Inga Nyström chose to leave Earth and help the colony of Nordenmark escape a looming ecological disaster. But by the time she arrives, the catastrophic degradation of the planet’s terraformed environment has already passed the point of no return, and she finds its people defeated, sleepwalking through a slow-moving death.
What’s more, the technology that brought Inga to this distant colony—beaming her consciousness out of her original body and into a synthetic one—has misfired. There are haunting gaps in her memory, pieces of herself lost to the void. As extinction takes species after species, Inga and the people of Nordenmark must find a way to survive, and a reason to live, in the spaces death leaves behind.
K.L. Schroeder is a speculative fiction writer and microbiologist forged by the cold dark winters of Canada and Sweden. Their fiction can be found in the horror anthology Northern Nights, and climate fiction anthology And Lately, the Sun.
K.L. joined editor Nicasio Reed for a few quick questions about their upcoming novella, No One to Hold the Distant Dead.
A lot of science fiction about terraforming is especially interested in how that process begins—what a place looked like before, and how it’s changed into something different. What was your thought process in looking instead at, instead, the ending and failureof a terraforming process?
Well, I wanted to look at how we go on when it seems like our world is lost, and for me that meant that death and ending had to infuse everything in the story, including the setting.
The form it took was influenced a lot from the time I worked in veterinary microbiology and anatomy research, which are disciplines quite close with death compared to other science spaces. They lent themselves to the discussion of what we do when faced with an end. And they are also wildly fascinating places. There really was a very big preserved tapeworm in a jar with ‘YUM’ written on it.
I think it’s fair to say that everyone who reads Distant Dead falls a little in love with Hecate the lizard. But really, every animal we run into has a huge emotional punch for the reader and the characters. How did you choose which animals would be representative of Nordenmark’s ecosystem?
I pictured Nordenmark as having sort of a boreal forest vibe similar to what I’ve lived around in Sweden and Canada, so it’s populated with wildlife that you might find in those places on Earth. I’m not an ecologist, so there’s imagination involved here, but I chose keystone species like beavers and otters because they have very strong stabilizing relationships with their environments. Which could be helpful in a forest terraforming situation.
There’s maybe only the viviparous lizard that lives in the boreal forest, but the black velvet leopard gecko is so adorable and goth that surely centuries of adaptation would allow the Nordenmark damask lizard to diverge and live in the forest too :).
While this is a science fiction story, set on a distant planet, it feels so much like a climate fiction book in its ecological concerns and even in the small glimpses we get of what’s happened back on Earth. Are there authors or works of climate fiction that you’ve been influenced by?
Oh man, there are so many. Probably the first SF-climate fiction I was influenced by was An Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed that I came across on CBC Books back when it first came out. I love Lorraine Wilson’s This is Our Undoing and We are all Ghosts in the Forest, Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea, and of course the solarpunk canon all the way back to Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean and Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. I’m panicking now because there’s so many more I haven’t mentioned.
Francesco Verso gave a panel here a few years back where he said something to the effect of “Cyberpunk is the modus operandi, the world we live in. It has lost its power to critique the system. In exploring solutions, including people, and focusing on humanity, survival and community, solarpunk is best positioned to do this now,” and that really resonated with me. Don’t get me wrong, I love cyberpunk (not showing the picture of teenaged me wearing those circuitboard contact lenses), but stories like Nausicaä and all the others have left marks on my heart and brain that have been important particularly in the last years with gestures at everything. It’s an honour if you can see their influence in this story.
There are threads throughout the story about the connection between death and memory. What happens to grief when the memory of what’s lost fades or disappears, and if it’s worth preserving a facsimile of what’s been lost. Was this always something you wanted to explore, or did these themes emerge during the writing?
Both, I think. The seed of the story was thinking about what death folklores might look like for people who have left Earth—and of course goths in space—and then everything related to death or grief and memory and making sense of how it changes kind of developed during the writing. Which also involved things like haunting the death deity Wikipedia pages (Meng Po Soup!) and learning about Swedish funeral traditions (there really used to be candy!) and reading how people revisit memories in the digital age (looking at old houses on Google Maps like in Josh’s cover reveal!).
What did you learn from writing these characters that you didn’t expect?
It was easy to write characters being empathetic, but much more difficult to write them reaching a consensus when it came to remembrance. Even if death and loss are certain for humans, I found there are many different ways to think about it.
Do you think you’d be willing to get beamed across space into a new body?
Hell yes, that would be extremely cool. I mean, it would be difficult to explain it to my cats, but if I had fewer attachments on Earth I’d go in a heartbeat. Which is possibly an unsurprising answer from a knowledge-hungry scientist and immigrant who has launched themselves across the globe.
Lush, lyrical, and heartbreaking, No One to Hold the Distant Dead is fascinating science fiction as well as a moving elegy mourning lost selves, lost loves, and lost species. This story of a cosmic traveler grappling furiously with pain and sorrow offers us a grim sort of hope in the midst of despair.
— Ivy Grimes, author of Glass Stories
K.L. Schroeder strikes the perfect balance between hope and grief, exploring loss on both a personal and planetary scale. Beautifully written, gentle, and thought-provoking—overall, a stunning debut.
— A.C. Wise, author of Ballad of the Bone Road
Schroeder weaves together a visceral and timely tale of environmental collapse that pulls no punches about what’s coming. Heartfelt and infuriating at times, No One To Hold The Distant Dead leaves us with a realistic, but hopeful version of the future, one hovering somewhere between victory and defeat.
— A.D. Sui, author of The Dragonfly Gambit
“Beautiful and heartbreaking. It’s sadly rare to find an author like Schroeder who approaches the non-human with such compassion and respect. A must read.”
— Ever Dundas, author of Goblin and HellSans
Readers, we are pleased to present MMIX’s (Rust MacCarthy & L Faunt) artwork for the cover of No One to Hold the Distant Dead by K.L. Schroeder (design by Christine M. Scott).
This November, join Inga on a journey out of her planet and body, across the stars to a world where everything is possible, but Death yet lingers.
