mookrakerSo I was finally getting around to reading my first Korps fic, 75% curiosity about the whole thing, 15% specifically wanting to read this fic so I could chat about it with a fairly dear friend, and about 10% a tongue-in-cheek gender performance obligation to familiarize myself with - slash - be into a setting that is supposed to be very much made for me like that hole in Amigara Fault.
… To an unusual degree I'm thinking, very suddenly right now, about the peculiar horror of knowing there is a hole there just for me, and knowing which one it is. The allure of something that is the perfect fit for me, in advance, the place I'm destined to go. Allure as horror. Horror as allure.
Forgive me, it's 3 AM and I've been sleeping poorly, so my mind is taking some very odd tangents. I don't think Korps is quite that perfect a fit, but it needn't be, it's fun stuff so far.
The… problem, such as it is, being that Redline's self-talk, internal landscape, inner dialogue and personality remind me of Al Sterling.
So, halfway through chapter two, I found myself no longer able to resist going back to O Human Star.
Blue Delliquanti's O Human Star doesn't have what you might call any of the obvious triggers. Self-harm that's all in the distant past, that Al refuses to talk about, leaving the scars something of a mystery. One death, really, and it doesn't stick; it's the event that kickstarts the story, the death and resurrection of Al Sterling, genius roboticist. There's moments that probably ring familiar for certain kinds of subtle -- and occasionally unsubtle -- racism in the treatment of the robots of the setting. No suicides, no murders, no sexual assaults, no child deaths, nothing obvious.
And yet it is one of the most emotionally harrowing stories I've ever read.
Like, at least Catch-22 and A Scanner Darkly warm up to the dense, intense feelings in them. There's breathing room.
From midway through chapter one, of a short eight, I was frequently overwhelmed by the emotions I felt reading O Human Star.
And the first was Sulla.
Brendan, Al's partner -- in both business and romantic senses -- had a copy of Al's mind, but it was fragmentary, recorded under terrible circumstances. When Brendan used it to try to bring Al back, what he got was something not quite a child, but not quite an adult, and not quite Al Sterling. In time Sulla was given a body suitable for a child's upbringing, since that was the closest analogue, but by her twelfth year she made extremely, completely clear that this body was wrong. That she was a girl, that she couldn't go on living in a boy's body.
I'm not doing this justice.
Seeing Sulla, without any context, was such a shock. She looked so much like Al. That same nose, a similar facial structure. And she was beautiful.
I don't mean sexy, she's a kid. She's a great kid. So's my kid, troubled, has challenges. Sulla is beautiful in ways that haunt me. She's a past I couldn't have. When I read Anne Of Green Gables, I get an almost agonizing wistfulness at times. With Sulla, it was even worse. She so recognizably had features that Al, her template, has. And she's so full of life. She's so excited. She's so glad.
There's a lot going on in there, things that don't become clear in those first chapters. Sulla is a very interesting kid with a lot on her shoulders.
That's part of what was nagging me with Redline. So much on her shoulders, so much she was supposed to be. And a horrible nagging sensation that she was a terrible fit for that role, and that she needed to fulfill it anyway, and that she couldn't.
Sulla's an interesting kid.
(Comic is from https://bsky.app/profile/upandoutcomic.bsky.social/post/3m4jjszmph22e )
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If I could make a Sulla of my own, what would she be? How would she be different? She inherited things from Al that nobody would have wished on a child, but she knew what she needed to be. Her room is a whimsical child's room, a teenager's room, full of little signs of joy.
What was I? As early as third grade I was wanting to be a bitter old man, calling myself a pessimist, imagining myself elderly and wise, yet baffled at trying to figure out what anyone meant when they called me an "old soul." I didn't much believe in souls, a fact which has some fascinating ironies but remains true now too. I was a bitter child who enjoyed some very childish things, and some very unserious things, but also loved 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, and Star Trek with a deep, profound affection.
I tell myself it doesn't matter what I would've been, because I wouldn't have been that. There are no alternate timelines, there is only this one; if others exist they are so causally disconnected that they are irrelevant to each other.
But I know that's not why I ask what I would have been. I know it's because somewhere in there, a wounded child is haunting me. And she doesn't want to talk to me, but I probably need to try to talk to her anyway, and I don't know what to say.
But Sulla makes it impossible to ignore that I've left them unsaid.
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I'm going to try to sleep again.
You should probably read O Human Star. Be aware that you'll probably need to take a break or two. My wife made it all the way to chapter 8, the final chapter, before she had to come up for air, to process what she'd read. I didn't even make it through chapter one.
I'm gonna… iunno, go lie down next to her, maybe cry a bit, listen to her pleasant snoring, and try to sleep.
I guess… for her, I wouldn't change much. Some things. There's regrets that I could do without. But I would not allow myself to do anything that disrupted getting back to her. My wife, my child, whatever hellscape I'll be living in next year will be more tolerable for knowing them in this life.
I'd like to think my Sulla would appreciate that. She always was a starved, smothered romantic somewhere deep down in there. She loved love. She'd've loved my deirest.
Maybe that's what I'll say to her. And that I'm sorry.
But at least all her wistful yearnings for a beautiful woman to love, to be dearest companions with, someone with whom we could be back-to-back against the world, someone stronger than us… at least I gave her that.
#julia-kaye #blue-delliquanti #o-human-star #sulla-sterling #alastair-sterling #redline #korps #the-korps #insomnia-posting #wifeposting
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