Often, when I think about connected stories, I think about series and sequels or about the sprawl of cinematic or comics universes: situations held together by setting, yes, but most of all by networks of shared characters (at least as exciting cameos) and clear causal links between each installment. If we narrow the field to a form like “the novel-in-stories,” I still see a set of narratives that circle around the same group of people, drawing the stories closer together even than the typical novelistic sequel,  perhaps in the way of Louise Erdrich’s first two novels, Love Medicine (1984) and The Beet Queen (1986), which were first published, in part, as two sets of five short stories. [1] Or else I think of something like Tales from Earthsea (2001) or Tortall and Other Lands (2011), in which the stories situate the reader in a world they already know, providing new and exciting perspectives on the setting, worldbuilding, and (if I may perhaps misrepresent the narrative role of the stories at least in LeGuin’s case) “lore”: new windows into the occulted portions of the lives of characters whom the reader already knows and loves. Further, these are often anchored, as in Tales from Earthsea, by novellas or novelettes that give the collections a sort of weight in relation to the world they paint. Ursula Whitcher’s novella-in-stories, North Continent Ribbon, however, is doing something different, something that allows it to take full advantage of the opportunities afforded by short fiction while still coming together to tell a cohesive and elegant tale.

The stories of North Continent Ribbon all take place in the same general setting, the planet Nakharat and its stellar environment, from the end of the third and first half of the fourth millennium by the local accounting of time, referred to as “the Nakhorian reckoning” (p. 1). As you might expect given the breadth of this setting, the six stories in North Continent Ribbon share no named characters, and are instead held together by the broadest and most fundamental features of the Nakhorian culture. One of the effects of this is that Whitcher highlights the power that short fiction has to delineate a world using only the most necessary of details, while still feeling rich and robust. Indeed, things here often feel more present than in many a novelistically expanded world about which the reader gets an almost scientific account of explanation, a manifested sense of excess: There is in North Continent Ribbon an impression that the stories’ world, like ours, is infinitely large, so that its story will include only the most important parts.

Take, for example, the second story in the collection and the first actually to take place planet-side, “The Fifteenth Saint.” In part, I have picked this story as my example because, although I felt every story partook of this piecemeal aspect of short fiction (in part by setting each new story in a new and different part of the world and its society), it is easiest to experience when you know the setting least. The story opens:

Sannali Emenev did two things with his life: he read a book with one page, and he ran a city.

Neither of these was his official role. There were eight judges in Junpalto. (p. 15)

This is a society in which the administrative power of the city rests in the hands of judges, then—a world structured by the theoretical framework of the law and the practical power of the “Companies” which are mentioned only a few lines later (and which make their first appearance in the previous story, “Closer Than Your Kidneys”). Emenev’s duties as a judge grow clearer as the story progresses, revealing the way that he is embroiled in the particularities of the city, and slowly exposing the broader structures of the planet, as the setting finds itself embroiled in patterns of military conflict and specific tensions around the relationship between the human and the computerized.

Ultimately, this is a story about Emenev, about the value he places on the past and on the digitized memories of the saints, and about the problems of handing things over to abstraction while still valuing the lessons offered by systemization. Yet, by focusing so narrowly on Junpalto and Emenev, the latter’s relationships with the people around him, and the wisdom of the past as embodied in his machine-intelligent book, “The Fifteenth Saint,” the story gives us hints of the fullness of the world of Nakharat—and sets up for the developments that will be on display 94 years later in the collection’s final story, “A Fisher of Stars.” We see the values of Nakhorian society: the rule of law, the vitality of poetry, the centrality of obligation. We see the potential for fracture, for exposure, for exploitation—both of our trust in systems we don’t fully understand and, more obliquely, the lack of such trust. But this story does not pretend to capture that full world, preferring to reveal it only exactly as it pertains to Emenev’s life and the increasing militarization he sees around him. It isn’t until later stories that other aspects of the world are given their due, even as the intricacies of judgeship fade into the background of those tales’ historical past.

This matter of historical past is core to the operation of the book, arranging itself so that, by the time the reader reaches “A Fisher of Stars,” every story in the collection is a clear waypoint in the long history that would lead to that story’s moment. Part of how the book takes advantage of its position as a group of related short stories lies in exactly this process of isolating the smallness of living. Historical change, the book theorizes, does not occur in, or only in, grand political declarations or major military movements, though such things may certainly shape the lives that history is made of. Instead, it lives in communities and connections, in intimate relationships: friendship, family, romance. Each story is a self-contained examination of one or more such relationship, just as “The Fifteenth Saint” places Emenev in relation to his family, his neighbors, and his beloved, Kiza. By allowing these personal connections to direct the stories, each story contributes to the sense of Nakharat the way real relationships do so for Earth. For example, it is in “Ten Percent for Luck,” the only story from the perspective of a member of one of the armies, that the fraught alignment between military forces and the powerful, that the planet-dominating Companies begin to come clear, factored through the protagonist Zhanu’s relationship to both her superior, Alyevet, and also Alyevet’s family—all involved as they are in Otter Company.

The forms of connection produced between pairs do not serve as the only governing relationship of these stories, though. Informal relations of affiliation and alliance are put at the forefront of “The Association of Twelve Thousand Flowers,” centered as it is on the connection between sex worker and client, a woman and her friends. This is clear right from the opening of that story, in which the narrator begins her tale by focusing on the ribbons that are physical markers of ties and links: “I see the green and lilac ribbon braided tight and tucked under the brim of your hat. Thanks for the confirmation—you could call it an installment payment. My part of our bargain is this story” (p. 69). This moment is one of the ratification of connections—the listener must reveal their adherence to a particular contract, signified by that green and lilac ribbon, before being permitted to look into what the narrator knows. The titular association is an Aid Collective, which is exactly what you might think such a thing would be. First introduced to the world of Nakharat here, but of vital importance to the remaining two stories in the collection, neither the group signified by the green and lilac ribbon nor the Association of Twelve Thousand Flowers is mentioned again by name or ribbon in either of those tales. This story marks a slight shift in the collection, then, since the presence of ribbons and bonds that encompass forms of intimacy which are neither the obligations of law and work nor the product of deep individual feeling come to the forefront in its second half. Nevertheless, each of these final three stories is still structured by personal intimacy as well. Still, relationships that we might associate with solidarity or affiliation or alliance become more present alongside the friendships and romances that make up the more visible forms of care in the earlier stories. In all of this, Whitcher takes advantage of the structure of the short story, only ever giving exactly as much of the picture as is needed to understand the characters’ presents at the moment we encounter them.

That is, the stories of North Continent Ribbon participate in a logic of assemblage and contingency by resisting the impulse to expansive totality. Each story is a window into how we get to the historical moment in which “A Fisher of Stars” and the book’s first epigraph—said to be from Cross-Planetary Investment: A Practical Vraelian’s Galactic Opportunity Handbook—occurs. Yet no story fully contains its own moment of emphasis, no story purports to be a deterministic force of certainty, no story imagines that it is the determinant of the future which feels its echoes. Full of the potential for radical queer collectivity, this feels like something that, while perhaps possible in the novel, strikes me as particularly suited to the form of the short story—especially in how, by assembling this novella in stories, in little shining gems constellated together, Whitcher allows the reader to see certain patterns play out over and over.  In the best possible way, each story is shown, by its very echoes in the next story, to be only a part of the story of Nakharat. We know there is more to imagine because we have seen what we have already imagined exceeded. Nakharat, like Earth, is constructed from an unending opacity of intimate relations which we, those who live or read, can only perceive in fragments and pieces. Yet that very fragmentation contains the possibility for finding new meanings outside the totalizing force of dominant narratives—the narratives that, on Nakharat, might be put forth by the Companies or the military or even the judges.

Elegant, tender, and energizing, North Continent Ribbon exemplifies the potential that short fiction possesses to enact a politics of connection and relation, of intimacy, at the level of form in order to support a tale that investigates those questions in its characters, plot, and setting. While this is, of course, not the first time something like this has been done, Whitcher’s novella-in-stories captures this lesson in a particularly accessible and condensed way. It is tightly formed, only six stories, all of which but the last (with its power of recontextualization) have appeared publicly before the book. The brevity of both the stories and the book is the point. Short fiction allows for a snapshot of a world in flux, of forgotten moments that reshape the world not so much as conglomerate or aggregate (with all its solid stoniness) as constellation, mobile and shifting like the stars.

Endnotes

[1] I first encountered these stories as shorts in her later collection, The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories 1978 -2008 (2009); but, even in that form and without a lot of the connective tissue and overarching plot that the novels provided, it was possible to see the same people and places repeating, the outlines of the novels they would become. [return]