A review by flying_monkey
A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker

challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring medium-paced

• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

This Nebula Award-winning novel from 2019 is set in a world that, in the time of COVID, seems much closer to home than when Sarah Pinsker wrote it. A combination of terrorism and a new plague has devastated the world, leading not only to countless deaths but to government measures that prohibit public and private gatherings and shutting down social life IRL almost entirely. Instead everything has migrated into a VR version of the Internet: people interface with the net through technologically-enhanced hooded tops, which has led to it being refered to as 'hoodspace.'

There are two main protagonists, whose intersecting stories are told in parallel chapters. The first is a rebellious rock singer-songwriter, Luce Cannon (geddit? but don't worry, it's her stage name...). Before the plague she as just getting there, one of her songs had become a hit, and she is actually on stage when everything is shut down. Rosemary Laws was a kid when all this happened. She has grown up in the new normal, so protected by her paranoid back-to-the-land parents that her entire educational and social life has been in hoodspace. She ends up working in customer service for the ubiqutous Amazon-alike everything store, Superwally (Super Wallmart? Perhaps...) until she unexpectedly gets offered another job worked for StageHoloLive, the company that has effectively replace both live and recorded music with VR-based music experiences. What's unexpected is that she isn't hired in the same kind of role she had for Superwally but as a talent scout. But how do you scout for musical talent in a world with no public gigs or concert.

Rosemary and Luce's lives collide as the naive (and possibly even autistic) new scout discovers the networks of illegal live music venues all over the USA, populated by outsiders and passionate fans, who come to listen to the likes of Luce and her musical rebels, most of whom don't trust Rosemary and want nothing to do with SHL's fakery. But together, can they perhaps do something that will bring the whole thing crashing down and help a new day to dawn? Of course, nothing is ever so simple or so easy.

This is a novel that creeps up on you. Halfway through I was still convinced that it was a mediocre and rather dull lesbian novel, and that I wasn't going to like it. However before I knew it I was riveted. Partly this was because of the musical element. It's really hard to do music in fiction, and music in science fiction is usually terrible and suffers from the need to show how 'futuristic' future art will be, thereby condemning it to be dated before it starts. Instead, Pinsker, who has released 4 albums and toured herself, keeps it close to the present: the bands and artists are a mixture of old-fashioned rock, arty stuff and more experiemental electronica. And she also hints at the fact that this is only one 'scene' - there are jazz and other things mentioned. But you feel the performances and the urgency and exhilihiration of being a live performer. The dirt, the blood, the vomit, the sweat, the terrible venues, the broken-down vans - it's all there. And this is music you really might believe could carry the hopes of a nation...