Light Of A Thousand Suns, James Van Pelt

Opening: Trellis noticed the trailer parked at the edge of the Lynwood Mall's parking lot, but he didn't think much about it. He hadn't been sleeping well. Troublesome dreams he couldn't recall. In fact, the idea that maybe the trailer had been there for a couple of days tickled the back of his mind until he dismissed it in the morning's hassles.


Capsule: It starts with the trailer and it ends, so to speak, with the trailer; that elusive presence, something that masquerades as part of everyday reality but is clearly outside of it, sharp in Trellis' mind one moment and impossibly blurry the next, as illusory and mystical as one of his half-remembered dreams. With this trailer, Van Pelt lures the reader in as much as he does the fifty-four year old protagonist.

The transcendence-laden title and introductory quote from the Bhagavad Gita perfectly set the tone of this powerful, condensed, eerily quiet, sad, crushing, hopeful story. One of the characters describes life as "all a trade." How poetic. Such a simple, devastating equation of gain for loss and loss for gain.

Here then, once again, we have the engine for personal transformation that works so well in fiction, and perhaps specially well in speculative fiction; the impositions of entropy. For a long time I've thought--and I'd be a fool to presume that this was an original insight--that when writers and teachers talk about the classic "conflict or struggle that a character must attempt to overcome" that lies at the heart of so many fictions, they're really talking about entropy. Characters must face up to the demands made of them, and all such demands ultimately spring from the finite resources of the world around them and inside them. Fiction may reveal the process of a character's discovery of entropy (coping with limitations, personal revelation, enlightenment), a character's refusal to admit the existence of entropy (usually leading to a tragedy through hubris) or the character's acceptance of the terms at hand (an existential victory). These elements can be permuted in a seemingly endless way. Perhaps existential victories are, at best, ambivalent. The ones in "Light of a Thousand Suns" certainly are.

Part of the marvel of this story is Van Pelt's crystal clear identification of the terms of entropic trade off. By so elegantly drawing up a contract of personal sacrifice, he manages to drive home a deep, universal truth about our existence without lapsing into the generic or abstract. In addition, the precision of the trade off that Trellis encounters in this tale balances neatly against the aura of mysticism and the diffuse, dream-like preludes that envelop and precede its discovery.

Another marvel is Van Pelt's control in the storytelling; there is a mature restraint at work which serves, through omission, to amplify the small moments of victory and hope in Trellis' life, which might otherwise appear world-weary and out-of-focus. Early on Trellis holds the hand of an elderly shopper who has sprained her neck, consoles a shop-lifter, and thinks about how he enjoys giving tokens to five-year-olds who wander through the arcade when their parents are too busy for them. These are not incidental revelations.

Impressive too is the handling of dialogue. The structure of the story demands an unreal conversation, one in which information is exchanged but not through literal communication. It can't veer too far into the metaphysical without becoming abstruse, thus sacrificing its function on the level of plot; and yet it cannot be too immediate, too mundane, too expository and easy to deconstruct or it will fail as an element of transition from Trallis' before to his after. Van Pelt strikes an enviable balance.

Readers might consider that the identification of one-thing-in-exchange-for-another in this story is too arbitrary. But so it is in life too. Few us will ever discover the true light of a thousand suns, and if we do, we may no longer be the same person. We certainly aren't after reading this fine piece.

(Note: Scott M. Sandridge at The Fix has reviewed the issue of Realms of Fantasy which contains this story.)