If you ask me now if I suspected something was happening, I suppose the answer is yes. There were days when the world felt off-kilter, light. The clouds, the trees, even the birds in the sky—nothing seemed quite real. There were moments when I glanced up from the book I was reading, or from the laundry I was folding, and the scene would suddenly come into focus, as if the world was rearranging itself.
I thought it was my eyes. Stress. Lack of sleep. All the excuses you make when the world as you know it ceases to make sense.
Haywire. I remember thinking, The world is going haywire.
There was enough in the news to support this notion, of course. The fires. The droughts. Blizzards in Southern California. The virus. And then those metallic globes in the sky. It was a relief when the experts identified them as Chinese spy balloons. A spy balloon poses its own kind of danger, of course, but it’s a threat we know how to work with. Old as the ages. In the fourth century BC, Sun Tzu praised foreknowledge over military action. “Be subtle! be subtle!” he wrote, “and use your spies for every kind of business.”
There is nothing new under the sun. There is nothing new in the skies. It’s what we tell ourselves so we can eat dinner around the table, brush our teeth, tuck our children into bed at night.
There is nothing new under the sun. Until, one day, there is.
This is chapter five of the serial novella By the Time You Read This…an experiment in tiny chapters. Begin here.
This is Novella, Michelle Richmond’s author newsletter. You are receiving this newsletter because you signed up at some time in the near or distant past on my author website or the Random House website, or more recently on Substack. Thank you for reading.
Chapter notes: When I was writing the fourth chapter of this novella, it occurred to me that it could be the sequel to a novel published years ago. I imagined those
previous characters into the future, sixteen years from publication of that earlier novel. I changed the names in chapters 3 to the names of the existing characters. This worked in my head, sort of.
Then, I wrote chapter 5, and I realized this novella is not a sequel. It is a new thing altogether. The earlier novel was a literary mystery, a meditation on memory. While this too may turn out to be meditative, and while it may have elements of a literary mystery, I can’t just take Jake and Abby and plop them into a futuristic world. In reality, of course, that is how it will happen. Here we are, 2023, and one year—we don’t yet know when, maybe five years from now, maybe 50—we will wake up into a future we didn’t see coming, one in which our world has been fundamentally rearranged.
But it’s true what we all learn in those early writing workshops: just because something can happen in real life doesn’t make it work for fiction. In our actual lives, we may one day find ourselves abruptly shifting genre: divorce, death, illness, change of career or of geography. But a literary sequel can’t do an abrupt genre shift. Well, it can, but it probably shouldn’t. The readers of the original would be confused. Anyone coming to the sequel first, who then went to read the original, would likely be disappointed to find themselves primed for a kind of soft science fiction but set down instead in reality as we know it.
So this is not a sequel. It is a stand-alone novella, its own story. I have no idea where it’s going. Thanks again for coming along for the ride.
Photo by Artem Kovalev on Unsplash