For my ongoing “Story of the Story” series, I have been discussing the stories in my debut collection, Histories Within Us. Today, we’re talking about my story “In Memory of a Summer's Day.”
Before we start, just a reminder: My far-future space opera adventure novel Space Trucker Jess comes out July 1st. Pre-order here!
Our narrator is a tour guide to Wonderland, where people pay £186.40 per person to head down the rabbit hole and experience Alice’s adventures for themselves. There’s the Cheshire Cat, of course, and the Door Mouse, and the Duchess and the Dodo, and the Gryphon and the Caterpillar, and our poor narrator has witnessed their trite old schtick countless times. He heads down to Wonderland twelve times per day. Sometimes, after work, he goes drinking with the Seven of Diamonds and kvetches about You Know Who.
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Wonderland isn’t exactly safe, or even safe at all, and parents aren’t really sure why they’ve brought their kids here, only that it’s a thing people do to say they have done it, and the stories. Sometimes children go missing in Wonderland. Or the children who emerge from the adventure are not quite the same children who went in. No one seems happy, but people keep coming, day after day after day.
Unlike many of my friends, I’m not a huge fan of Alice in Wonderland. J.K. Rowling has more or less been canceled by most SFF readers because of her anti-trans views, and yet Lewis Carroll (aka Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) has somehow skirted past all our moral filters, even though by all accounts he was a pedophile1.
I went to an Alice exhibit at the Frick Museum years ago, and while, yeah, it was cool to see some original drawings and manuscripts of the famous story, I was struck by how creepy he was.
He very clearly had a romantic interest in Alice Liddell — the real Alice for whom he named his famous book after — taking her on long boat rides alone, or taking creepy pictures of her.
I know that Carroll is beloved among many of my peers, but I don’t share that love. I find it highly suspect that he (a) loved to photograph children, (b) that parents weren’t always present when he did so, and (c) he deliberately destroyed 60% of his photographs.
Artists don’t just destroy their own work without good reason. Your opinions may vary, but after that museum visit I realized that we have only ever heard Carroll’s story. We never heard Alice’s, the real Alice, Alice Liddell.
And so “In Memory of a Summer’s Day2” the story isn’t told from her point of view, but she definitely does make an appearance. And she has some things to say.
