It’s been a little over a year since Last Exit came out, and I’ve found myself looking back, in the time left over from the release of Dead Country.
When a book hits shelves, I talk about it to a degree that seems excessive, absurd. This impression is of course balanced by the traditional reality check six months later, in which someone who follows me on social media, where I feel as though I have been shouting buy my book since before there was a book to buy, says: “I didn’t realize you had published another book!”
I’ve been in the fan’s position too: once I learned Sara Gran had published a whole new Claire DeWitt novel (Infinite Blacktop) and I didn’t know until it was almost out in paperback?! There is so much signal out there that it’s hard to pick up even those signals one would be grateful to receive—let alone the noise.
But while I talk about my upcoming books a great deal, I talk about them in a particular way. I try to share what (if I’m remembering correctly) William Zinsser calls the ‘prelibation’, the nexus of concept and character and emotional energy that drew me to want to read this book so much that I had to write it—and which, I hope, will give others the same desire. I can’t discuss particular plot elements, because no one has read the book yet. But it’s been almost a year. I think it’s safe to raise one relevant, relatively spoiler-free sidebar.
The central characters in Last Exit have developed the ability to ‘hitch’ into alternate realities—different versions of this road-trip America, heightened and mythical. But to do this, they need to find uncertain places, soft places—those moments when they don’t know what’s around the next corner. It’s not a clear binary. You can find mystery, surprise, enchantment, danger, even in relatively known environments. You just have to work harder to discover the edge of the map.
Also, you have to leave your phone behind.
Look, carrying a GPS-enabled device without a removable battery is no way to get lost. Plus, it’s fun, and cathartic to have characters chuck their phones into oncoming traffic. It’s become fashionable to hate the ‘what fresh horror device,’ the internet in your pocket, the black mirror, the Eye of Sauron, whatever you want to call the strange miracle that gives you access to, in theory, vast oceans of knowledge and wisdom and beauty but also reflects the churning contents of your own unfiltered psyche back at you at speed, with id and superego turned up to 11. For me, though, the relationship of cell phones to the alts in Last Exit roots a bit further back, before touchscreens, before the phones were even (ostensibly) smart.
I went to college twice. Kinda. My parents taught at a small private high school on a mountain in Tennessee, near an idyllic liberal arts college, pretty much what you’re thinking if you close your eyes and imagine ‘liberal arts college’ right now. The school where my parents taught subscribed to an educational philosophy that did not allow AP classes, because, in its view, all classes should be AP. Not to go all Syndrome on this, but there are practical issues with making all classes AP classes—not everyone in ninth grade needs the same quality of attention, or learns at the same tempo. The solution for kids who really wanted AP classes, was that students from the high school were technically allowed to take classes at the college. Well, my father enjoys technicalities. To make a long story short, I spent most of my last two years of high school at the college, except for Mrs Benson’s Latin class, and Religious Studies.
I was at this point six feet tall with long hair and sideburns and there were days when I had to shave twice. I felt like a kid, and I was, but a glance wouldn’t tell me apart from the other freshmen in English 101, or calculus or chemistry or physics. Between classes at the university I would catch up on work, and when I wasn’t working, I would drift through campus lawns and courtyards, and just… hang out. It rarely took more than fifteen minutes to find someone I knew from class, or from the university’s fencing or martial arts clubs, or the pizza place where I worked on Saturdays, or someone who had been on the periphery of a conversation two days ago with another friend. We’d catch up, wander, play hackey-sack, merge and part. Days drew out like a magician’s scarf. I had close friends, and I knew pieces of their course and work schedule, but if I didn’t know where they were, I’d wander and trust human gravity to lead me their way. It was weird, open, wonderful. And if, by extreme off-chance, I didn’t run into anyone: well, there were plays to read and problem sets to solve.
Eventually I graduated and went north for college. My new university was larger than the old college—the undergrad body was five times the size—but the bigger student body was balanced by a smaller physical footprint, the campus nestled within a city center rather than sprawling over a mountaintop. The buildings still looked like castles; the students didn’t wear academic gowns, an aspect of pageantry which I missed, but overall: I loved it! I feel the essay form drawing me into some stark contrast but there isn’t one. I talked, I tried on faces and new identities, I roamed the dorms, I joined clubs, I resisted joining clubs, I stumbled into a Party of the Right meeting once, I made questionable decisions (see previous). I learned, after profound psychological and physical upheaval, that I could not go two months without sleep and expect to remain whole. I learned, eventually, that food was required. (The freshman fifteen isn’t supposed to be an absolute value measurement, I’m told. I was not a particularly smart kid.)
But I did notice that my new social environment had a different texture than the one I’d experienced back on the mountain. There seemed to be less slack, more intentionality. I’d meet folks walking across campus, but they were so often on their way somewhere, or waiting for someone. They’d welcome company, they’d include—but there was a pre-existing structure of intent around which I found myself twining, rather than a primordial riot of social undergrowth.
Maybe this was a culture thing, an irreducible Northern-ness thing, a class thing, maybe it was me being part of the milieu rather than peripheral to it, and thus aware of its structure in a way I wasn’t back on the mountain. All those factors were in play, certainly. But at the time, they seemed to tangle around cell phones.
The mountain didn’t have cellular service, really, when I lived there. In an emergency, students who had cell phones (not many) could had to climb onto the roof of a car in one corner of a particular parking lot to get a bar or two. But cell phones were a key feature of my new environment—I was one of the few students I knew who didn’t have one, and most folks traded numbers on first meeting. These were ‘feature phones,’ pre-smart Nokia bricks and flip phones and once in a while a Palm or a Blackberry, but they could call and text. If you had time to kill, you were more likely to ask friends where they were, and head to them—excusing yourself from random encounters along the way—rather than to visit areas where you might find your friends, and meet some other adventure. The structure shifted from random social mulch to planned encounters with a degree of randomness; from Nethack to Rogue-lite. It became easier for groups to encompass your social world—to spend all your time with newspaper people or political union people or boffer LARP people or choir people or martial arts people, because you always knew where they were, and they could always find you.
When I got a phone in my junior year, I experienced this convenience for myself. All of a sudden it became trivial to close planning loops. The ‘ships in the night’ problem of missing someone in a crowded dining hall just… went away. I found myself closer to my friends, better able to coordinate complex group logistics . But I was on task more—moving from meeting to meeting, running late if something off my direct path attracted my attention, rather than drifting in the XiaoYaoYou free and easy wandering of before. I was doing what I wanted, I knew where I was going—but that meant that my own will played a much greater role in my life than it used to, for better and for worse. When you know, it’s natural to focus on what you know, rather than what you don’t. It’s harder to unchoose than it is to explore. But it’s through exploration—new circumstances, friendships, discoveries, experiences—that we meet unfamiliar pieces of ourselves. We find in our reactions, in our surprise, clues to our identity, and even our values. We excavate ourselves, from ourselves. We may not always like what we find at first—but that’s okay. Better than okay, even: essential. When we know ourselves, we can get to work.
Now, I made lifelong friends before phones and after them, and without these tools of communication today I’d be far less close to the people who make me, me. But I still feel that tension between choice and discovery, between the self I am and the self I might become—and it’s even more pronounced in the modern internet, which pulls in a third direction, toward the illusion of discovery—that moment when you think you’ve found a new song or a new meme or a new video, when in fact you’ve responded to one that an algorithm presented to you because it mathed out that the kind of person it ‘thinks’ you are might like whatever it ‘thinks’ this is.
When I sat down to write Last Exit, I thought: well, if they’re going out there, beyond the firelight, if they want to find out what they are and who they are, if they want to change the world, they’ll have to leave what they know behind. They have to choose unchosen-ness—hard to do in your 30s, however essential! You’re not just trying to find your corner of the sky, as the man sings, you’re trying to find a crack in the sky’s shell. You can’t stay where everyone knows your name; you can’t keep to usual paths, walking the ramparts, pacing in circles. The phones had to go.
That was one thing on my mind when I started, anyway! I don’t know if that’s what reached you, and I’m not sure that it matters. We write books, after all—well, I write books—to discover, and to share what we think we have discovered (though we often share far more than we intend). What we know, or what we think we know, becomes a springboard, a point of departure, but sooner or later we have to take the unexpected turn.
And here are a few housekeeping notes and forthcoming events:
Hanover, NH: The weekend of April 13 to April 16, I’ll be in Hanover as part of Speculation by Design, an interdisciplinary project of the Design Initiative at Dartmouth. The project pairs speculative fiction writers with researchers, with an eye toward creating spec fic that wrestles with cutting edge science. The project has collected a great list of writers, and many of us will be reading and signing at Still North Books & Bar at 5:30 on Thursday April 13. There will also be an author panel and a faculty panel that weekend, which I believe are open to the public—more information here.
The following weekend, April 21 to 23, I’ll be Guest of Honor at ConStellation in Lincoln, Nebraska! If you’re in the neighborhood, I’d love to see you there. I’ll be kicking off the evening with a book signing at Francie & Finch in Lincoln at 6pm on April 20.
Hugo Award nominations are open. As always, I’m grateful for any support you’d care to send my way. To Make Unending is eligible for best short story, and Last Exit for best novel. Supporting members of the Chengdu Worldcon, and members of last year’s WorldCon, are eligible to nominate, and can do so at this link.
Thanks so much. Take care of yourselves!
Love this post! Certainly brings me back to college, and to the time of non-smart cellphones. Ironically, while I did have a cellphone in college, I don't particularly remember being tied to / by it. My definitive cellphone memory was 9/11 -- I had gotten my first cellphone just a month or so before, so parents could reach me in an emergency. Of course, on the day, cellphone networks were overwhelmed and my parents couldn't, in fact, reach me. In retrospect, pretty ironic -- the devices meant to connect us failing when we most need connection.
While we're on the subject, did you ever try going cellphone-free while writing, Last Exit or other books?
Thank you, Max. This is a lovely and thought-provoking set of thoughts to read this morning. It's got me remembering the way it was to roam the U of M campus and Dinkytown, Stadium Village, and the West Bank in the late seventies to find out what the day's serendipity had to offer.