Brooke Bolander jumps from stories to novellas with The Only Harmless Great Thing, her #Tordotcompublishing novella. The novella is a strongly affecting and moving story that proves that her emotional strengths in reaching an audience do translate from her short stories to novella length.
Brooke Bolander first came to my literary attention with “Our Talons can crush Galaxies”, her Nebula and Hugo nominated story in Uncanny magazine that mixed Gods, revenge and a very sharp, short package. When I heard that Bolander was writing a novella that was an alternate history that involved the radium girls, a part of history I only had the vaguest notions about, I was thus intrigued. What could and would the author do at novella length in an alternate history? I was not sure, but I wanted to find out.
The Only Harmless Great Thing turned out not to be what I was expecting, but in the end, I am not sure what I was in truth expecting. It’s billed as an alternate history but its really an alternate world. The world she constructs, with sentient elephants, The Radium Girls and a sort of from-the-future framing-like device, is not what I expected. I thought it’d be more straightforward and direct in its execution, and it wasn’t that at all. It throws a curve at the reader. This “wicked curveball” the author throws here allows her to show the poetical, and evocative nature of her writing. You feel for the characters, human and elephant, alike as it carefully unspools. More than plot and story, this is a novel of evocation, of image and of language. That language is even better than the intriguing story and premise. It’s the writing, the evocation of things, that really sticks with me.
As curious and unique as that story is, and is a draw to the book, it’s unusual and heightened in that strangeness in the way that some parts of the story are told out of order. The author has an interesting and careful sense of plotting and showing us things, and foreshadowing other events. It is a brutal, hard story, that much it does have in common with “Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies”. This is not a story for a happy, relaxing read, it is a story that demands engagement, and thought, and facing inhumanity of both the callous, uncaring, shoulder-shrugging kind, as well as inhumanity of a direct, forceful nature. In the end, the story is a twin narrative of tragedy and sorrow. The tragedy of the radium girls, as epitomized by Regan, the radium paint that they use to paint objects slowly and inexorably rotting their bodies, the job destined to rot away their souls in turn. And then there is the tragedy of Topsy, the elephant compelled to service in the same role the radium girls once occupied, and how the conditions Topsy exists under drive to an act that will ultimate cost Topsy, and others, their lives.
Now that I’ve read the story, and look back on it from the beginning, I can see the work in its totality. It is a mine car twisting ride of beauty and tragedy, of memory and loss, of power and pain. A myth from the future, a story told and evoked by a future that ties to an alternate, even darker, world than our own. Some novellas and stories are brightly polished gems, shining and beautiful in the light. The Only Harmless Great Thing is a dark gem, just as finely crafted, just as well created, but of a dark crystal, showing beauty in darkness, tragedy, and loss. It’s not a story that everyone can handle, I think. It’s out and out a tragic fable, a dark tragic fable that knowingly pushes emotional buttons and makes no bones in letting the reader know, by that out of order story part technique, that it is going to emotionally affect the reader. That means the story is not for everyone, but it is most definitely the story for a swath of science fiction readers who need, and deserve, this story.
