Memory’s Legion by James S. A. Corey

Author:James S. A. Corey [Corey, James S. A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Novela, Ciencia ficción
Publisher: ePubLibre
Published: 2022-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Vital Abyss

Author’s Note

Oh, so much to talk about with this one.

If there’s one real regret in writing The Expanse, it’s that we didn’t keep the right title for this story. When it was written, it was “The Necessary Abyss.” Our editor at the time was adamant that the title wouldn’t work, and we needed to change it. We went back and forth and landed on “The Vital Abyss.”

We should have stuck to our guns.

Here’s the thing. We don’t know what a vital abyss is. But a necessary one? That goes back to Will & Grace.

You remember Will & Grace, right? It was a sitcom with Eric McCormack and Debra Messing. It was also maybe the most widely missed obscure philosophy joke in popular culture. Will and Grace are common first names, but put together like that, they’re also one of the central questions of Western philosophy—how much we are self-determined and how much we are controlled by deterministic forces. Agents of our own free will or else predestined cogs whose fates are out of our hands, determined instead by the grace of God. Freedom or necessity. Will or Grace.

Cortázar makes himself a kind of moral zombie in this story. There’s a reason that Dresden has the modification made permanent before Cortázar recovers from the temporary version of it. If he had come to, he would have had the capacity to understand what he’d lost. Instead, he becomes someone incapable of moral choice. The way that his mother lost parts of her experience, he loses his ability to judge—and even be interested in—questions of right and wrong. He’s beyond good vs. evil and deeply into effective vs. ineffective. It’s a very Nietzschean place to be, and so the abyss. And it’s the abyss where there can be no moral choice. The Abyss of Grace. The Necessary Abyss.

But the editor didn’t like it. So it’s Vital. You win some, you lose some.

Paolo Cortázar is named after Paolo Bacigalupi and Julio Cortázar, not because those two writers have much to do with the character but because they’re writers whose work we admire. The physical setup of the jail is a reference to The Enormous Room, which is an autobiographical novel by E. E. Cummings about his time as a political prisoner in France during the First World War.

And Dresden’s thing about biology being an exercise in pretending to be different in kind from animals, while every study proves more and more that we’re not, is a large part of why Daniel decided not to keep going as a biologist after he got his bachelor’s degree. He’s still looking for the hole in that argument.

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