Roommates, Relationships, & The Archive Undying

As the year ends, I realize I (once again) did not update this blog quite as much as I wanted to. To be fair, I was getting a lot of (other) writing done, teaching new classes, and planning a wedding (still doing that last one). In other words, there were a lot of changes for me this year. Including my roommate moving out…

I've been thinking how to explain that last one, because "roommate" doesn't quite cut it. I've had lots of roommates; I think lots of folks who live in the Great Boston area, like myself, spent their twenties pinballing around different living situations. Some of those relationships were…not great. One roommate broke a beer bottle in our shared kitchen and neither informed me nor cleaned it up. I spent thirty minutes in the bathtub with tweezers and alcohol trying to get the pieces out of my foot before the sheer amount of blood started to worry me and, unable to walk, I dished out several thousand dollars for an ambulance to take me to the hospital—three blocks away. In fairness to that roommate, I was an absolute bastard about the trouble, the money, and his inability to compensate me for both. (He was actually a really nice guy with a beautiful orange cat, and I'm sure I wasn't fun to live with then, either.)

But I'm lucky enough to have lived with some of my best friends, over the years.

The roommate who just moved out fits into that category, where "roommate" isn't really descriptive enough. Neither is "friend," I don't think. You don't live with all your friends.

We actually met just prior to the pandemic, and throughout the terrifying lockdown months we were in the same "pod," along with my partner and another friend (and another excellent cat—I'm realizing I judge roommates based on their quality of their felines). We got through what feels now, in retrospect, like a strange fever dream where the world was oddly quiet, the future uncertain and horrific as it always is—but softened, perhaps, by the reality of immediate and tangible steps we could do to protect ourselves and one another. I remember the endless discussion of isolation periods and how to manage grocery shopping and anxiety about running out of toilet paper…

What's the word for someone who went through that with you? Co-survivor? Best friend? (Are you allowed to call more than one person a best friend? I certainly hope so, because I do…)

Increasingly, I'm interested in fiction that explores these kinds of relationships, the ones that are not just complicated in the artificial way we often see in Act One when reading the poorer examples of romance. (Oh, no, they're coworkers but they used to date!) (Double parenthetical: I like a Romance and I'm not disparaging the genre, but rather pointing out that what people sometimes call "complicated" truly is not. I recall people in grad school describing some relationships as "complicated" when in fact they merely meant they'd slept with someone and did not want to put it in such stark terms. That's not complicated, unless both parties were into aerial aerobics or are woefully ignorant of human anatomy.) Absolute Friends by John le Carré is one such novel, following two spies during the Cold War and into the War on Terror. Their relationship is genuinely complicated—by their shared ideals, divergent means and skills and racial backgrounds, and much more. It rules.

I think Science Fiction and Fantasy, however, can deal more fully with complicated connections, usually through various novums that throw people in with each other in unexpected ways—dramatic reimaginings of the way real-world circumstances (such as a global pandemic) can tie people inextricably together.

I recently read The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon, and loved it for the truly complicated relationships undergirding the overall plot. It’s a book that could be described quickly as a giant mech techno-thriller, but that doesn't really do it justice…

Short version: our characters live in a world in which independent city-states, once ruled by sentient AI, have fallen to "corruption." A new empire has risen, using chunks of the old, dead robots to expand and fight against these corrupted remains of the old world—terrifying machines that stalk the wilds, unleashed from their former AI overlords. It's rad as hell.

Our main character is Sunai, a former "priest" for one of the fallen AI. His current, less glamorous work as a scavenger sees him recovering chunks of dead but valuable technology from the former AI city-states. He soon meets a mysterious "doctor" named Veyadi Lut, who also worked for an AI in the past (in a different capacity—it is genuinely complicated).  Veyadi has his own agenda…

Candon makes a great choice early on, which is that Sunai and Veyadi have sex more or less right away. It's out of the way. There's a few pages where you expect some kind of slow burn romance and then…they do the deed, almost suddenly. The narration reveals that Sunai often uses sex as a way to deaden his own pain, or to get around difficult issues by presenting himself with a more, uh, immediate thing to do. Sunai is a deeply hurt character who doesn't want to tend to his own emotional wounds; he is a walking disaster zone, the embodiment of the guy Liz Phair describes in her classic "Fuck and Run."

After, Sunai is worried that Veyadi, having also lived with sentient AI before corruption hit, will recognize that Sunai previously worked as a priest and reveal his former occupation to people who might hold it against him. The smart thing to do, now that Sunai has fucked, is to run. But he doesn't.

The question isn't Will they / Won't they? They already have.

The question becomes—Why doesn't Sunai get away?

It's clear early on Sunai is not in love. In fact, he is frequently annoyed with Veyadi. And it's unclear, at best, if they even want the same things—so for the middle portion of the book, at least, it's not a completely shared goal that brings them together. Even when they can finally speak about their past experiences as servants to terrifying sentient machines, they have different views on what that means.

Without spoiling too much, their respective pasts do overlap in a number of ways. They do have shared values, but it takes time for those to become clear. Later portions of the book find Sunai and Veyadi trying to avoid international conflict and mitigate casualties in what I can only describe as robot-disasters. They aren't completely pacifists; but Sunai is refreshingly averse to violence, and neither he nor Veyadi is particularly good at it. Candon gets to have her giant robot novel but, through gentle characterization, manages to land at a finale that isn't merely a rehash of Optimus Prime getting in a fist fight with Megatron.

And while there are some revelations about Sunai and Veyadi's pasts, we avoid the worst sort of conclusion to this trope (if it can be called that) of two people coming together in a way is both intense and intensely hard to define. We see this in the SFF space all too often: they were secretly siblings / relatives, they were one person split among multiple personalities, they are simply "fated" to be orbiting each other, etc. That sucks.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with any of these tropes, but when done poorly they take the reality of nuanced human connection and try to explain it away. It is, basically, bad worldbuilding. An unsatisfying answer is worse than no explanation at all; in any setting, there are many things that defy rational explanation. And the kind of connection between people that is my concern here—immediate, visceral, more than a friend but not quite family in the traditional sense—is, in our reality, hard to explain. With the exception of people who approach their friend circles like Marie Kondo—often and easily parodied: Does this person spark joy?—most of us have relationships that weren't conscious decisions, that just happened and are no less meaningful because of it. A secondary setting that is less mysterious than our own will feel half-realized, incomplete, and frankly boring.

I'm not saying I would like to see more roommates in fiction, I don't think. But I do appreciate when the central relationship of an SFF novel reflects the nuance and doubt we face in the real world.

I still don't know how to describe what has just happened. My roommate moved out? One of my best friends moved away? Both of those are true, but neither captures the whole reality of the situation. And as any narrative writer knows, scene is (only?) necessary when simple summary doesn't do the job.

In The Archive Undying, there is an element of body horror, but also a focus on the way technology inflicts itself on the space between two people; and it is most powerful and resonant when it has nothing to do with Sunai and Veyadi's romance (if it can be called that). Veyadi has a classic cyberpunk visor he wears (for plot reasons). Over the course of their adventures, Sunai notices when the visor becomes damaged and inexpertly repaired. Golden cracks reveal where it was (science fictionally) taped back together. And when Veyadi has to take it off, Sunai can see the pain it causes Veyadi to go without. It's this act of noticing that illustrates, for the reader, Sunai's growing concern and care for Veyadi. Why doesn't Sunai run? Because he notices the cracks in Veryadi's face; he knows the color of Veyadi's eyes, when almost no one else does.

As the semester ended, I was underwater with final grading for most of last Friday. We had driven our roommate (again, the word's profound lack strikes me) to the airport just the day before. Because I am an excellent friend (or I try), I made sure that she had seen both of the first two Terminator films as part of our send-off, and the last thing we said to each other outside the airport was, "Hasta la vista, baby."

I took some solace in the immensity and immediacy of work; the semester ran late and grades were due soon. But as I brewed cup after cup of tea, I was struck by her absence in a way I had not experienced at the terminal. We had co-worked through much of last spring and this fall, our desks catty-corner to one another. She would talk to herself as she wrote. I would crack my knuckles, conscious both of age's effects on my crooked fingers and how much the sound must have annoyed her. And when I could not find a way to finish the sentence that had looked so promising when I struck out to write it, I would push from my chair and declare that I was boiling water. Tea. Coffee. Cocoa. You know. Writer fuel.

We are forced to retreat into shorthand. We rely on clichés. We give in to the inadequacy of our language for the sake of others' comfort.

It's a bit wordy; but when people ask, I tell them that our "good friend and roommate" has moved out.

But fiction is best when it deals with the things you could only say on the page, and with the story. When it tackles the relationships that could be described in no other way. Now, I go to the kitchen and hold the kettle beneath the tap and find myself caught between breaths, about to ask if she wanted hot water—but of course she isn't there.

This is the reality of the relationship, which I cannot speak aloud; she was the reason I filled the kettle to the top.

I strongly reocmmend