Reading Tomorrow

“Of Late I Dreamt of Venus” (novelette)
by James Van Pelt
Originally published in Visual Journeys, ed. Eric T. Reynolds, Hadley Rille 2007

(slated for inclusion in Gardner Dozois’ upcoming The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection, due out from St. Martin’s Griffin in July 2008.)

The Story: Elizabeth Audrey, the richest human being who ever lived, is using her vast wealth to realize the dream of an inhabitable Venus. With the help of her assistant Henry, she facilitates the terraforming of the second planet, bombarding it with asteroids to adjust its orbit, and with comets to introduce water to its ecosystem. With her titanic plans set in motion, Elizabeth and Henry enter cryosleep for centuries at a time, waking for occasional periods to monitor the work of millennia. But each time she wakes, Elizabeth finds things slipping ever more out of her control.

Review: In this story, James Van Pelt very interestingly manages to paint a quiet, melancholy, and moving character study on an epic canvas. In the details of its setting, Elizabeth Audrey’s planned transformation of Venus is awe-inspiring. Both the mechanics of the plan and the results seem well thought out, and in and of themselves would have made a perfectly passable (if much less interesting) SF story.

What elevates this story to one worthy of note, though, is the way those intriguing SFnal details are merely the backdrop to Van Pelt’s portrait of a somewhat tragic human being. Elizabeth’s wealth and power enables her to do anything. On both a small scale (Henry) and a colossal one (Venus) she has come to believe that because she has the power to effect change, she has the judgement to know what change to effect, and she is truly surprised when people disagree with the choices that she essentially imposes upon them. That makes for a tragic flaw that is both interesting and ironic—that a person with such far-ranging scope and vision should suffer from such a disastrous lack of perspective.

The character and setting threads are tied up beautifully in an elegiac denouement, in which it becomes clear that all the money and power in the universe can’t give a human being control over the human heart or the world(s) those hearts inhabit. Nor should it.

Verdict: A wistful and wise story that couches some very insightful ideas in entertaining Big Sci-Fi clothes.