Ceridwen Dovey’s latest speculative stories, all set in space, unfold with fierce clarity and breezy wit.
With some delight and trepidation, I learnt from the first of these five pieces of speculative realism that the character of Starman, with his nod towards David Bowie, is circling the universe in a small red car. I drive a small red car. Starman’s is a Tesla; mine is not. Starman is “something between odyssey and oddity”. He can be described as a “mannequin in a pressure suit”.
Yet, Starman’s personal belief in a happy resolution of his narrative is clearly never going to manifest. The clue is in the pronouns that indicate the woman he has been so fondly addressing throughout the story was a shabby liar. Starman was duped. Get used to it, reader, and maybe abandon hope. This brutal reality check punctures every story, in one way or another. The flaws are in the humans. Each tale is preceded by epigraphs – some literary, others being quotations from the history of space exploration. The second story,, is introduced with words from H.P. Lovecraft: “Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise.” In this story there are sections written in languages other than English. A little challenge for the proofreader.
As feminism quietly flickers through this male-dominated universe, there comes an epigraph from Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. The engineers ask her: “Is 100 the right number” of tampons for her five days in flight. The blind insanity of the question paves the way for the comedy of the main character in the storyThe expedition was financed by a fund “created by the tampon luxury tax”. You have heard of that before.
As the spirit of Carl Sagan breathes across the collection, so the literary imagination of Italo Calvino haunts its pages. In the final story, Starman and his car are discovered by Voyager One on the tiny planet Sedna, which is inhabited by a sinister life-form named Oortian. There is a character, Plautus the tortoise, from Dovey’s earlier collection,, silently spying for the Oortians on the visitors. “They want to know who you believe yourself to be.
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