Category: Maureen McHugh

Yellow and the Perception of Reality by Maureen F. McHugh

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Yellow and the Perception of Reality by Maureen F. McHugh (Tor.com, 22nd July 2020) opens with the narrator visiting her brain-damaged sister, Wanda:

The doctors say that Wanda has global perceptual agnosia. Her eyes, her ears, her fingers all work. She sees, in the sense that light enters her eyes. She sees colors, edges, shapes. She can see the color of my eyes and my yellow blouse. She can see edges—which is important. The doctor says to me that knowing where the edge of something is, that’s like a big deal. If you’re looking down the road you know there’s a road and a car and there is an edge between them. That’s how you know the car is not part of the road. Wanda gets all that stuff: but her brain is injured. She can see but she can’t put all that together to have it make sense; it’s all parts and pieces. She can see the yellow and the edge but she can’t put the edge and the yellow together. I try to imagine it, like a kaleidoscope or something, but a better way to think of it is probably that it’s all noise.

The laboratory accident which caused her injury (and killed two others) may have been Wanda’s fault—we subsequently learn that she was a physicist doing research with a group that had developed a pair of “reality goggles”, a device designed to see the true quantum reality that lies beyond our own perceptions. Or at least I think that what they were designed to do, as the story only tangentially addresses the subject: the closest we get is a meeting between a physics researcher and the narrator towards the end of the story where the physicist attempts to quiz her about her sister’s work. The narrator does not reveal her suspicion that Wanda used the goggles herself.
What we get instead of a development of the core idea is a well written and characterised—but definitely mainstreamish—story that provides, variously: an account of the two sisters’ childhood; an interview with a detective who quizzes her about the two men who got killed in the accident; Wanda having a bad episode at the care home; and a visit to Claude the octopus, the team’s experimental subject who is now living in an aquarium.
This piece has an intriguing idea at its heart but, as with a couple other stories I’ve read by McHugh, it is a road to nowhere.1
**+ (Average to Good). 8,750 words. Story link.

1. Useless Things (Eclipse Three, 2009), for example.

A Foreigner’s Christmas in China by Maureen F. McHugh

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Foreigner’s Christmas in China by Maureen F. McHugh (Christmas Ghosts, 1993) has the narrator (perhaps the writer) going to a Christmas Eve party for ex-pats in China. Then, on the way home, she is accosted by a young girl who says she is the narrator’s Christmas Spirit. The narrator tries to fob her off and go home, but she blacks out, and then finds herself at an underground (and illegal in China) Catholic service.
The next (Christmas Carol-like) stop is in the living room of the cook of the special dining room the narrator uses at work. She doesn’t know the man that well (a language issue) but it soon becomes clear that he and his wife do not get on, and that he may be cheating. The Christmas Spirit tells the narrator she is here, “To show you his choice”.
The final visit is to a shared room where one of her ex-students lives, a young woman who is an untreated depressive and almost completely withdrawn. The narrator reflects that she has similar mental health issues but has always managed to avoid the abyss into which the young woman has fallen. She remembers a previous depressive episode, and how she came out of it one day when she noticed the beauty of a maple tree: she resolved to choose that viewpoint in the future.
Then (spoiler) the narrator realises that she has stopped doing so—at which point she finds herself back on the road.
The final part of the story sees the writer intrude into the story even more and talk more directly about her time in China and why she went there (although her specific reasons are never revealed). She concludes with this:


Maybe I had a sort of blackout on Red Flag Road, or maybe I met an old Chinese spirit. I am telling you now, I don’t know. But some things you must choose. Choose a bad marriage, choose a bad life, or choose to look around you and see.

Interesting final point, but I’m not entirely sure the story’s different parts sum to that observation (what was the point of the church service scene, for one thing?) I also wondered whether this is really a story, or self-therapy for the writer. Whatever of those two is true (probably both) it has an interesting Chinese setting and wise final message. If you don’t squint too hard, it sort of works.
*** (Good). 4,150 words.

The Lincoln Train by Maureen F. McHugh

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Lincoln Train by Maureen F. McHugh (F&SF, April 1995) opens with the young female narrator and her mother on a train station platform waiting to be transported to Oklahoma in the mid-1800s. As the narrative unfolds we learn that, in this alternate world, Lincoln didn’t die but was seriously injured and incapacitated. Subsequently, his deputy Seward ordered that “recalcitrant Southerners” be deported (although it seems that the narrator and mother’s offence was to allow their slaves to remain living with them after emancipation).
When the train arrives there is a crush during which the narrator’s mother dies, but she is told by a soldier to leave the body behind and get on the train. On board she is befriended by a young woman who, when they arrive at their destination (spoiler), secrets her away through a door, but only after a madwoman runs down the platform screaming that the deportees are being starved on the reservations.
The narrator subsequently learns she has been saved by Quakers, who are running a version of the Underground Railroad for deported Southerners. They tell her they will help her get to her sister.
The final paragraphs of the story have her offer to help their organisation, but she is refused as she is a “slaver” and thus “evil”. I wasn’t entirely convinced that the Quakers would have been so explicitly judgemental about her.
This is a predominantly descriptive, slow-paced story, and feels a little like an extract from a longer work. It’s fairly good, I guess, but I’m mystified as to how it won a Hugo Award.
*** (Good). 5,500 words.