A Song for a New Day

"Sarah Pinsker is one of the most lauded writers of short-form speculative fiction. She’s won many awards, and gotten a great deal of recognition for her work. A Song for a New Day , I believe, is her debut novel, her first long-form piece of fiction. The novel is in the subgenre of post-apocalyptic fiction , and imagines a world in which a plague has caused all of us to become isolated, particularly relevant in light of the current COVID-19 virus outbreak. In the world of the novel, everyone is living like a hermit, working from home, eating at home, studying at home, and there are no large-scale gatherings anymore, and entertainment is usually done through virtual reality. So, the very visceral experience of going to a live concert, of that connection between the performer and the audience, of being part of an audience, and performing for an audience—these experiences are no longer possible. And because Sarah is a musician herself, she is able to talk about music and these music-mediated shared experiences in a way that few others can. “This is a story about why live music and shared experiences are critical to the formation of social consciousness” This is a story about why that kind of experience is critical to the formation of social consciousness, and of the fight for freedom. The post-apocalyptic world is corporate controlled, and music is completely dominated by corporate interests who want to maintain the status quo, but individual independent artists still want to perform and write rebellion anthems, and awaken the people to the possibilities of collective action rather than just virtual crowds. Sarah draws on her experiences as a professional musician to portray why that matters, and to give people a sense of the potential of resistance in live music. It’s not a subject that I had thought a lot about or knew much about, and once again, this book allowed me to see reality through a different lens. Corporate totalitarianism. Yes, I think that’s right."

"Yes. The first thing to say about this book is that it was published in 2019, before Covid. I imagine most readers might assume otherwise now. It’s set in the near future: frightened by a combination of terror incidents and a pandemic, the world has gone inside and stayed there. Mass gatherings are still outlawed years later. If that didn’t feel enough like a post-Covid response, there’s even an illegal music venue called ‘The 2020’… It’s fascinating to read it now, and see what was psychologically insightful, what still resonates, what hits differently. For all that, this is not really a book about pandemics. It’s about live music. We follow a musician committed to live gigs, and a younger music fan who only faintly remembers a different world. The fan gets a new job: she’s employed by the corporation with an effective monopoly on the music business. This brings the two across each other’s paths. It’s a love song to watching and performing music live, and more broadly to making something, however small, rather than passively consuming. It’s a zippy read, driven by the page-turning missteps and misunderstandings. In amongst that, the sci fi elements – the near-future tech, and the implied commentary on our own direction of travel – are easily absorbed and believed."