Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day depicts a United States in the near future where people are compelled to stay at home and avoid any kind of public gatherings in the wake of a series of terrorist attacks and a pandemic that killed some unknown part of the population. She published it in 2019. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novel on June 1st, 2020. I am going to say I think this one might have included a little bias – this is a perfectly cromulent novel, but I don’t think it’s really up to the historical standard here, even though that wasn’t a great year for sci-fi/fantasy novels.
A Song for a New Day follows two main characters, both queer women, through plot lines that intersect, split, and intersect again, with one of the two jumping forward in time. Luce Cannon (say it out loud) is a singer/songwriter whose band happened to play the last concert before the world shut down; Pinsker tells her chapters in first person, and begins her story with that final show before moving forward to the future time when live music is essentially banned. Rosemary Laws (no relation) is a young naïf who lives with her parents and works for the everything-store SuperWally (subtle) in customer support, dealing with users through a sort of virtual reality that works through wired hoodies. Through a small coincidence, she ends up getting a job with StageHoloLive, a company with a monopoly on recorded music and that streams ‘live’ shows to the SuperWally user base, again through virtual reality. Rosemary becomes a recruiter, going out into the real world in search of underground music venues to find new bands for StageHoloLive to scoop up, which eventually puts her in the crowd at one of Luce’s shows. Rosemary is, naturally, a true believer that these conglomerates are benevolent and that their services really help people, while Luce and her counterculture friends and acquaintances have other ideas – or, they just have ideas, and they help Rosemary come up with some, too.
The best parts of A Song for a New Day don’t revolve that much around the characters, neither of whom is that special or memorable, or even that tangible off the page – it’s the music, as Pinsker must be a dedicated fan of music, especially live music, to be able to evoke the sense of watching a great band in person just through her descriptions. Some of the music she describes is a little too far-fetched, as we’re talking maybe fifteen years in the future, not two hundred, but the descriptions of just being there, hearing it, feeling it in your bones, recognizing a song but also hearing it in a new way because it’s live, are the real standout here. There’s some fun and intrigue in the narrative around Rosemary’s attempts to find these illicit shows and scenes; it dovetailed nicely with my watch of A Complete Unknown, where Bob Dylan and some of his peers get their starts in little coffeehouses and other underground (albeit legal) venues in New York.
Pinsker also takes aim at Big Tech dominating more of our lives, a philosophical view I happen to share, but she lays it on so thick that it loses some of its bite. The company names, like many of the character names, are too obvious, and there’s the usual blame-the-consumer part going on – I can never blame people who simply choose the cheapest option, regardless of the hidden costs, or people who say yes to same-day delivery of something for no extra fee. That’s rational economic behavior. It’s also not in our natures to consider the externalities of anything we do; you have to learn those behaviors, like separating your recycling from your trash to keep it out of a landfill or breaking down those cardboard boxes so you’re not making more work for someone else. The blame should fall on the complicit governments that allowed these companies to get so much control over our lives and our economy – and now our Administration – but not on the consumers.
Even from my spoiler-free description, you can probably guess most of where the plot of A Song for a New Day ends up. There were virtually no surprises in the story or the development of Rosemary’s character – I don’t think Luce’s develops at all, except maybe for one sentence near the end of the book that hints at something further – so while it’s pleasant, it’s not as compelling as it could have been. The novel functions much better as a paean to the power and beauty of live music than anything else, and maybe that’s good enough for most readers. I just wonder if it would have won the Nebula if it hadn’t had a pandemic baked into the back story.
Next up: I just finished Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown and started Ursula Le Guin’s Nebula-winning YA novel Powers.
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