Aimee Ogden returns to the pages of Analog in our [May/June issue, on sale now!] with the story “More and Less and New.” In this blog post, Ogden discusses how themes surrounding death informed her latest piece for us.
In my fiction, a theme I turn back to time and again is death and all its trappings, and “More and Less and New” is no exception. Death is the one truly universal theme, after all; not everyone grapples with complicated family dynamics or motherhood or mental illness, but all of us are being ushered, at various paces, toward the big red EXIT sign.
Thanatophobia lurks in the backs of plenty of brains, but mine shoves its way into the foreground more often than I’d like. No way of knowing from where I’m standing how much of it is nature, like my spouse’s arachnophobia must be, and how much is nature. I grew up in an evangelical tradition that did its best to crowd out other ways of looking at the world—and certainly shut down any possibility that this world could be the only one. For seventeen years, I thought I would have an eternity’s worth of experiences. Compared to the infinite, even a good eighty-ninety years doesn’t quite stack up. So now, I write about death, examine all its fictional facets. The concept as a whole is too big for me to wrap my thoughts around at once; a facet or two at a time is all I can properly handle. And it feels sometimes that, as if, by keeping it within sight at all times, I might be able to stop it from sneaking up on me at a moment I don’t expect it. I might not be able to work myself into a place where I’ve really and truly gotten comfortable with the idea of my own mortality, but I’ve at least arrived somewhere where I can convince myself I’ve done that, most of the time.
Recently, while I was folding laundry and mainlining YouTube shorts, one of Hank Green’s videos popped up. He mentioned speaking to a friend he’d worked on a show with—specifically, saying to her that he didn’t have cancer yet when they were working on the show. Her response: “Well, you probably did, actually.”
Death is the one truly universal theme, after all; not everyone grapples with complicated family dynamics or motherhood or mental illness, but all of us are being ushered, at various paces, toward the big red EXIT sign.
When I wrote “More and Less and New,” a story about a science-fictional fungus that takes an invisible foothold and grows and quietly rewrites the architecture of a woman’s body, I must have already had cancer. It would be two or three months yet before I would look in a mirror and notice that a particular mole had grown far beyond the borders of its original zip code. Write what you know has long been the adage; this time, I was writing what I was about to find out.
(This is the part where I say I’m almost certainly fine, and that an early-stage melanoma is eminently treatable. It’s also a good time to issue the obligatory reminders: wear sunscreen. Don’t stay out in the sun too long. And consider the trade-offs very, very carefully before you run away to a planet where everyone ends up infected soon or later with a strange, symbiotic fungus.)
In fiction, pure coincidence is unsatisfying, and it’s not worth much more than a short blog post in real life, either. It’s tempting to look for the hand of narrative causality at work here: maybe that fever-inducing sunburn I got as a toddler was Chekhov’s gun all along, and it’s finally gone off. Maybe this is dramatic payoff for all those mice I saddled with pancreatic cancer in graduate school. Or maybe it’s a ham-handed metaphor for depression and anxiety—parts of me turning against the rest.
But of course, it’s not really a coincidence at all, no more than it’s a “coincidence” when I write about night, and the real sun sets; when I write about oceans and the real tide rolls in. Death shows up in everyone’s story sooner or later, and I’m just lucky that death decided to only give me a teasing tap on the shoulder this time around.
The version of leaving an imprint of yourself as a not-quite afterlife offered in “More and Less and New” is a far cry from anyone’s idea of heaven (and it’s certainly not a very practical alternative, with the current dearth on the ground of space nuns and symbiotic fungus). I don’t think, even with the state I was in on the day I received that unwanted phone call from my surgeon, I’d be ready to sign up for that kind of mycological infestation. The reasons someone might find to say yes or no to eternity (of sorts) is just another angle on mortality that I find interesting to examine, and I appreciate that you’re taking the time to explore it with me while we’re all here waiting for our turn with the world’s communal dance partner.
The Astounding Analog Companion 