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bibliogrammaBrooke Bolander’s The Only Harmless Great Thing, a novelette published in chapbook format, is a complex, tragic, and angry cry of j’accuse to humanity for its lack of understanding, compassion, self-awareness and ability to take responsibility for its own mistakes.
The narrative is based on two historical events, both of which in their own way show humans to be cruel and thoughtless beings in aggregate. The first is the story of Topsy, an elephant taken into captivity to be exhibited to the public as a performing elephant. Topsy was involved in several violent incidents, most if not all of which seem to have ben provoked by thoughtless spectators, or careless and cruel handlers. In 1903 she was publicly executed - poisoned, strangled and electrocuted. Her execution was filmed for the edification of those eho could not attend personally.
The second historical event was the tragedy of the ‘radium girls’ - women who had been hired to paint watch dials with luminous paint containing radium. The women, who have been assured that the paint was harmless, were instructed to ‘point’ their brushes on their lips to make a smoother line, and as a result, ingested deadly amounts of radium. When some of the women, severely ill with radiation sickness, took their employers to court in the 1920s, they were alleged to have become ill, not from exposure to radium, but from syphilis contracted due to their ‘immoral’ lifestyles.
Bolander brings these two events together in an alternate Earth where elephants have long been known to be a sentient species, and a sign language developed to allow humans and elephants to communicate. There are three narrative threads in Bolander’s story. First, one on which Topsy, having too bad a reputation to exhibit, is sold to a watch manufacturer where Regan, dying from radiation sickness, is teaching her how to paint the watch dials while she waits for her court-ordered compensation comes through so she has some money to leave her family after she dies. Second, a mythical story about the sacrifices made by an elephant matriarch that enabled elephants to have a kind of group racial memory maintained by the mothers. And third, a future scenario in which humans hope to bury all the world’s nuclear waste under a mountain in Africa, and persuade a band of elephants to mind the mountain in perpetuity, warning future generations of humans against the dangers buried under the earth they protect; the humans come up with the ironic idea of altering the genetic makeup of these elephants so that they will glow, to remind humans of radioactive dangers.
The weaving of these ideas - radioactivity and poison, human cruelty and carelessness, the memory of elephants, the human urge to make others responsible for the mistakes of humanity, the implication that elephants will remember and protect better than any human agency could - is a powerful indictment of humanity and its relationship to other humans, to other life forms, and to the planet itself.
The narrative is based on two historical events, both of which in their own way show humans to be cruel and thoughtless beings in aggregate. The first is the story of Topsy, an elephant taken into captivity to be exhibited to the public as a performing elephant. Topsy was involved in several violent incidents, most if not all of which seem to have ben provoked by thoughtless spectators, or careless and cruel handlers. In 1903 she was publicly executed - poisoned, strangled and electrocuted. Her execution was filmed for the edification of those eho could not attend personally.
The second historical event was the tragedy of the ‘radium girls’ - women who had been hired to paint watch dials with luminous paint containing radium. The women, who have been assured that the paint was harmless, were instructed to ‘point’ their brushes on their lips to make a smoother line, and as a result, ingested deadly amounts of radium. When some of the women, severely ill with radiation sickness, took their employers to court in the 1920s, they were alleged to have become ill, not from exposure to radium, but from syphilis contracted due to their ‘immoral’ lifestyles.
Bolander brings these two events together in an alternate Earth where elephants have long been known to be a sentient species, and a sign language developed to allow humans and elephants to communicate. There are three narrative threads in Bolander’s story. First, one on which Topsy, having too bad a reputation to exhibit, is sold to a watch manufacturer where Regan, dying from radiation sickness, is teaching her how to paint the watch dials while she waits for her court-ordered compensation comes through so she has some money to leave her family after she dies. Second, a mythical story about the sacrifices made by an elephant matriarch that enabled elephants to have a kind of group racial memory maintained by the mothers. And third, a future scenario in which humans hope to bury all the world’s nuclear waste under a mountain in Africa, and persuade a band of elephants to mind the mountain in perpetuity, warning future generations of humans against the dangers buried under the earth they protect; the humans come up with the ironic idea of altering the genetic makeup of these elephants so that they will glow, to remind humans of radioactive dangers.
The weaving of these ideas - radioactivity and poison, human cruelty and carelessness, the memory of elephants, the human urge to make others responsible for the mistakes of humanity, the implication that elephants will remember and protect better than any human agency could - is a powerful indictment of humanity and its relationship to other humans, to other life forms, and to the planet itself.