Paul McAuley's "Bruce Springsteen"

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I used to nominate a lot of stuff for the Nebula, before they changed the rules.  If I admired a story and thought it worth being on the ballot, I nominated it.  Then, at the end of the year, I used that informal list to help me decide what to vote for.  Nowadays, you get only so many nominations (five, I think) per category, and you have only a few months out of the year in which to make them.  Which is to say, you have to keep track of what you read through the year and then, when it's over, go through your notes to determine what you think are the five best works per category before you nominate any.

Alas, I'm just not that organized.  So the nominating process has to go on without me.  However, I do like recommending good stories.  So I thought I might occasionally review one here.

Let's hope the following off-the-cuff review is the first of many.

"Bruce Springsteen" by Paul McAuley

Asimov's Science Fiction, January 2012

Novelette

"Bruce Springsteen" pretends to be set on another planet but is actually an exploration of the myth of the American West.  The West of the high desert, I mean, not that of cowboys and gunfights and genocide.  The roads out there are empty and go on forever.  You turn the nose of your car into the Great Lonely and pray to an untenanted sky to dissolve your self and make you into something you are not.  I was on Route 50 in Nevada, "the loneliest road in America," recently and I can testify to the pull of that myth.  You want to just go down that road forever.

But there's a dark side to the myth.

The nameless protagonist of this story is a working stiff in a dead-end job at the edge of town who may or may not be aware that he's reached the end of his rope, when a woman crosses his destiny.  "Rachel was definitely my type," he says.  "Older than me by five or ten years, easy with what she was.  Someone who'd lived a little and taken some hard knocks, who knew how to look after herself.  Someone, I thought, who was passing through.  A change from the waitresses and kitchen staff."

The fated pair go the Stardust Hotel and fuck.  Then they hit the road, intending to pull an easy and bloodless heist that will be the key to some vast and unspecified alien treasure.  Two dead guards later, they're in a car and on the run, carrying an ancient soul stone back to the tomb from which it was stolen.  They talk.  They steal another car and accidentally kill another person.  Along the way, McAuley rather cunningly conflates Bruce Springsteen's work (particularly his Nebraska album) with Samuel Beckett's.  One of the two is betrayed.  The other is gunned down by the police.  The survivor winds up in jail and speaks the epitaph for them both:  I thought we'd have a bunch of adventures until the law caught up with us.  I thought we'd be together right until the end . . ."

There is a kind of coda at the end of the story which, with the help of a useful alien, makes it clear that the story is about the uncanny power of stories to ride us and make us do their bidding.  And here I have to hesitate because I'm not entirely sure the story has earned its own ending.

But I'm also not entirely sure that it hasn't.  This is one of those stories you have to think about for a long time.  Someday, years from now, most likely, I'll come to a conclusion and turn thumbs up or thumbs down.  Either I'll conclude that "Bruce Springsteen" managed to not say but imply something deep . . .  or I'll decide that it was a noble attempt.

Good story, either way.

Back when I was in college, I was riding in a pickup truck driven by a young woman who, I realized abruptly after the truck nearly went off the road, was a lot drunker than I had realized.  So drunk that, she being who she was, I knew there was no chance of talking her into slowing down or stopping.  So, realizing there was a good chance I was going to die, I leaned as far out the window as I could and laughed.

This is a story that happens every day in America.  In Zen Buddhism, it's called the koan of the strawberry.


Above:  According to its YouTube caption, this is the only film footage in existence of Mark Twain.  I didn't have anything appropriate to the review, so I threw it in.

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