Norilsk
is a real place. Located above the Arctic
Circle in the deepest reaches of Siberia, it is the northernmost city on Earth
with at least 100,000 residents. The
average temperature is below freezing for nine months out of the year, and the city
is snowbound for upwards of 250 days annually.
It is not a place where human beings should exist. Historically, it has served two
purposes: as a center for the extraction
of plentiful mineral deposits, and as the de facto center of Stalin’s gulag
system of forced labor. It is one of the
coldest, one of the most polluted, and one of the most dangerous communities on
Earth. And it is difficult to know exactly
what goes on in Norilsk today; since 2001, the city has been mysteriously
closed to all non-Russians.
Mara
Dabrishus’s “Mechanika,” technically a work of dystopian fantasy, could just as
easily be classified as urban fantasy given the pervasive way the city itself
looms over the entire narrative. Snow
piles up at the base of candy-colored tenements. Buses full of exhausted workers belch diesel
fumes as they lurch pointlessly from one razor-wire encased checkpoint to
another. The polar twilight looms over
all, broken only by the hollow glow of the ubiquitous ultraviolet lamps which
are the only visible evidence of the authorities’ interest in keeping the
citizens alive, so that they may continue to work in the mines.
The title of the story refers to a
particular location within Norilsk, but it might just as easily refer to the
city itself, or even to its citizens.
The entire edifice is a single, soulless machine. The only virtue recognized is efficiency;
Dabrishus is careful to show how even those characters who have not been
completely broken by the system have been colored by the all-consuming emphasis
on maximum return for minimum energy.
Most
pervasive of all is the cold, “seep[ing] into the bones” of the community’s
haggard occupants, numbing them to their fate and to one another. In scene after scene, we find characters
fleeing emotional awareness, seeking refuge in alcohol or harder drugs, or
simply closing themselves off mentally.
This same numbness characterizes the ambiguous authorities of the story—this
is not the cartoonishly evil government of Panem, but rather, an unfeeling
bureaucracy dedicated exclusively to the maintenance of a machine. Dabrishus places us in the same position as
her characters, dispensing information about the state in meager spoonfulls—there
are ambiguous references to an “old era” and “new era”, to labor strikes and
nationalist rebellions. Of particular
interest is Dabrishus’s choice to transplant the Stalin-era NKVD into an
environment marked by modern technology such as flash drives and cell phones—as
a result, the totalitarianism she creates isn’t linked to a particular era, but
timeless, and the reader is left unmoored, with no historical context to anchor
to. We share the protagonists’ sense of
disorientation, of isolation.
Dabrishus’s
most daring decision of all is to infect her protagonist, Zoya, with some of
this same numbness. In a genre marked by
wildfire heroines who can’t be controlled or tamed—by, to be frank, a hundred
carbon copies of Katniss Everdeen—Zoya is something very different. Zoya has spent her entire life in the cold,
both in literal and figurative terms, and has been particularly shaped by her
interactions with an emotionally absent mother who has been shattered by the
system. Zoya has never in her life laid
eyes on a growing tree. There is still a
spark within her, but we catch only fragmentary glimpses of it—in tiny gestures
of kindness to people who have nothing left to offer her. More often, we see her huddle away from that
which might make her vulnerable, from commitment to a cause or to a
person. Her rebellions are, for the most
part, rebellions of inaction, of refusal to engage or to comply. Her primary instinct, shared with those
around her, is to escape from pain.
Ultimately, the “war” in this story is within Zoya—the instinct to flee
versus the decision to engage. The way
this struggle marks her character puts her head and shoulders above most
dystopian heroines in terms of psychological complexity.
I’ve already remarked on Dabrishus’s
ability to craft a haunting big-picture environment, but her single greatest
gift as a writer lies in what she does when she pulls the camera in tight. There is mastery in the tiny details here. The neglected carpet of a tenement hallway,
worn through almost to the poured concrete beneath. The way a knife blade, warmed in candlelight,
casts flickering penumbras against the walls of an underground chamber. The way a bloody microchip clings to the discolored
linoleum of a sink. The single cracked
tooth in a sailor’s mouth. Dabrishus
strings beautiful sentences together with as much skill as any bestselling
author you’d care to name.
“Mechanika” has not been
foregrounded in any of the preliminary reviews of A Thousand Words for War. I
don’t know why. It's arguably the best story in the anthology.
After reading the proofs, I went out and immediately researched
Dabrishus’s background. It turns out
that she specializes in YA equestrian fiction, and that her work in that genre
has been exceedingly well-reviewed. So: if you’re into horses at all, for heaven’s
sake, go here and start buying things.
For my own part, I’m looking forward to Dabrishus taking on additional
projects outside of that genre; she is, very clearly, an author who can write
about anything.
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