Citations from a plague
October 3, 2024 7:18 AM Subscribe
"Footnotes" is a very short science fiction story by C.C. Finlay, originally published in 2001.
1. Report of the Joint Investigating Committee (Washington DC, 2027) pp. 2-3....
4. Werks to Beverly Dohnt (and 79 others), 11:21 a.m. PST, 8 Jan 2019, Subj: Fw: one more thing.
The best stories are always in the footnotes.
posted by OrangeDisk at 8:08 AM on October 3 [3 favorites]
posted by OrangeDisk at 8:08 AM on October 3 [3 favorites]
I'm very fond of stories that use the machinery of books to tell a story.
This is a good one, but my favorite is still J G Ballard's The Index, an index to a possibly suppressed biography of someone who seems to have been very influential throughout the twentieth century:
Eliot, T.S., conversations with HRH, 209; suppresses dedication of Four Quartets to HRH, 213
(full version at Wayback Machine)
posted by thatwhichfalls at 8:12 AM on October 3 [8 favorites]
This is a good one, but my favorite is still J G Ballard's The Index, an index to a possibly suppressed biography of someone who seems to have been very influential throughout the twentieth century:
Eliot, T.S., conversations with HRH, 209; suppresses dedication of Four Quartets to HRH, 213
(full version at Wayback Machine)
posted by thatwhichfalls at 8:12 AM on October 3 [8 favorites]
Thanks for this, brainwane! I am an absolute sucker for this epistolary/academic/bureaucratic style. Let's, uh, not dwell on what that says about me.
posted by McBearclaw at 8:14 AM on October 3 [5 favorites]
posted by McBearclaw at 8:14 AM on October 3 [5 favorites]
Werks to Beverly Dohnt (and 79 others)
Forwarding an e-mail to 80 people? That's the true brain parasite, right there.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 8:18 AM on October 3 [3 favorites]
Forwarding an e-mail to 80 people? That's the true brain parasite, right there.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 8:18 AM on October 3 [3 favorites]
I wish I comprehended more of this than I did :(
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:28 AM on October 3
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:28 AM on October 3
It's a great "ghost story" told well, but the spookiest part was seeing a 2001 publication date followed by references to congressional investigation of evidence destruction on January 6th and a 2019 pandemic.
posted by Rhaomi at 8:29 AM on October 3 [27 favorites]
posted by Rhaomi at 8:29 AM on October 3 [27 favorites]
Wei Ling, Anya Soboskey, et al, "'We Have A Little Problem:' A Case Study in Corporate Indecision," Journal of Corporate Anthropology, vol. 15 no. 1 (2023), pp. 1-37.
A great insight on the words prefacing every coverup everywhere.
posted by SunSnork at 8:30 AM on October 3 [2 favorites]
A great insight on the words prefacing every coverup everywhere.
posted by SunSnork at 8:30 AM on October 3 [2 favorites]
I understand that this observation makes me a monster but these appear to be endnotes (very clever and enjoyable regardless!)
posted by prefpara at 8:36 AM on October 3 [7 favorites]
posted by prefpara at 8:36 AM on October 3 [7 favorites]
GenjiandProust and thatwhichfalls, I was also reminded of Sarah Gailey's "STET"! And of some other fiction told as meeting minutes and similar fictional documents, and "The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)" by John Varley, and A Perfect Vacuum by Stanisław Lem.
Rhaomi, yeah, I found the coincidence of the projected year(s) eerie as well! And while posting this I thought about "For the Plague Thereof Was Exceeding Great" by Jennifer Pelland, published in 2003.
posted by brainwane at 8:41 AM on October 3 [4 favorites]
Rhaomi, yeah, I found the coincidence of the projected year(s) eerie as well! And while posting this I thought about "For the Plague Thereof Was Exceeding Great" by Jennifer Pelland, published in 2003.
posted by brainwane at 8:41 AM on October 3 [4 favorites]
Also “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” by Sarah Pinsker. previously
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:48 AM on October 3 [3 favorites]
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:48 AM on October 3 [3 favorites]
One of my favorite uses of footnotes in sf was in Gene Wolfe's four volume Book of the Long Sun. The folks on the old Urth Usenet group started a new group called Whorl to discuss the books as they came out - there was a certain degree of relief that Wolfe seemed to be telling a straightforward story with no tricks this time - third person omniscient narrator, no word games, just a steadily escalating adventure story.
Then, in the third book I think, the footnotes began - more and more of them, all in the second person and the whole edifice started to crumble.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 9:02 AM on October 3 [3 favorites]
Then, in the third book I think, the footnotes began - more and more of them, all in the second person and the whole edifice started to crumble.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 9:02 AM on October 3 [3 favorites]
Metafilter: 11:45 a.m. PST, 8 Jan 2019, Subj: Oops! :)
posted by BungaDunga at 9:50 AM on October 3 [5 favorites]
posted by BungaDunga at 9:50 AM on October 3 [5 favorites]
Damn, that was good.
Given that it ends with a poem, maybe a conscious nod to Pale Fire?
posted by gwint at 10:15 AM on October 3 [1 favorite]
Given that it ends with a poem, maybe a conscious nod to Pale Fire?
posted by gwint at 10:15 AM on October 3 [1 favorite]
I thought the poem at the end was really effective. It was like a window opened onto the reality we had only been piecing together as abstract information
posted by treepour at 10:17 AM on October 3 [2 favorites]
posted by treepour at 10:17 AM on October 3 [2 favorites]
I don't get it. It's describing a plague? We just had one.
posted by Comstar at 3:08 PM on October 3 [1 favorite]
posted by Comstar at 3:08 PM on October 3 [1 favorite]
I think it's describing an engineered prion disease? Intentionally released and maybe running out of control?
I'll read this again later to see if I still agree with myself
posted by Acari at 3:58 PM on October 3
I'll read this again later to see if I still agree with myself
posted by Acari at 3:58 PM on October 3
There's some detail about how the disease attacks the hippocampus, and the poem at the end seems to describe how victims suddenly run away crazed. So I think it's about a engineered contagious nanopathogen that triggers the flight response and the infected just ran away and hid.
posted by zixyer at 4:16 PM on October 3 [1 favorite]
posted by zixyer at 4:16 PM on October 3 [1 favorite]
Very cool. I read it, and I’ll go back and read it again. I feel like this is the type of story where you pick up more from multiple reads. Love it.
posted by eekernohan at 5:38 PM on October 3 [1 favorite]
posted by eekernohan at 5:38 PM on October 3 [1 favorite]
footnote 22 does imply that it was intended as a tool of corporate warfare, lol
posted by BungaDunga at 5:45 PM on October 3
posted by BungaDunga at 5:45 PM on October 3
I think 11-14 are the clearest clues as to what it was. Some kind of damage to the hippocampus is clear, and that would definitely affect memory formation, lead to Alzheimer's type symptoms, etc.
The email subject lines are the worst part of this for me.
posted by Acari at 6:09 PM on October 3
The email subject lines are the worst part of this for me.
posted by Acari at 6:09 PM on October 3
and the poem at the end seems to describe how victims suddenly run away crazed
Or maybe (in addition to flight) fall into some kind of permanent absence seizure? Based on the last line, which I do like. I can't tell whether it's literal (raptured as in they disappeared and weren't even recovered as corpses) or more metaphorical ("empty" bodies).
posted by praemunire at 7:08 PM on October 3
Or maybe (in addition to flight) fall into some kind of permanent absence seizure? Based on the last line, which I do like. I can't tell whether it's literal (raptured as in they disappeared and weren't even recovered as corpses) or more metaphorical ("empty" bodies).
posted by praemunire at 7:08 PM on October 3
"For the Plague Thereof Was Exceeding Great" by Jennifer Pelland, published in 2003.
Whatever happened to her? As an up-and-coming writer she was much talked-about in the Science Fiction field at the time, published a novel and a collection of excellently creepy short stories, and then ... nothin'.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 2:21 AM on October 4
Whatever happened to her? As an up-and-coming writer she was much talked-about in the Science Fiction field at the time, published a novel and a collection of excellently creepy short stories, and then ... nothin'.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 2:21 AM on October 4
As of a few years ago, Pelland's website said,
posted by brainwane at 5:12 AM on October 4 [2 favorites]
"She is currently in temporary retirement from writing to concentrate on belly dance instead."Go her! Awesome!
posted by brainwane at 5:12 AM on October 4 [2 favorites]
#14 includes "anterograde amnesia".
#21 includes "the former assistant was never found or questioned."
#24: "Initial figures were high because many of the missing were presumed dead. These numbers were subsequently reduced."
#26 includes "There are significant gaps in both the Geneva registry and the private non-profit Stop-The-Madness victims' list."
#27, the poem, includes "styrofoam-white bones" as well as "they fled, wild strangers to themselves" and "For some, for some, not even that, / a rapture". (And, figuratively, the bones left over from people's bodies are like the story we're reading, citations from a missing article -- the leftover structural supports for something now absent.)
So here's what I infer:
The fictional pandemic led to a lot of deaths, and a lot of people experiencing some extreme forms of amnesia. Some people went physically missing, but even among those who didn't, people went missing in other ways. To be utterly unable to form new memories or to remember who you are is akin to being raptured, in that (the poet suggests) your personhood has been taken away.
And the whole story is playing with memory. All research articles are so deeply dependent on a shared distributed memory, captured in written forms - the fragments we have shored against our ruins - and the act of citation is, here, not only conventional scholarly practice, but an act of resistance against the tide of forgetting that washed over humanity along with the disease.
And the poem's title - "17 More Reasons Why We'll Forget" - and the implied audience of this selected verse, which is bystanders who experienced the pandemic but did NOT lose their memories to the disease - further gets at the desire to forget. The desire to leave those memories behind.
But this scholar won't. It's been at least 25 years, and they refuse to succumb.
posted by brainwane at 8:17 AM on October 4 [1 favorite]
#21 includes "the former assistant was never found or questioned."
#24: "Initial figures were high because many of the missing were presumed dead. These numbers were subsequently reduced."
#26 includes "There are significant gaps in both the Geneva registry and the private non-profit Stop-The-Madness victims' list."
#27, the poem, includes "styrofoam-white bones" as well as "they fled, wild strangers to themselves" and "For some, for some, not even that, / a rapture". (And, figuratively, the bones left over from people's bodies are like the story we're reading, citations from a missing article -- the leftover structural supports for something now absent.)
So here's what I infer:
The fictional pandemic led to a lot of deaths, and a lot of people experiencing some extreme forms of amnesia. Some people went physically missing, but even among those who didn't, people went missing in other ways. To be utterly unable to form new memories or to remember who you are is akin to being raptured, in that (the poet suggests) your personhood has been taken away.
And the whole story is playing with memory. All research articles are so deeply dependent on a shared distributed memory, captured in written forms - the fragments we have shored against our ruins - and the act of citation is, here, not only conventional scholarly practice, but an act of resistance against the tide of forgetting that washed over humanity along with the disease.
And the poem's title - "17 More Reasons Why We'll Forget" - and the implied audience of this selected verse, which is bystanders who experienced the pandemic but did NOT lose their memories to the disease - further gets at the desire to forget. The desire to leave those memories behind.
But this scholar won't. It's been at least 25 years, and they refuse to succumb.
posted by brainwane at 8:17 AM on October 4 [1 favorite]
It's a really brilliant compaction of a lot of world-building into a very small space, and the final poem gives it the grace that might otherwise be left out of the format.
posted by tavella at 9:07 AM on October 4 [1 favorite]
posted by tavella at 9:07 AM on October 4 [1 favorite]
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