New Fiction: "The Concept Shoppe"
A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy
I have a story out today in the excellent Escape Pod podcast: “The Concept Shoppe: A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy.” This is a sequel to my story “The Uncool Hunters,” which ran around time last year, also in Escape Pod. Thanks to Valerie Valdes for once again lending her voice to Rocky. Check it out.
Last time around, the brilliant, amoral capitalist operative Rocky Cornelius slugged it out with her nemesis while doing market research in an Illinois CostCo. This time, we get to see Rocky work her creative consultant magic, helping with the soft-launch of a peculiar concept shoppe. What's a ‘concept shoppe’? I’m so glad you asked.
The idea of this ‘concept shoppe’ was to make shoppers feel like they were looting an abandoned store in a post-apocalyptic, collapseporn paradise. Rocky quite liked the idea. No one wanted to be a ‘consumer’ these days. People—especially Californians, who had lately been through so much—wanted to think of themselves as ‘survivors,’ as disaster-hardened protagonists in a return-to-their-roots story of rebuilding and social rejuvenation. It’s just that, if they could afford one of the new quake-proof condos springing up in Westwood, they wanted to do so without having to worry about tetanus, botulism, scurvy, or gluten.
The soft-launch goes swimmingly until things get a little too post-apocalyptic. To find out what the trouble is, you’ll have to read it, but I’ll give you this little taste of Theme Stated:
“But—” Franklyn began, but Rocky slapped him hard across his blond-bearded face.
“Snap into it!” she said. “You wanted The Event? There is no single The Event. Catastrophe isn’t evenly distributed and never will be. Some folks will get knocked back to the stone age, while others will keep on as sales reps and foot models and costume designers. Some will go greengrocer and others will go bandit. This here is your The Event! So get to it!”
Where did this weird, funny story come from? Well, recently the writer Robin Sloan commented on a literary maneuver the great Ursula Le Guin used to set a challenge to herself. Sloan quoted Le Guin’s intro to her second Earthsea novel:
So when I wrote the last words of the [A Wizard of Earthsea] —
“…before ever he sailed the Dragons’ Run unscathed, or brought back the Ring of Erreth-Akbe from the Tombs of Atuan to Havnor, or came at last to Roke once more, as Archmage of all the islands of the world” — what was in my mind was not a teaser for a sequel, but only the resounding, echoing closure of a story told.However…
A writer sometimes writes a message for herself, to be read when she begins to understand it.
Well, I don’t know if what I was doing was exactly “the resounding, echoing closure of a story told,” but reading this, I do think I used this maneuver too, and experienced the same “message to oneself” phenomenon.
“The Uncool Hunters” begins with the following:
Before she settled down into publishing in Minneapolis, before she got taken for a ride by the Chicago AltNormLit scene, before she flared spectacularly out of Silicon Alley, and had her pilot shoot C&Ded by the City of Santa Barbara, and narrowly avoided cryptocollar prison in the floodzone formerly known as Tampa, Rocky Cornelius was a fucking uncool hunter.
Perhaps not quite the mythopoetic elegance of the Deed of Ged, but like Le Guin, when I wrote this, I didn’t know what all these chapters in Rocky’s life were, nor was I particularly intending to write them. I borrowed the name and vague idea of the character from a trunk project about publishing, so that’s where Minneapolis came in, but otherwise this reverse resume was basically a mystery to me.
But, maybe because I set this challenge to myself, I eventually found myself drawn back to Rocky and her various capitalist-surrealist capers and foibles. When the story came out, I described her mode of brand-soaked, corpo-speak, High Capitalism thusly:
I think of High Capitalism as distinct from the “late-stage capitalism” we often complain about nowadays. The latter is defined by its crises and contradictions, by decay and dysfunction that must surely result in either rupture (revolution) or dystopia. The former, however, has a way of just kinda dancing around all that. Sure there might be problems (ecosystem collapse, heavy weather, refugee crises), but aren’t those problems really, if you’ve got the right mindset, opportunities? There’s no such thing as tragedy or triumph, just perturbations of the market. High Capitalism is a vision of a future in which neoliberalism has absorbed and coopted all possible critique and left us with no recourse but to shrug (or grin) and play the game.
…
High Capitalist stories, to me, make a fun, cynical minor key to the plucky, sappy, idealistic major key played by a lot of solarpunk. The contrast is in whether: a) we turn our head to look at the world-disaster straight on, to bear witness, and decide that, no matter how painful it is, we will make it make us better, more resilient, more caring and thoughtful, more kind and open hearted, and we will take on the mission to fix what’s been broken and heal what’s been hurt. Or b) nah, I’m good, I don’t see anyone else jumping out of comfort to save the planet, and if they did it’d be a little weird, so I’m going to keep my eyes on the freeway straight ahead, focus on demonstrating my worth in the main way my civilization has given me to do so——shareholder value——that way if the monster ever comes for me I can simply do the sensible thing: pay it to go away.
This new story tries to weigh that choice and the temptation to go with option B, even while standing amid rubble and ruin. Many of us hope that our personal and collective lethargy about the world’s dire circumstances will get shaken off when, finally, as the preppers say, SHTF. But capitalism doesn’t want that. Capitalism wants us to absorb the blows and get back to prosumering as soon as possible.
Anyway, read the story and comment what you think about all this. It’s looking like we may all get to see more of Rocky and her mercenary metacultural analysis, as I got a very generous grant to, in part, write more Rocky Cornelius stories this summer. I’ve got a bunch of ideas, some connected to Rocky’s reverse resume, some not. There are secrets in the Deed of Rocky yet to be hinted at, for as everyone knows, sometimes it’s prudent to leave a few things off your CV…
Have you joined the Cosmic Mystery Club?
While I’ve got you, I thought I’d mention that my partner CY Ballard has put out two excellent editions of her own newsletter, the Cosmic Mystery Club. The first one discusses my favorite novel, The City & The City, and the second (which just came out yesterday) digs into the more recent The Extinction of Irena Rey. If you haven’t been following, now’s a great time to check it out and subscribe.
Bonus Art
At the Turin Book Fair this past weekend, I had the weirdly liberating experience of being surrounded by enticing books that I couldn’t actually read (most everything was in Italian, of course). So I spent my money on art books, like the trippy, multistylistic Cracking by Tommi Musturi. Check out his very good Future series on his website.
If you like this newsletter, consider subscribing or checking out my climate fiction novel Our Shared Storm, which Publisher’s Weekly called “deeply affecting” and “a thoughtful, rigorous exploration of climate action.”
