Advent

by Michael Kamakana

Overview

"We were in no way insane. We told ourselves we would adjust and only those of weak mind would question the real. We thought this would be better. We were wrong." 

When the aliens came, everything we thought we knew was wrong.  This is the motif that runs through Michael Kamakana’s refreshingly different take on alien invasion.  It’s not War of the Worlds or even Childhood’s End.  It’s a far more subtle and quiet takeover, which unfolds in the periphery of everyday lives.  The rolling language repeats like waves on a shore, carrying the reader deeper and deeper, until we too, feel like we have been colonized.

If Stanislaw Lem and James Joyce had a love child that was more brilliant and yet more readable than either, Michael Kamakana would be that child.  This amazing debut novel is destined to become a science fiction classic.

What readers are saying:

“ahead of its time”

“amazing, glorious writing”

“brilliant and intriguing storytelling”

“best Science Fiction book I’ve read this year”

“Great storytelling, couldn’t put Advent down.”

“Michael Kamakana is a writer to watch.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781988865102
Publisher:	Pulp Literature Press
Publication date:	02/05/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	918 KB

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

ARRIVAL

I go to the pool in the complex every morning for this is not possible in winter in my home city, or even possible in summer for the pool there is in the University and only open to public swimming for certain hours. I go to the pool when the sun is not yet up and the air is cool and the garden and lawn and beach are muted in dawn. I go to swim alone. I am not cold but cool and the pool water is smooth as a mirror without the slightest breeze, and I take off my watch, I take off my sunglasses, and wrap them in the large beach towel that I put beside the chaise longue. I look up to an empty tropical sky. I listen to the wild chickens. I watch the old men who fish off the pier already perched on their chairs. I watch the calm surf hissing and disappearing in the sand. I am about to step into the pool when my father calls down to me from the lanai. I look up and for a moment fear captures my thoughts, for he is deliberately calm as he ever is in a serious moment, but then my mother appears beside him and I do not fear. I know my parents are reaching that age when death is said to be of natural causes, but to me that nature is difficult to imagine. I wonder what they are watching at this time on the television that I hear. I remember the cold war terror I had felt as a child one vacation when the air raid siren went off, when I thought of the air force base nearby, but no one seemed to care, no one moved faster, no one even noticed, and my mother saw how upset I was and told me it was only a test they run every first Monday of each month. I remember that terror and it seems to join this as I hear other televisions come on and voices raised and the sudden quiet murmur of many electrical vehicles starting. I move more quickly and wonder what has happened for this is midday on the Eastern Seaboard and news is often keyed to that time zone. I come up to the condo where Mom is held closely to my father but he glances to me and then to the flatscreen. I turn to the images as they lower the volume, but I can hear the televisions from all the other condos and this does not clarify what has happened. I watch the explosion of a crashing airplane but this is not into buildings in New York. I watch a honking gridlock of red brake lights. I watch buildings on fire. I watch subways immobile. I watch surging groups of people who have swarmed on urban streets, some waving flags and banners, some dancing, some fighting, some embracing, some raising their phones to record images, some standing alone. I watch quickly rendered computer graphics that point to various locations around the world, some at midnight, some at midday, some at dawn, some at dusk, but everywhere with too many faces staring and babbling in their local language, with scrolled translations, with a clock that is somehow hours past and not current. This news came in the night to most of the cities of the mainland, but there is now an explanation why we are hearing this only now. Power down, the terrified face claims. All the power was down. Father looks to me and takes a deep breath. Mom holds on more tightly to him.

RESET

When the aliens came it was not what we expected. We did not even realize that human history had come to an end. We wanted to believe that the aliens were just a new aspect of our human world. We wanted to believe that whatever was to happen we humans were the central protagonists. We were shocked but quickly adjusted to this advent, even as we necessarily saw it as a radical change in our human story with unsuspected new characters. In our sense of history the aliens were long expected. We wondered how anyone could have ever imagined persisting secrecy, could have ever imagined this advent would not change everything in our human story. We could think in terms of narratives. We could imagine what we could not before imagine. We were ready for this adventure. We had seen the movies. We were ready to reset or adjust to this new feature of our human lives. We thought that somehow we would continue, that no matter how the aliens were disposed to us, we adaptable humans would find common qualities, find logic, find love, find hatred, find some meaning to this encounter. We were proud, we were fearful, we were tentative, we thought ourselves at the beginning of a wondrous new history and not simply at the end of human history. Some people were happily amazed, though this reaction did not long persist. Some people were immediately fearful. Some people were joyous. Some people were in dislocating shock and unable to react either way. Some people were ecstatic to be visited by elder beings of another evolution that knew so many, many, magical technologies. We had in those first days, first months, first years, many and often conflicting ideas of what did they want, what did we want, what did this all mean. Some people saw the aliens as aliens. Some people who were religious claimed these aliens were actually gods or emissaries or potentates or facilitators of their god or gods. Some people who were atheists claimed this was proof that the universe, if not the world, was a natural creation. Some people lost their faith, some people gained a new faith. Some people tried to form a religion around the aliens but there was nothing we could call miracle, judgment, grace, damnation — in fact, nothing humans had previously called religious. Some people said we defined religious experience, religious sentiment, too narrowly and typically in our postindustrial way. Some people said we were lucky to see the inevitable triumph of the true spiritual world, the true church, the last church. Some people saw great promise in the aliens, some great fear. Our merely human leaders could only hold their breath, hold it long and longer, until finally collapsing with piercing mental anguish. Some people lost their minds and acted out their madness. Some people insisted they were now possessed by these aliens, excusing fantastic and horrific crimes, revealing by their acts just how alien were these others. We were all human now, truly. We were ready to discover just how human we all were and what that status meant. We were human, but no one knew that when the aliens came our proud claims, our human insistence, our human naming was no longer ours to make. We humans perhaps all wanted the same things, food for our families, shelter from the rain or snow or burning sun and scouring sandstorms, care for our elders, a future for our children. We simply have fatal disagreements on how our desires are needs, how desires are ordered in importance — as spiritually deferred or materially immediate — how we can best satisfy our needs. But such conflicts have always been so before the aliens came and was not so different now. We saw that the impoverished subcontinental weavers of our shirts, our trousers, our suits and dresses, were as human as those of us in the postindustrial world of hedge funds, of insurance, of banking in all its varied forms, who never previously thought of those who died in buildings that collapsed from overloaded floors in ravaging fire and suffocating smoke behind locked fire escapes, or those simply poisoned by the rare metals factories webbed into our innumerable phones and other electronics. We were all human, now. We suspended capital, denied debts and loans, struggled to imagine what the aliens used as matrices for their obviously highly technological society. Some people thought their intervention in our world was proof that capitalism or socialism, that technocracy or theocracy, as practised here or there in lamentably human imperfection, was the answer to how we humans should live. Some people believed that through enlightened reverse engineering we would be able to leap into a future in which there would be no distinction between magic and technology. Some people believed all our typical human problems were soon to be solved. Some people thought this meant that we would now become men like gods. Some people were certain it would only be their like-minded cohorts of religion, of wealth, of skin colour, of nose size, of eye shape who would be selected to gain from untold alien benefits. Some people fled the cities to hide in caves or farms or extensive plantations or private islands or untracked wilderness. Some people abandoned their farms and came to the cities. Some people fanatically insisted on continuing to live no differently than they had before the advent. Some people fatalistically refused to live anything like the way they did before. Some people circulated conspiracy theories. Some people said the aliens were not aliens but actually this or that usual scapegoat, maybe Jewish or maybe Muslim or maybe American. Some people said the aliens were actually artificial intelligence or time travellers or persistent mass hallucinations or a glitch in that endless computer simulation of our human lives. We were wrong.

REAL

He is a man who knows the joy of finding things out. He is a man who was a boy who knew the joy of finding things out. He is a man who has discovered a place where finding things out is approved, a place where it is rewarded, a place where it is central to his entire working project. This is what he discovered after one university class on physics while he was studying as an engineering major. He is a man who was a boy who only knew of practical occupation for his skills with math and science, knew only of the profession of engineer, knew only of design and building by engineering in a mechanical sense. He is a man who learns about chemical engineering after mechanical engineering, who learns there is another way to use his intellectual aptitude, learns there is something so perfectly abstract in finding things out, learns of university professors, learns that this career leads to use and freedom and secure employment, learns by studying in one undergraduate class about physics as required by the engineering faculty for graduation. He walks across the quad, autumn leaves orange and gold skittering in the crisp breeze, crackling under his step, swirling against stone steps before this university building entrance gathering all the falling leaves, but no one stops to notice this, he least of all. He is not here. He is thinking about the innovation of Boyle's law of ideal gas, how the higher the density, the higher the energy, the faster and stronger the energy released in expansion. He knows that for a fixed amount of an ideal gas kept at a fixed temperature, pressure and volume are inversely proportional. He is thinking he has known this in a practical way, known this is the essential gaseous energy transformed into mechanical energy, known this is the principle by which all automotive and other internal combustion engines work. He has known this but he has not known this. He is thinking about how this has been known but not how he has known, for though he never imagined it was magic that powered such engines, he has usually imagined only the obvious working parts, parts like combustion chambers, like spark plugs, like pistons, like crankshafts, like exhaust. He could see them in action, he could understand how engineers would try to improve each generation of automobile, even how such engines powered small aircraft propellers, even how this model of engine was surpassed by turbines, by jets, by rockets. But whatever form it was always Boyle's law that was applied. He is thinking of this with each distracted step, his brow furrowed as if in pain but truly only in concentration. He is thinking of this wondrous theoretical discovery, but not of the man or men or the details of how this was discovered. Only the elegance, the beauty, the power, of that theory. He is not able to say at which step on the playful leaves he comes to understand he must leave the engineering faculty where he is on scholarship and switch his major to physics. He is not able then, or later, to recall the moment of this decision. He does not know the time of day nor the day of the week, but he does recall the term and from this the year and maybe it clarifies in his mind much later, decades later, when he finds a solid block of books with sketches and math and symbols which speak of this physics class which convinced him of what he must do. He finds these lecture notes in an old cardboard box by his desk at home, and some kind of pleasure comes back, some memory, some joy, some surprise, all emotions, for he had long forgotten how very good were these notes. He is walking across the quad, he is mounting the steps, he is wearing a cracked black leather jacket, rough blue jeans, he is thinking with a scowl that only adds to his unapproachable presence. He frightens one student who immediately steps aside wondering what this hoodlum is doing entering the physics building rather than, probably, racking up some billiard table in a basement downtown. He is not even aware of this student. He is not here. He is walking now on black- speckled gray linoleum scuffed with a history of so many footprints, wood panels dark brown halfway up the walls, closed frosted-glass and wood doors into lecture halls, panels open above the doors, muted lectures, solid polite silence, but he is walking past these chambers and to the office. Later, he will never able to recall exactly to whom or how he had spoken or even if they had tried to dissuade him. He might have been momentarily worried about money but probably not. He has grown up rural poor. He knows grinding poverty but is confident he will never allow this to happen to him. He speaks softly to the secretary to set an appointment, and despite his surly appearance, despite his lack of academic pose, despite all this he seems polite enough. He is confident but he is not confident. He briefly allows his anxiety to surface when the woman gives him necessary application papers and points to where he needs to sign, where he needs this man to sign, where he needs this other man to sign. He has not thought that this action will be denied, has not for a moment imagined alternatives, has not for a moment conceived arguments or assertions that will make this change real in his world and not the worlds of hopes and dreams. He does so now. His eyes blur, his body shivers unseen, as he thinks about how there must finally be some reason to be turned away, some reason the university will not allow him to major in physics, some reason he cannot anticipate and he cannot overcome. He does not remember discussing this change of major here at the office or ever before to his roommates, all fellow students as well in the process of dispersing from engineering to other majors, such that of the four none will actually become an engineer. He does not realize that it is his example, his certainty, his leadership unspoken that allows them one after another to switch to chemistry, to physics, to physical chemistry, to chemical physics. He does not realize that what he does with such confidence allows the other three young men to each question their own paths. He has an unspoken and unsolicited effect such that when questions arise, questions of any sort, even of what beer to drink or what pizza to order, he will listen to relevant arguments and positions then with a dismissive shrug will ignore the others and do whatever he originally wanted. He has always been the unifying force for any projects with his friends because he is imaginative but knows when to halt thoughts and just do, never focusing on what might happen but only on what he wants to do. He is dedicated and serious and focused when he has set a goal. He knows his goal is to never become his father. He has seen his father, after years of independence as a silver fox farmer, after years surviving the blight of the Great Depression, after years with no other futures awaiting or possible, become the night watchman at the town foundry. His father has to be servile at most, has to be modest at least, has to be glad that even this minor employment was there for it enables him to keep the family farm and see off his son to university. His father is trapped by his own conscience and the son knows well enough that he would suffer the same if he had made commitments, if he was married, if he had children, if he had hopes for their future. He knows well enough this would become if not a welcome burden of responsibility, an adult load of responsibility, an adult life. He has never had illusions that the world was a welcoming place, he knew that he needed to wrest his future from denying forces, from poverty, from children, from the fox farm. He would never suffer the injustice of working for a living, having a boss, having limits, having to answer Sir, having to rely only on skills any healthy man might own.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Advent"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Michael Kamakana.
Excerpted by permission of Pulp Literature Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

“ahead of its time”

“amazing, glorious writing”

“brilliant and intriguing storytelling”

“best Science Fiction book I’ve read this year”

“Great storytelling, couldn’t put Advent down.”

“Michael Kamakana is a writer to watch.”

From the Publisher