I picked up Sarena Ulibarri’s Another Life with great interest. Not only did she edit the Glass & Gardens anthologies (including debuting “Glâcehouse” by yours truly), but the description seemed to be marked ATTN: Roscoe.
Finding out who you were in a previous life sounds like fun until you’re forced to grapple with the darkness of the past.
Galacia Aguirre is Mediator of Otra Vida, a quasi-utopian city on the shores of a human-made lake in Death Valley. She resolves conflicts within their sustainable money-free society, and keeps the outside world from meddling in their affairs.
When a scientific method of uncovering past lives emerges, Galacia learns she’s the reincarnation of Thomas Ramsey, leader of the Planet B movement, who eschewed fixing climate change in favor of colonizing another planet.Learning her reincarnation result shakes the foundations of Galacia’s identity and her position as Mediator, threatening to undermine the good she’s done in this lifetime.
The back cover of Another Life
Fearing a backlash, she keeps the results secret while dealing with her political rival for Mediator, and outsiders who blame Otra Vida for bombings that Galacia is sure they had nothing to do with. But under the unforgiving sun of Death Valley, secrets have a way of coming to light.
Greening deserts! Rebuilding human society, better after the worst! Past life regression! Experimental social forms, vertical gardens, and rediverted waters! It’s pretty clear that Sarena and I both grew up reading the Kids’ Whole Future Catalog. And the sparse worldbuilding she does in this lean little novella is enough to clearly draw this solarpunk “ambiguous utopia” in stark lines.
Unlike LeGuin’s Anarres, though, the community is still small enough and Ulibarri focused enough to try and solve (some of) the structural issues in utopia. Over the course of the story, we touch on the emergence of class in the Founders and Inheritors, hero worship, bias (in the form of genetic fallacies like Galacia’s past life, and more broadly the community’s reliance on charlatanism), and even replicating old world systems while rejecting its values (something I notice in every counterculture and subculture).
And Galacia struggles with all of them on the side. “Cozy” became a dirty word, and solarpunk is supposed to be the coziest thing in science fiction, but I can’t think of a better word for the main conflict of Another Life. The bomb threats, massing polic- pardon, Protectors, and dramatic direct actions happen secondarily to the past-life regressions and election to a position with as little power as possible. At first, I struggled with the low stakes, but as I progressed, I realized it was on purpose, and that, bombs and police raids aside, these were the stakes of an ambiguous utopia. Legends and Lattes did nothing for me, but if that’s your speed, you’ll get into Another Life faster than I did.
But, whatever quibbles I have with the stakes or the plot, I do love the world. I’d love to sit down with Galacia and her old friends around the balcony feasts that bookend the story, toss some fishes Seattle-style in the tower, or just walk around the shore of the lake that was once Death Valley, watching the water come in because a few people said to themselves that the world could be better. The desert could be green.
I must respect that kind of idealism in science fiction, and I look forward to seeing more of it.
See you in another life.
Us “children of the revolution” (the ‘60’s) will be processing its “failure” for many generations. Not sure failure, however, will be the era’s final epitaph and conclusion (and is there ever really, in the production, writing, and remembering of history, a conclusion??)