Story 236: "A World to Save" by Geb

[wendelah1]

To those who celebrated, I hope you had a happy Christmas.

If you were hoping for Christmas recs, sorry, I'm fresh out. Try our holiday tag. You can check out this Tumblr rec post, too. For the "access denied" Gossamer links, just highlight and hit enter.

Since the beginning of the month, I've been driving the crack_van, doing one last set of recs for The X-Files before the community closes for good the middle of January.

"A World to Save" is one of the stories I posted to crack_van. Since I reformatted this and put it up at Fugues, I thought it might be a good choice for discussion. It's Scully-centric, dark but not unrelievedly so, in the way so many post-colonization stories are. I think it's one of the best colonization stories out there, right up there in quality with "Life During Wartime," although vastly different in scope and content.

Read A World to Save. Let us know what you think, where possible, leave feedback for the author, and put your suggestions in the nomination post.

Comments

[mosinging1986.livejournal.com]

Hm, a lot of the links in the Tumblr rec post don't seem to be working for me. ("Access denied")

[tri-sbr.livejournal.com]

ok, I will say ... something. There are sure to be spoilers for the story below.

I thought it was certainly well-written. In a relatively short space, the author painted a vivid picture of Scully and her post-col world by gradually revealing bits of information and few but telling details. There were a few lines that really hit me in the gut with what Scully's reality is like in this universe (although you really need the context around them too):

"I don't use my blood for Joyce. That's where I draw the line. She's not my daughter. I can't bleed for all of them."

"I'm having trouble today. Some days I have a bad time." (sounds very Scully)

"'This isn't heaven, is it?' 'No, no it isn't.'"

Along the way, the author (through Scully) layers in pieces of the past - what happened to get where things are. But it's unclear how much of that the reader can trust. The thing I got hung up on (but not in the negative sense) was the idea that Scully's memories, especially regarding Mulder and their relationship, were not reliable. About 2/3rds into the story, when Scully is greeting the new arrival, she says "They destroy our memories on purpose...memories will come back slowly, eventually, piecemeal and incomplete. Dreamlike. She may think that memories are just imagination and that dreams are real, but eventually she will learn to live with it." So, at that point, we realize that everything Scully has described as remembering is under suspicion. She even admits at this point that she remembers a few basic things and "The rest is pure conjecture."

Even before we are told outright that her memory has been tampered with, we get hints that something is amiss. At the beginning, after her dream, Scully says "Enough, Dana. Enough of that. That's not the way it was." And then, later on, she reveals that she is missing three years (i.e., she can't remember them), between when Gabe was two and when he was five and they were brought to their current location in West Virginia.

Her memories of how Mulder reacted to Gabe when he was born and the changes that came along with that were painful to read, even if we're not sure how accurate they are. "He watched with his usual look of bewildered fascination and terror, as if that happily grunting bit of flesh attached to my breast was a giant tick rather than his son." "He never once told me he loved me." And the way Scully describes Mulder's disappearance, deliberately distancing herself from it, rings true as a way she would cope with his loss and the not knowing whether he left or was taken/killed. And it's how she is coping with not being able to trust her own memories of him, good or bad, even though she obviously misses him.

And to confuse things even more, Scully relates her escape from DC and then immediately retracts it as a lie. A made up memory is better than not having one at all, perhaps. And if she isn't sure of the memories she does have, maybe to her it isn't really that much of a leap to just making one up for something she can't remember at all.

So, again, it's well-written, and I think what the author has done with having us question every memory Scully relates is interesting. I don't love the story, though, because, basically, it bummed me out. It's terrible that Scully knows she cannot trust her memories, especially her memories of Mulder. And, I'm grumpy when things are bad beyond repair between M&S (even if it's in un-trustworthy memories). The story is definitely dark, and I'm not sure where I see any relief from that. I'm not getting it from the obvious place (I at least won't spoil that at this point in the discussion), but maybe I'm not looking from the correct angle. (This is what I meant when I said I got hung up on the memory thing.)

[badforthefish.livejournal.com]

Same here, I was busy writing for xf_santa but now that it's done, I'm going to read this one. I adore post-col stories.