-hewn melancholy quality that I’ve seen elsewhere, to the point where I can easily imagine “An Important Failure” as appearing in Asimov’s a couple decades earlier.

There Be Spoilers Here

A couple characters I’ve not mentioned until now are Jake, Mason’s brother, and Sophie, Jake’s wife. Sophie makes money from growing weed and other plants, illicitly. There’s a special crop she grows, which she calls Nepenthe, and which I’m trying to remember is a strand of weed or some opioid. It has painkilling properties, which ends up being useful when Mason hurts his shoulder really bad in a lumbering accident. The shoulder never totally heals, but at least the Nepenthe is good. That name, which the reader is likely to forget about, comes back when Mason finally finishes his violin many years down the road. Delgado loves the violin, naturally, but she thinks it should have a name, as if it were a person or an animal. Mason pulls Nepenthe out of his memory, like some near-lost and hazy childhood thing, and hell, that does the job just fine. If Campbell asks the question of whether all this was worth the effort, if partaking in the demolishing of forest and precious trees is worth the creation of a single instrument, she doesn’t do so explicitly, which I have to respect. Mason realizes by the end of it that he is no longer a young man, that Delgado went off, got married, and even had a kid, in all the time that has passed. The world continues to slide downward into a pit of chaos and blackness.

A Step Farther Out

This is a depressing story, if I’m being honest, and I don’t mean that as necessarily a positive or negative criticism, more so that it’s not the kind of story I was in the right mindset for. I’ve been having depressive episodes more frequently than usual as of late, and I admit I had to drag myself (not literally) to the keyboard and write a review here. Depression, as a vibe if not as a mental aberration depicted in-story, is maybe too common in modern SF as it is. Of course, there’s a lot to be gloomy about. I do sort of recommend “An Important Failure,” but be aware going in that it has that special Canadian flavor of doom-and-gloom.

See you next time.