Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day explores how society changes following two plausible disasters: a surge in terrorism and a deadly epidemic.
In the Before, people brush against each other in crowded cities, gather in stadiums to watch baseball games, and hang out in clubs to watch live music.
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In the After, curfews and bans on public gatherings give rise to mega-corporations that allow people to work, study, shop, and socialize in virtual reality.
The two eras come to life through the stories of Pinsker’s main characters: singer-songwriter Luce Cannon, who misses the Before, and Rosemary Laws, who comes of age in the After.
The two collide when Rosemary starts recruiting musicians for StageHoloLive, a virtual reality entertainment company. In the After, most musicians would be thrilled to have Rosemary offer them an exclusive contract. But Luce is different. She would rather perform before a small flesh-and-blood audience (even if it’s illegal) than be turned into a holograph projected into millions of headsets.
“Having two characters with vastly different worldviews is a great way to get some interesting conflict,” Pinsker tells me on the new episode of New Books in Science Fiction.
A prolific short story writer, Pinsker has won Nebula and Sturgeon awards for novelettes. She is also a singer-songwriter, which helps explain the vividness of her portrayal of dedicated musicians like Luce. A Song for a New Day is her first novel.
“I’ve said a couple times that I don’t think I’m as good as Luce is, which is part of the joy of writing fiction. She’s not me and I’m not her, but I got to put the best of my favorite performers into her. I love live performance. I think the parts of me that are in Luce are the making-a-connection-with-an-audience parts; we’re trying to win people over.”
(A special thank you to Sarah Pinsker for allowing us to close the episode with an excerpt from her song Waterwings.)
Rob Wolf 