Zima Blue

publish Opened 2024-10-24; musings dated 2024-10-31. Related to Poetry and literature I like.

Overall

Wonderful short story published in 2005 about the nature of art and memory with a sci fi backdrop. The imagery is unreasonably rich and evocative, and the sci fi is not self indulgent in the slightest (I can’t say the same about some of Qntm’s work).

The author, Alastair Reynolds, wrote a few sci fi stories called Beyond the Aquilla Rift which I’ve been meaning to check out.

The story is only 15 pages long. You should totally read it yourself before reading further. Here’s a link to a free PDF: http://www.sfsfss.com/stories2/zima%20blue.pdf

Things I liked

I’m totally biased because I love philosophy and art — and this story is about both.

• Vivid imagery.
  • The main character is, chiefly, a very old art critic. And Alastair writes this character amazingly. She is armed with the appropriately wide vocabulary one would expect from a seasoned critic and the calm “above it all” nature of being so old.
  • Her internal monologue is so deeply reasonable, thoughtful, and expressive that it warms my heart and brain.
  • Really fragile and thought provoking mood and atmosphere.
• It’s thought provoking.

  • “But if the AM had accompanied me, I’d have a flawless record of how things really were.”

  • “You would,” Zima said. “But that isn’t living memory. It’s photography; a mechanical recording process. It freezes out the imagination; leaves no scope for details to be selectively misremembered.”

  • I love this concept. It’s Selective ignorance.
• A satisfying epilogue.
  • It ties back the unexpected Chekhov’s Gun of Carrie’s old Martian paper. Which ties a little bow on the idea that small distortions of our memory can lead us to treasure things more than we should — an irrational act, but a net good one.
  • It’s short and doesn’t overstay its welcome.
    • Also: the brevity of the epilogue conveys subtly how above-it-all this character is in her age. The consistency of her character is nice.