Travel Documents 115: A Song For A New Day
Genre: near-future, dystopian, punk rock
The Dust Cover Copy
In the Before, when the government didn't prohibit large public gatherings, Luce Cannon was on top of the world. One of her songs had just taken off and she was on her way to becoming a star. Now, in the After, terror attacks and deadly viruses have led the government to ban concerts, and Luce's connection to the world--her music, her purpose—is closed off forever. She does what she has to do: she performs in illegal concerts to a small but passionate community, always evading the law.
Rosemary Laws barely remembers the Before times. She spends her days in Hoodspace, helping customers order all of their goods online for drone delivery—no physical contact with humans needed. By lucky chance, she finds a new job and a new calling: discover amazing musicians and bring their concerts to everyone via virtual reality. The only catch is that she'll have to do something she's never done before and go out in public. Find the illegal concerts and bring musicians into the limelight they deserve. But when she sees how the world could actually be, that won’t be enough.
The Scene
Worldbuilding
Funny question: you ever read a book that, even if you bought it new, felt like it needed to be second-hand? It needed dog-ears on the pages, a stain of don’t ask on the back cover, and a little bit of ripped paper used for a bookmark? Ever met a book that needs these things just to fit the story it’s telling?
That’s A Song For A New Day. This book makes you wish you had a hole in your jeans, dirt under your nails, and your instrument of choice on your back. Every great punk-rock show you’ve ever been to and loved is in here, and the cops showing up to chase you out of it is in here too.
So, this world. Picture something that spread like COVID, but it didn’t hit the lungs. It hit the system with something like a case of chicken pox from hell. There’s a lot more obvious scarring. Blood in the hospital halls. A nightmare.
If your society went through that nightmare, couldn’t you see them doing a China-style lockdown? And if it went on long enough, couldn’t you just see it becoming the norm if it hit in a time when the technology to permanently isolate was available?
That’s what happens in Song. People have settled into a nice safe world of isolation at all times, living in Hoodspace (which I’ll take over Metaverse as a name any day ;) ) and working for supercorporations. They’re happy. They all tell themselves they’re nice and safe and happy.
Almost all of them believe it. Those who don’t create underground art venues and speak-easy concert spaces out of whatever they can find: old warehouses, abandoned houses, old barns and soundproofed basements. If more than nineteen people show up, the cops get called and the place gets shut down. But for those who have a drive to play their songs and a need to build their communities, that’s a price worth paying. It’s worth the price to be really alive in a real world.
The Crowd
Characterization
The work is written as a polemic narrative between two characters: Rosemary and Luce. So I’ll follow the same convention. As I read this work, I identified a little more than I like to admit with the two main characters, reflecting two of the inflection points of life. Rosemary is the fledgling in this story: she’s on the cusp of growing out of the small world her loving parents made for her. She’s stepping out, finding out, and getting knocked down for the very first time. In her is all the aching wistfulness, all the hope, and all the raw heart of that first time you brave the world to see what it really has for you.
And there’s Luce, the magpie of the tale. She’s wiry, wily, done with the system’s shit and ready for everything. She’s got knocked down, and she’s got up again. She’s got her boots on and she can kick, but she hasn’t let the world make her callous. She’s been around this block, and she’ll show you how to jimmy the back door and get into the kind of community you want to be a part of. She’s seen what the mainstream has to offer, and she’d rather go swim in the ocean.
Man, did these people and these places in life hit home for me. I remember my own Rosemary stage all too well: so scared by crowds that I wanted to hurl, so eager to make SOMETHING happen in my life, so hopeful that something was out there for me. And now I’ve been in my Luce phase too: I’ve learned where my limits are, what I can push, and exactly who I am. I’ve learned to roll with the punches, spit out the blood and get back up again.
Reading a story tossed between the naïve and the experienced was a strange delight. To me, each of these women has their own theme song. As I read Rosemary’s chapters, I kept hearing Billy Joel’s ‘Only The Good Die Young’ running through my head. Luce’s music was the Interrupters’ ‘Control’. And the two songs danced together in my head as I read about the dreamers hoping there was something more out there, the doers creating places for another kind of world to exist, and the destroyers who will take everything away to keep the status quo if you let them.
Writing Style
Snappy and spare, this story moves like a good night on the road and a long night on the dance floor. Pinsker has an incredible talent for balancing the details of musical competence with daily existence in a way that makes you feel like a pro whether or not you’ve ever played a chord. The author brings the same lovely balance to the juxtposition of the mundane details and the surprises in her interpersonal writings: with laid-back ease she works in lots of LGBT subplots, as well as working in the realities of living in this particular dystopia that makes it feel like you’ve lived this way your whole life. Pinsker gives us just enough of the sense of what it is to be in the situations of the characters to ground the story, and makes you feel like you’re listening to great music when you’re sitting in a quiet room.
The choice to polarize the story between a character in their early 20s and a character in their mid 30s was inspired, letting the author wrap all that hope and fear and confusion of youth in with the resolve and I’ve-seen-worse grit of full adulthood. Together, these points of view wrap the story up into an anthem.
The Moves
Plot
A story of realizations and cultural narratives being changed, the plot starts from the best place: a prank, a swig of tequila, and a world getting thrown upside down. That draws us in as readers. It builds excitement as another character escapes the crushing boredom of a Nice Normal Life (TM) and starts exploring city existence. She finds out that corporate glamor hides nasty corporate secrets, the kind designed to squash authentic communities and fill that hole in the human heart with their shiny product. It makes us face those times that we hold up the system unwittingly. And then it asks us a question: okay, now that you know, what will you do about it?
That question is the key to the rest of the story. With a bloodstained grin and taped-up knuckles, these dreamers and singers and story-changers play their tricks, change the rules, and show us how to refuse a world trying to crush us into passive consumption and nice, quiet lives. They show us how to stand up to fear and say ‘no. I’m not going quiet. I’m going to sing.’
Overall Rating
An incredible ska-punk anthem to what matters in life: community. Falling in love. Falling in with your people. Courage to live your life. Courage to stand up and to say yes to a life worth living. Grit. Grind. Joy in being ALIVE. And music. Always music.
Turn it up. Let’s dance.