March 15th
Caitlin walked into the garden through the little gate from the drive. Maureen was working on the lawn.
Capsule: Deeply moving SF story. By starting off with a date, Baxter is immediately signaling to the reader the importance of when events are happening, which can only be relevant in relation to something else that has happened previously--or something that is going to happen. We quickly find out that it is the latter. This story can almost be seen to start where Arthur C Clarke's famous "The Nine Billion Names of God" ends. Clarke's visionary techno-theological speculation ended with: "Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out." In Baxter's "Last Contact" a field of antigravity is tearing the entire universe apart (aka the Big Rip), and so we're starting with the disintegration of everything. As though that weren't enough (and it might not be, considering the number of excellent apocalyptic visions sf has already produced), Baxter adds levels of meaning and emotion by placing the protagonist's confirmation of the end in the wake of humanity's discovery of a proliferation of ETs, albeit ones whose messages we are unable to decode. Discovering super-civilizations has, in fact, become so prevalent that Maureen gets alerted to each new one on her cell phone: it pings with the message. Talk about dramatic and yet conceptually sound juxtaposition of the quotidian with the transcendent! In fact, this is the technique that Baxter uses throughout the entire story, to astonishing effect, by focusing on the character's immediacy. The incomprehensible sense of loss and vastness of the changes-to-come are contrasted with quiet moments of conversation in Maureen's garden. A few pages in, for example, Maureen's daughter Caitlin tells her mom that she's always hated her coat, and that she should buy a new one. Maureen's beautifully understated response, which is chilling in the context: " 'This will see me out,' Maureen said firmly." I can't recommend this story highly enough.
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