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catherineldf
The Masque Books imprint of Prime Books is doing all kinds of interesting titles these days and I'm hoping to have the imprint editor in as my guest later on this month or next to talk about all the cool things they're doing now and hoping to do next. This month, my guest is a new author talking about her first book, Trading Rosemary. Octavia Cade has had short stories published in Strange Horizons, Abyss and Apex and other venues and she tweets at @OJCade.
TRADING ROSEMARY BLOG POST
Writers are often told to write what we know. This can be difficult when what you want to write is science fiction and fantasy – no-one does know aliens, or vampires, or what it’s like to create a biosphere, to meet mythology at the coalface and know it for what it is. Those of us who write speculative fiction go ahead and do it anyway, on the grounds that imagination is there to be used and not stuffed into a teapot like the dormouse.
But imagination without knowledge is a very flat thing – there’s got to be something in it that the writer, that the reader, can recognise and hang on to. If not the alien, then the experience of being alien, of being outcast, of creating something out of yourself even if it’s only nightmares.
That’s where Trading Rosemary came in. I wanted to write something I knew, and see how far I could take it. I wanted to see what the world would be like if what I knew were all there was, and mutable. So there’s Rosemary, whose memories are mostly mine, and who lives in a world where memory can be transferred into coins and used as currency. And like any other coin – once you give it away, it’s not yours anymore. It’s not mine either.
This is something tangible for most of us, I think, something identifiable. We all know what it’s like to forget things, and how impossible some memories are to forget. How easy it is to forget the things we’d like to remember, and how each of these things change us, inform the person we are today, rather than the person who had our face but who lived five years ago. That person, that collection of memories, is different and they are gone.
Push that as far as it goes, and what kind of world do you get? What are its priorities? What are the really expensive memories, and what’s the loose change you pass over for a piece of fruit, for a bread roll? And what happens when you trade away part of yourself and regret it – what compromises are you willing to make?
That’s the position in which Rosemary finds herself. She’s got a library of memory, a good one, as much museum as library, a place of preservation, a public good. To improve it, she trades away the sole remaining memory of her grandmother’s final composition in exchange for a rarer coin, a better coin. And it seems like a good deal. But Rosemary’s got a daughter, Ruth, who’s a bit of a brat if ever there was one and Ruth wants it back. Well, these are things we do for children and for heritage.
But the person she’s sold it to doesn’t want to give it back. He wants something else – a collection of memories, taken from Rosemary herself. The foundations of her character, the defining points of her life. If Rosemary were to give these away, she’d be changed and changed irrevocably. In a world where memory is currency such change has value, but there’s change and then there’s gutting, and how much can one woman reasonably be expected to accept, and what happens when, if, she draws a line and will not cross?
Trading Rosemary is a fractured little novella. Rosemary’s memories are contrasted with fragments of world-building, with what such a social and economic environment does to artists and environmentalists, to explorers and to parents. At its base, it’s a question of identity, and what we can do to lose it – and to keep it. And these are questions that we know. Questions that everybody knows.
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I’d like to thank Catherine for letting me ramble on here. Thank-you very much!
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Trading Rosemary is out now from Masque Books.