“5:37”: Translunar Travelers Lounge

Issue Three of Translunar Travelers Lounge went live on August 15. In addition to the free-to-read online format, it’s also available as an ebook from Amazon. My short story “5:37” is on the menu (one of four Jasmine Luna Blends, “subtle in scent and sweet in flavor”).

The story’s basic concept is a decades-old joke about The Ring and technological obsolescence. Its writing was strongly influenced by my having happened to think about John Landis and gotten mad all over again about terrible labor practices and preventable accidents and how The Twilight Zone is a piece of gruesome trivia rather than (minimally) a career-ender. Some people are allowed to fail over and over again, and fail up, and escape the reasonable consequences of their actions.

That’s part of the reason I wanted to make my characters women of color, and why I wanted to give them the opportunity to escape the unreasonable consequences of others’ actions.

I also wanted to play around a bit with professional practice. Archives have historically been a site of power. The people who are documented, remembered, mourned, and memorialized tend to be the same people who are allowed to fail (overwhelmingly, though not exclusively, rich white men).

There has been professional push-back against that historical reality, including efforts to document previously undocumented voices, collect and highlight material created by or relating to marginalized groups, and assist communities and individuals who wish to maintain their own archives outside of established institutions. (The degree and success of this push-back is a whole other question; but this is a blog post about a short story, not an article about the history of the field.) I wanted to put my archivist firmly in the midst of that conversation.

And here I must apologize for some artistic decisions that may be difficult for archivists to accept. The fictional article abstract is rather over-expansive. A case study would stand as an article of its own. I should also point out that using “Tai Soo-jin (Spirit)” in the finding aid is something of an anachronism. When I entered the field, Describing Archives: A Content Standard included guidance on spirit communication along with various other name forms, but that chapter was removed from DACS in 2013. I am not sure what the current standard for spirit communication may be, but I always wanted to make use of that particular technical guideline. I hope readers are willing to suspend their disbelief.