When Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” was first published in the 1988 collection Women of Vision: Essays by Women Writing Science Fiction, edited by Denise Dupont, nobody knew how conflicts brewing at the time were going to turn out. It was unthinkable that the Berlin Wall would soon fall, that the Cold War would effectively end without widespread nuclear annihilation, or that Nelson Mandela would be released from prison after twenty seven years and go on to become the President of South Africa. The increasingly extreme scale of the world’s simultaneous interconnectedness and fragility was just beginning to show. We never know what the world will look like the next time it swings around its elliptical path. In this sense, then, all times are “uncertain times,” but the phrase has, of course, acquired extra weight this year.
Maybe the only certainty is revolution: the Earth continues to follow its path around the Sun. That perpetual state of revolving is not what most people first imagine when they hear the words “revolution” or “movement.” But come what may, our home planet—a container for so many brief and precarious lives, so many antique and seemingly unyielding structures of power—continues to revolve. About two months ago, Arundhati Roy published the essay “The Pandemic is a Portal,” exploring the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of the ongoing economic crisis and conflicts in India. Roy reminds readers that, while all lives are precarious, some are more precarious than others.
In 1979, the Army Corps of Engineers predicted that by 2014, Optima Lake, in the panhandle of Oklahoma, would have 600,000 visitors a year camping, fishing, boating, and swimming. Instead, the lake sat empty, a dry expanse of land about three miles long. Today, it is still abandoned.
The Optima Lake and Dam was originally intended to control flooding from Beaver Creek and the North Canadian River. After $45 million was spent on its construction, though, the lake never filled up, and it has never reached more than 5 percent of its capacity.
In this fine collection, Goolsby seems to be saying that we must look into a world that alternates between demanding speech and speech that calls itself into question, and one where neither option allows for the kind of human connection we need. Goolsby’s drama plays out in the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains, at the military bases at the edge of cities in the American West, while driving past the ADX Florence, in the suburban homes of returning soldiers, in the fact that we have been at war for the majority of my life. As much as Acceleration Hours is an artistic investigation into the ways in which we communicate and fail to communicate, it is also a call to action for all of us to explore the depths of communication ourselves and, at least, make an attempt, like Marie in “Waist Deep at Hapua,” to recover.
Rebello makes no excuses for the tawdriness of either the book or the film, but revels in it. Through detailed behind-the-scenes interviews and research, he brings the property to life in a book that is as compulsively readable as the original dishy source material.
Tenderly he lowers the dead man