CZM Book Club: Because Change Was the Ocean and We Lived by Her Mercy, by Charlie Jane Anders, Part One

0:01 Cool Zone Media book Club book Club, book Club book Club. Hello and welcome to cools On Media book Club, the only book club where you don't have to do the reading because I do it for you. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, And this week I have the first of another two parter called Because Change was the Ocean and we lived by her Mercy by the One, the only, Charlie Jane Anders. There's probably not someone else named Charlie Jane Anders. That's a very specific name. And also she's amazing, and I'm really excited to be reading a story by her to you all. And I'm I'm really excited to read this story in particular to you. You'll probably figure it out as I read it. Why I feel that way.

0:52 This story was originally published in Drown Worlds, a twenty sixteen short story anthology themed around the futures Will Inherit when the Oceans Rise, which hooray anyway. It's edited by Jonathan Stehuan. This story, it's a love letter to San Francisco, which is not the part I'm excited about. I'm gonna be honest about that. And in a lot of ways, it's also a story about falling in and out of love with the community, and about aging and subculture. And that's why I'm interested in it. I have no opinions about that, no experience with that whatsoever, but I'm excited to hear what you all think. So let's get into it.

1:30 Because change was the ocean, and we lived by her mercy by Charlie Jane anders One. This was sacred, this was stolen. We stood naked on the shore of Bernal and watched the candle's float across the bay, swept by a lazy current off to the north in the direction of Protrero Island. A dozen or so candles stayed afloat and a light after half a league, their tiny flame sames bobbing up and down, casting long yellow reflections on the dark water, alongside the streaks of moonlight. At times I fancied the candlelight could filter down onto the streets and buildings, the old automobiles and houses full of children's toys, all the water log treasures of long gone people. We held hands, twenty or thirty of us, and watched the

2:24 little candle boats we'd made as they floated away. Ycondo was humming an old reconstructed song about the wild road here beard full of flowers. We all just held our breath. I felt my bare skin go electric with the intensity of the moment, like this could be the good time we'd all remember in the bad times to come. This was sacred, this was stolen. And then someone, probably Miranda, farted, And then we were all laughing, and the grown up seriousness was gone. We were all busting up and falling over each other on the right ground and a nude heap, scraping our knees and giggling into each other's limbs. When we got our breath back and looked up, the candles were all gone. Two. I felt like I had always

3:15 been wrongheaded. I couldn't deal with life in Fairbanks anymore. I grew up at the same time as the town, watched it go from regular city to megacity. As I hit my early twenties, I lived in an old, decommissioned solar power station with five other kids, and we tried to make the loudest, most uncomforting music we could, with a beat as relentless and merciless as the tides. We wanted to shake our cinder block walls and make people dance until their feet bled but we sucked. We were bad at music and not quite dumb enough to know it.

3:52 We all wore big hoods and spiky shoes and tried to make our own drums out of dry cloth and cracked wood, and we read our poetry. On Friday nights. There were book houses along with stink tanks where you could drink up and listen to awful poetry about extinct animals. People came from all over because everybody heard that Fairbanks was becoming the most civilized place on Earth. And that's when I decided to leave town. At this moment of looking around at my musician friends and my restaurant job and our cool little scene and feeling like there had to be more to life than this, I hitched a ride down south and ended up in Olympia at a house where they were growing their own food and drugs, and doing a way better job with the drugs than

4:36 the food. We were all staring upwards at the first cloud anybody had seen in weeks, trying to identify what it could mean when you hardly ever saw them, clouds had to be omens. We were all complaining about our dumb families, still watching that cloud warp and contort, and I found myself talking about how my parents only liked to listen to that boring boopop music with the same three or four major chords and that cruddy AAA bbb cde cde rhyme scheme, and how my mother insisted on saving every scrap of organic material we used and collecting every drop of rain water as fucking pathetic as what it is. They act like we're still living in the Great Decimation. They're just super traumatized, said this skinny gender

5:24 freak named Julia, who stood nearby holding the bong. It's hard to even imagine. I mean, we're the first generation that just takes it for granted we're going to survive as like a species. Our parents, our grandparents and their grandparents, they were all living like every day could be the day the planet finally got done with us. They didn't grow up having moisture condensers and micoprotein rinses and skin cys. Yeah, whatever I said, But what Julia said stuck with me because I had never thought of my parents as traumatized.

5:54 I had always thought they were just tightly wound and judgy. Julia had two cones of dark twisty hair on Zeer head and a red pajam zut and Ze was only a year or two older than me, but seemed a lot wiser. I want to find all the music we used to have, I said, you know, the weird, noisy shit that made people's clothes fall off and their hair light on fire. The rock and roll that just listening to it turned girls into boys, the songs that took away the fear of God. I've read about it, but I've never heard any of it, and I don't even know how to play it. Yeah, all the recordings and notations got lost in the dataclysm. Julia said. They were in formats that nobody can read. They got corrupted where they were printed on discs made from petroleum. Those songs

6:40 are gone forever. I think they're under the ocean, I said, I think they're down there somewhere. Something about the way I said that helped Julia reach a decision. Hey, I'm heading back down to the San Francisco Archipelago in the morning. I got room in my car if you want to come with. Julia's carr was an older solar mine that had to stop every couple of hours to recharge and the self driving module didn't work so great. My legs were resting in a pile of old head mods and biofilms, plus those costumes that everybody used a few summers earlier.

7:13 That major skin turned into snake skin that you could shed in one piece. So the upshot was we had a lot of time to talk and hold hands and look at the endless golden landscape stretching off to the east. Julia had these big, bright eyes that laughed when the rest of zir face was stone serious, and strong tentative hands to hold me in place as Zee tied me to the car seat with fronds of algae. I had never felt as safe and dangerous as when I crossed the wasteland with Julia. We talked for hours about how the world needed new communities, new ways to breathe life back into the ocean, new ways to be people. By the time we got to Bernal Island and the wrong Headed Community, I was in love with Juya deeper than

8:00 I had ever felt with anyone before. Julia up and left Bernal a week and a half later because Z got bored again, and I barely noticed that Z was gone. By then, I was in love with a hundred other people, and they were all in love with me. Bernal Island was only accessible from one direction from the big island in the middle, and only at a couple times a day when they let the bridge down and turned off the moat. After a few days on Bernal, I stopped even noticing the other islands on our horizon, let alone paying attention to my friends on social media talking about all the fancy new restaurants Fairbanks was getting. I was constantly having these intense, heartfelt moments with people and the wrong headed crew. The ocean is our lover. You can

8:44 hear it laughing at us. Yokanda was the sort of leader here. See. Sometimes had a beard and sometimes a smooth, round face covered with perfect bright makeup. Her eyes were as gray as the sea and just as unpredictable. For decades, sam and Sisco and other places like it had been abandoned because the combination of seismic instability and a voracious dead ocean made them too scary and risky. But that city down there under the waves had been the place everybody came to from all over the world to find freedom.

9:18 That legacy was ours now, and those people had brought music from their native countries and their own cultures, and all those sounds had crashed together in those streets night after night. Yokanda's own ancestors had come from China and Peru, and here great grandparents had played nine string guitars, melodies and rhythms that Yokanda barely recalled. Now, listening to hear, I almost fancied I could put my ear to the surface of the ocean and hear all the sounds from generations past, still reverberating. We sat all night, Yokanda, some of the others and myself and I got to play on an old school drum made of cowhide or something.

9:59 I felt like I had always been wrongheaded, and I just never had the word for it before. Julia sent me an email a month or two after Z left Bernal. The moment I met you, I knew you needed to be with the rest of those maniacs. I've never been able to resist delivering lost children to their rightful homes.

10:17 It's almost the only thing I'm good at, other than the things you already know about. I never saw Zero again, but you'll see us again right after this ad break, and we're back three I'm so glad I found a group of people I would risk drowning in dead water for. Back in the twenty first century, everybody had theories about how to make the ocean breathe again. Filler with quicklimeb to realized the acid split the water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, and bond the hydrogen with the surplus carbon in the water to create a clean, burning hydrocarbon fuel released.

11:11 Genetically engineered fish with special gilds grow special algae that was designed to commit suicide. After a while, spray billions of nanotech balls into her and a few other things. Now we had to clean up the after effects of all those failed solutions while also helping the sea to let go of all that co two from before. The only way was the slow way. We pumped ocean water through our special enzyme store and then through a series of filters until what came out the other end was clear and oxygen rich. The waste we separated out and disposed of. Some of it became raw materials for shoe soles and roof tiles. Some of it the pure organic residue we used as fertilizer or food for our mycoprotein I got used to staying up all night playing music

12:03 with some of the other wrongheaded kids, sometimes on the drum and sometimes on an old stringed instrument that was made of stained wood and had a leering catface under its fret. Sometimes I thought I could hear something in the way our halting beats and scratchy notes bounced off the walls and the water beyond, like we were really conjuring a lost soundtrack. Sometimes it all just seemed like a waste. What did it mean to be a real authentic person in an era when everything great from the past was twenty feet underwater? Would you embrace prefab newness or try to copy the images you can see from the handful of docs we've scrounged from the dataclysm. When we got tired of playing music an hour before dawn,

12:49 we would sit around arguing. In Inevitably, you got to that moment where you were looking straight into someone else's eyes and arguing about the past and whether the past could ever be on land or the past was doomed to be deep underwater forever. I felt like I was just drunk all the time on that cheap ass vodka that everybody chugged in Fairbanks, or maybe on nitrous. My head was evaporating, but my heart just got more and more solid. I woke up every day on my bunk or sometimes tangled up in someone else's arms and legs on the day bed, and felt actually jazz to get up and go clean the scrubbers or churn the micoprotein vats.

13:27 Every time we put down the bridge to the big Island and turned off our moat, I felt everything go sour inside me, and my heart went funnel shaped. People sometimes just wandered away from the wrong headed community without much in the way of goodbye. That was how Julia had gone. But meanwhile new people showed up and got the exact same welcome that everyone had given to me.

13:49 I got freaked out thinking of my perfect home being overrun by new selfish, blowed fuckers. Joconda had to sit me down at the big table where seated all the official business, tell me to get over myself, because change was the ocean and we lived on her mercy. Seriously, Chris, I ever see that look on your face, I'm going to throw you in the microvap myself. You'll kinda stared at me until I started laughing. And promised to get with the program. Then one day I was sitting at her big table, overlooking the streets between us and the Big Island, staring at Sutro Tower and the taller buildings poking out of the water here and there, and this obnoxious skinny bitch sat down next to me, chewing in

14:34 my ear and talking about the impudence of impermanence or some similar Miranda. She introduced herself. I just came up from anheim. Diego, geez, what a mess they actually think they could build nanomex and make it scalable. What a bunch of poutines. Stop chewing in my ear, I muttered. But then I found myself following her around everywhere she went.

14:57 Miranda was the one who convinced me to dive into the chasm of Fillmore Street in search of a souvenir from the old Church of John Coltrane as a present for Yoconda. I strapped on some goggles and a big apparatus that fed me oxygen while also helping me navigate a little bit, and then we went out in a dinghy that looked old enough that someone had actually used it for fishing. Miranda gave me one of her crooked grins and studied a wrinkled old map. I think it's right around here, she laughed. Either that of the Korean barbecue restaurant where the mayor got assassinated at one time, not super clear which is which. I gave her a murderous look and jumped into the water, letting myself fall into the street at the speed of water resistance. Those

15:41 sunken buildings turned into doorways and windows facing me, but they stayed blurry as the bilge flowed around them. I could barely find my feet, let alone identify a building on site. One of these places had been a restaurant, I was pretty sure. Ancient automobiles lurched back and forth like maybe even their brakes had rusted away. I figured the Church of John Coltrane would have a spire like a saxophone maybe, but all the buildings looked exactly the same.

16:10 I stumbled down the street until I saw something that looked like a church, but it was a caved in old McDonald's restaurant. Then I tripped over something, a down pole or whatever, and my face mask cracked. As I went down. The water was going down, my throat tasting like dirt, and my vision when all pale and wavy.

16:28 I almost just went under, but then I thought I could see a light up there, way above the street, and I kicked. I kicked and chopped and made myself float. I churned up there until I broke the surface. My arms were thrashing above the water, and I started to go back down, but Miranda had my neck and one shoulder.

16:47 She hauled me up and out of the water and threw me into the dinghy. I was gasping and heaving up water, and she sat and laughed at me. You managed to gavege something, after all. She pointed to something I'd clutched out on my way up out of the water, a rusted, barbed old piece of a car. I'm sure Yokando will love it, oh, I said, Fuck old San Francisco.

17:11 It's gross and corroded and there's nothing left of whatever used to be cool. But hey, I'm glad I found a group of people I would risk drowning in dead water for. And do you know who would risk drowning for you? Who cares so much about you that they're willing to die for you. No, it's not religion, it's the products and services that support this podcast. That's Who and We're back four. I chose to see that as a special status. Miranda had the kind of long limbed, snaggled beauty that made you think she was born to make trouble. She loved a roughhouse and usually ended up with her elbow on the back of my neck as she pushed me into the dry dirt. She loved to invent cute and salting nicknames for me, like Dolly Press

18:13 or pre ridiculous. She never got tired of reminding me that I might be a ninth level gender freak, but I had all kinds of privilege because I grew up in Fairbanks and never had to wonder how we were going to eat. Miranda had this way of making me laugh even when the news got scary. When the government back in Fairbanks was trying to re establish control over the whole West Coast and extinction rose up like the shadows at the bottom of the sea, I would start to feel that scab inside my stomach, like the whole, ugly, unforgiving world could come down on us and our tiny island sanctuary. At any moment. Miranda would suddenly start making up a weird dancer inventing a motto for a team of superhuman mosquitoes, And then I would be laughing so

18:55 hard that it was like I was squeezing the fear out of my insides. Her hand were a massive scar tissue, but they were as gentle as dried up blades of grass on my thighs. Miranda had five other lovers, but I was the only one she made fun of. I chose to see that as a special status five What are you people even about? Falling in love with the community is always going to be more real than any love for a single human could ever be. People will let you down, shatter your image of them, or try to melt down the wall between your self image and theirs.

19:33 People one at a time are too messy. Miranda was my hero and the lover I pretty much dreamed of since both puberties, but I also saved pieces of my heart for a bunch of other wrongheaded people. I loved Yocanda's totally random inspirations and perversions. Like all the art projects, see started getting me to build out of scraps by the Sunken City. After I brought back that car piece from Fillmore Street, Zell was this hyperactive kid with wild half braids. Why this whole theory about digging up buried hard drives full of music files from the digital age so we could reconstruct the actual sounds of Marvin Gay and the Jenga priests. Wao used to sit with me and watch the sunset going down over the islands. We

20:17 didn't talk a lot, except that Wao would suddenly whisper some weird, beautiful notion about what it would be like to live at sea one day when the sea was alive again. But it wasn't any individual, it was the whole group. We had gotten in a rhythm together, and we all believed the same stuff, the love of the ocean and her resilience in the face of whatever we had done to her, and the power of silliness to make you believe in abundance again, openness, and a kind of generosity that is the opposite of monogamy. But then one day I looked up and some of the faces were different again. A few of my favorite people in the community had bugged out without saying anything, and one or two the newcomers started getting on my nerves. One person,

21:02 Mage just had a nasty temper going off at anyone who crossed her path. Whenever z was in one of those moods, and you could usually tell from the unruly condition of Mage's bleach blonde hair and broke tooth scowl. Mage became one of Miranda's lovers right off the bat. Of course, I was just sitting on my hands and biting my tongue, reminding myself that I always hated change, and I always got used to it after a little while.

21:27 This would be fine. Change was the ocean, and she took care of us. Then we discovered the spoilage. We had been filtering the ocean water, removing toxic waste, filtering out excess gunk, and putting some of the organic byproducts into our micoprotein vats as a feedstock. But one day we opened the biggest vat and the stench was so powerful we all started to cry and wretch, and we kept crying even after the puking stopped. Shit that was half our food supply. It looked like our whole filtration system was off. There were remnants of bucket struck and the residue we've been feeding to our fungus, and the fungus was choking on them. Even the fungus that wasn't spoiled would have minimal protein yield. And this all meant

22:09 that our filtration system wasn't doing anything to help clean the ocean at all, because it was still letting the dead pieces of bucky crap through. Yokanda just stared at the mess and finally shook her head and told us to bury it under the big hillside. And that's where we're gonna leave it for this week, Hazel says about it.

22:31 Hazel's the person who helps me pick stories. Hazel says, quote. I first read this story maybe a year and a half ago, and the way that Charlie writes about finding your people and it just clicking is so real, Like it feels like you've always been this way but didn't have words, And that's stuck with me ever since. And the flip side waking up one day to find that the people you loved are gone and replaced by people you don't. The specific combination of annoyance, nostalgia and trying to hold onto the community that you fell in love with is just so gripping and honestly, yeah, that's what gets at me about this story too, like, I haven't quite been in exactly this wild subculture, but I've been

23:08 in some wild subcultures where it just feels like, you know, this is it, this is my family, this is what I'm doing, this is everything you know, and how that changes and how shocking it is. And I really like how it ties that into this change of the world itself, right, because we're living in this world and it's so hard not to have in this intense grief for what's happening to the climate, and the microcosm of that happening in like a subculture that's changing kind of almost helps me handle climate grief, right, because I've survived waking up and finding out that the micoprotein is changed, and you know, the person I'm seeing it was five other lovers takes on a sixth tho I don't like and all of

23:57 that stuff, and I've survived that. I don't know that we're going to sort of climate change, but it's still like, on some gut level that's reassuring. I don't know. I find it interesting, I find it beautiful. But we're only halfway through the story because next week we'll finish it to hear how our wrongheaded commune deals with losing their food production. This has been the first part of Because change was the ocean and we lived by her Mercy by Charlie Jane Anders. Her latest book is called Lessons in Magic and Disaster. It's an adult novel about a young scholar who teaches her mother to be a witch.

24:33 You can keep up with her work at her newsletter called Happy Dancing, which you can find at Buttondown dot com slash Charlie Jane. Charlie has won the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Lambda, Literary Crawford, and Locus Awards. She co created Escapade, a transgender superhero for Marvel Comics, and wrote her into the long running New Mutants comic, and she's currently the science fiction and fantasy book reviewer for The Washington Post with Annelie Wentz. She co hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct And I'm Margaret Kiljoy and you can find me on Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff for I talk about history every week. And you can also find me on Substack at Margaret Kiljoid at substock dot com, where

25:16 I talk in a newsletter every week. It's almost always free, except for the more personal posts. And I talk about the state of the world, and I talk a lot about the things that this piece makes me think about, grief and hope and how they relate. And so you can check that out for free, and you can find this show here. We also have our own feed too, So if you're like, ah, I only ever listen to the book Club, well you can just go and look up the book Club now because it has its own feed with its own art by Jonas Goonface and yeah, you can get it wherever you find your podcasts under the cool Zone Media book Club. I'll see you next week for the thrilling conclusion and until then, maybe the ocean hold you in her infinite grace and love. And

25:55 also fuck Ice, love you bye. It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources where it Could Happen here, updated monthly at Coolzonmedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.