In “I Remember a One-Sided Die” by Francis Bass, the narrator introduces the reader to a world that is familiar and comforting (a family dinner, with chat about the workday) and yet also very alien and unsettling. This unsettling alienness is partly due to the strange details that emerge: the father’s “blow-pieces were all wrong” and “his talking turned into one long, high scream, like an alarm,” and the disturbing revelation that there is a small dead body in the room. But more than that, the reader quickly realizes that time itself is moving in an alien way. Sentences repeat with slight variations, as if tumbling and gathering up new details on each rotation; the characters echo their own words and sometimes seem to become trapped in a loop. The narrator relays events that have happened in the past yet also have not happened yet. All of this has the effect of destabilizing the reader, leaving us unmoored from the familiar and from time itself. It’s a story to be experienced as much as read, and it raises interesting questions about time and our perception of it.
Francis Bass is a writer living in Philadelphia. His writing has appeared in Escape Pod, Electric Literature, Reckoning, and others, and he has self-published many other works. You can follow him online at francisbass.com.
Marissa van Uden: Hi, Francis! Thank you for joining us to chat about this unique and arresting story. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like it. I’d love to know, what gave you the idea to play with the perception of time like this?
Francis Bass: Thank you for having me! I think the idea came from my own experience of periods of my life that have been highly routinized. During the first year and a half of the pandemic, for instance, I was on unemployment, and I developed a consistent daily routine to manage the tremendous amount of free time I had. Doing the same thing day to day for month after month, it all starts to collapse. Although the days may feel long and monotonous as they happen, in retrospect they seem to have flown by leaving hardly a trace. So I thought, if an alien species’s whole life was like this, and they lived on a planet without seasons, they would have no reason to remember time serially—all their memories would be like ditto marks of the same day, and so they could recall everything as part of this one-day schema. Of course, there would still be once-in-a-lifetime events that would stand out, that would have to be remembered. Rendering this in prose would require some strange literary maneuvers, which excited me.
Shortly after I came up with the concept, I realized it was very similar to Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” though without any actual precognition. So that may have been a subconscious inspiration, too.
MVU: And how did the story evolve from concept to finished version?
FB: For a while I was planning to write the story as a novella, focusing on a human diplomat who undergoes a treatment so they can experience time the way the aliens do and better understand them. I made a lot of notes on how the world worked but never found an emotional heart to the story, and so left it as a vague sketch. About a year later I picked it up again and started coming up with other, smaller ideas for stories I could write in this world, one of which was dead simple – just write the entire life’s story of one of these aliens, as narrated by them. Since they remember everything as a single day, their lives are perfectly short-story-shaped already. I spent a while then figuring out all the story beats, writing out two timelines—one a linear timeline, everything in order, the other a diurnal timeline, mapping out where each major event would occur in the day.
MVU: Presenting time in this strange way—liberated from chronological time—risks disorienting the reader or leaving them feeling lost, but the use of anaphora and other kinds of repetition creates a kind of lyrical coherence. The writing has a hypnotic, almost scriptural feel. Was this intentional as a way to give the reader a firmer ground to stand on? Did crafting this voice take a lot of revisions and refining, or was it something that formed more organically?
FB: It was intentional, but it wasn’t to give the reader a firmer ground to stand on. “Scriptural” is a good word, because a lot of scripture comes from oral tradition, or is written to be recited, repeated, spoken in chorus. Ritual speech and oral tradition were really my touchstones for the way the characters speak, and the way !uau narrates the story. This was a big part of developing the world of these aliens. Because things do occasionally change, they have to be able to communicate and exchange information, they have to have language, but much of their communications would be repeated every day. So it’s ritual, the same way saying “Hi, how’s it going?” “Good, how about you?” “I’m alright” is ritual. When a coworker asks, “Hi, how’s it going?”, it’s very difficult to answer that with anything other than “okay,” “going good,” or some other formula. The same is true for these aliens, but it extends to the vast majority of their speech. Producing novel speech is difficult, so much of it comes out as formulas or repetition.
It was a conscious decision to write the story this way, but it didn’t take much refining—perhaps because I’d had a brief but intense Bible obsession phase a few years previously, when I read several different translations of the Book of Genesis for a literary translation class. Genesis, and much of the Bible, is composed of long series of sentences that start with “And,” with really infrequent use of subordinating conjunctions like “so,” “then,” or “although.” It lays down one event after another, one generation after another, in a steady, regular order. It’s very different from our modern conception of narrative, which is all about the causation and relation of events. “X, so Y, but A and B. Meanwhile, C, then Z” vs. “X and Y and A and B. And C and Z.”
So I think during all that reading, I picked that style up and have kept it in my writer’s toolbox ever since. And it happens to fit !uau’s conception of the world quite well, with events just laid out one after another, with infrequent remarks on causation or contradiction.
My desk, in its natural, untidy state
MVU: It worked perfectly, on so many levels. I’d love to hear more about the human settlement and the black tower. The humans seem mostly interested in studying and communicating with these beings, although it seems they have also been the harbingers of vermin and famine. The story itself is framed as a translated interview by Bell Thea, who is trying to share the human way of seeing the world with !uau. What made you decide to show !uau’s story in this way?
FB: Like I said, my original idea for this story was to have a human diplomat as the protagonist. In that version, the humans want to build a radio telescope on the planet as part of a large, multi-planetary telescope array. Then I had another idea to write a story about a human scientist observing one of these villages and struggling to determine if the inhabitants have free will or are enslaved, or are operating on pure, unconscious instinct. With both of these, I needed some emotional connection for the humans. I needed the revelation of the aliens’ memory—the big wow factor of the story—to matter to them on a personal level. I couldn’t get it to work (yet! I may still write these some day), so I turned to the aliens. It’s their planet, it’s their mnemonic schema, so it was easy to make things personal.
And it gave me the chance to write a first-person alien story, a type of story I’ve always really admired in sci-fi but never tackled myself.
MVU: I’m so glad you did, and I hope you do explore more in this world! Your story “The Mechanical Turk Has a Panic Attack” (originally published in Uncharted and reprinted with audio narration in Escape Pod) looks at the way humanity can become so enamored with the idea of convenience and automated work that people are willing to look away from the very real human suffering behind the scenes—the vulnerable people who are exploited to create the illusion of automation. It reflects how so much of our modern world is built on a mass delusion, carefully designed and maintained by corporations. Why do you think it is that so many otherwise intelligent and compassionate people are able to simply ignore and compartmentalize the truth of their convenience and consumption? Do you see any hope for impactful change?
FB: I think people care about their friends and their family and themselves and not about people they can’t see (even when those people may just be them or their children in the future!). When choosing between a slight inconvenience to a real person (self, friend, or family) and a great cruelty to an unreal, kind of abstract, hypothetical person, they choose cruelty. The choice isn’t always so stark, but that’s what it comes down to. We all do this! I think it’s fucked up and try to minimize it myself, but we citizens of imperialist and neocolonialist states all do this! Prioritizing unreal people over real people is usually awkward and inefficient and socially inappropriate, so we prioritize real people.
Consumption habits must change, but I don’t see much hope for people just doing that as consumers. I have been heartened, though, by the rise of organized labor in the United States throughout the past few years. I think we can wield far more power as workers, as the people being exploited, than as consumers, and we can build strong, broad coalitions. And class consciousness does make those invisible people more real, makes them your fellows.
MVU: You often address social issues in your stories. Can you share a bit about the themes you are most drawn to write about?
FB: For a while it was climate change. Then, for the past few years, I took a long detour into urbanism and city planning. What both have in common is that they’re large, complex systems which can profoundly affect our lives in specific, personal ways, and that’s what I return to over and over: big systems, and how they manifest in individual lives—because these things manifest in my own life, and I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about them.
MVU: When crafting a story, do you usually start with the theme? Or is that something that emerges as you write?
FB: Theme or question or feeling is very often what I start with, and then I try to find the right setting and characters and story to make the theme matter. It’s not because I care so much about my stories being about something; it’s really about staying motivated to finish the thing. I’m not usually motivated by a particular character or world, but a particular struggle or feeling or conflict of ideas can see me through planning and writing and editing.
Even in the cases where theme doesn’t come first in developing a story, I’ll still know what themes and emotional resonances are present before writing the first draft. For “I Remember a One-Sided Die,” it was the feeling of witnessing a catastrophe while everyone else goes relentlessly about their regular business that I tapped into. I don’t think that’s the primary or sole theme of the story, but it was the thing that kept me working on it.
MVU: That’s so insightful, to view the themes as what motivate you through writing and editing rather than as some sort of end-product “message,” which can so easily fall flat. Can you tell us about what stories, either from childhood or adult (in any mediums), have most influenced your own fiction, and in what ways?
FB: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy was an early inspiration, those books opened my eyes to how political science fiction could be – and political in a really grounded, economically cognizant way. Lots of dystopias reach for vague ideas of authoritarianism and free will, and don’t end up saying anything. They gesture at politics but are really more like morality tales. In Red Mars, characters are explicitly debating communism, capitalism, conservation, industrialization. The corporations are Mitsubishi, Boeing, GE, not some cutesy made up AllCorp or something. That willingness to engage seriously with politics, to take a kind of historical materialist approach to the future—or any invented setting—has really stuck with me.
More recently, Julian K. Jarboe’s Everyone on the Moon Is Essential Personnel is a collection I’ve returned to a lot, especially the story “Self Care.” The story is urgent and energetic and committed and specific and fun, and it’s a high watermark for that thing I was talking about: complex, macro-scale systems manifesting in the microcosm of a single person’s life.
MVU: Yes! I can see how these influences tie into how you engage with themes as well. What does your daily or weekly writing practice look like? Do you have any established routines or habits? Where do you do most of your writing?
FB: I like to write in the mornings, when I’m freshly recharged from sleep, freshly caffeinated, and have the whole day ahead of me. I like to write that way, but often I just write whenever I must. When I wrote “I Remember a One-Sided Die,” I was working a soul-annihilating job at Starbucks which robbed me of my mornings, so I was writing in the afternoons, and sometimes on weekends.
These days I work evening shifts at a library, so I have a good chunk of time in the morning. I usually write at the desk in my bedroom, but every so often I like to write at one of the many cafes in my neighborhood.
If I’m working on a novel, I’ll fall into a pretty steady habit of writing for an hour or two every day, five or six days a week. But if I’m writing a short story, I’ll usually spend a couple weeks writing notes on the plot, characters, world, doing research if necessary. Then I’ll knock the whole first draft out in one or two big sessions. And hopefully during all this, in the back of my mind, I’ve found another story idea I’m excited about, and once I’m done with the first draft of one I can start right in on the notes for the next one. And I’ll keep going like that for a while until I run out of steam, and then I’ll start editing the stories I’ve written.
My favorite coffee mug
MVU: In the past, you’ve done some audiobook narration, and I wondered if this influenced the strong lyrical voice of this piece. How did that experience inform your writing practice? And do you read your own stories aloud as you work on them?
FB: I’ve always had a very vocal sense of reading and writing. I prefer to read aloud if I can, because it helps me focus more and because I really enjoy it. I like doing the voices. For a little while, it was my ambition to make an audiobook version of every story I self-published, and to record audiobooks for other public domain books besides—alas, time is finite, and I only made one audiobook recording of a story and one of a Karel Čapek novel.
But I still read aloud when I can, especially my own work. Even when I’m reading silently, I’m hearing the words in my head, and it’s the same when I’m writing. Rhythm, flow, tempo, it’s always a dimension of my writing that I’m paying attention to. If I’m editing and I decide a sentence is unnecessary, I can’t just delete it and move on—I have to delete it, then reread over the paragraph, see if the flow has changed.
I’m also continually inspired by the spoken language all around me, what I hear (and overhear) every day in conversation. Speech is so innovative and distinct from person to person; it’s really amazing.
MVU: I saw that you celebrate Public Domain Day (the day that works are released from copyright every year) by ceding a piece of your own work to the public domain, and that you encourage other artists to do the same. I wondered if you could share a bit about this for readers who might not know a lot about it. Have you found a lot of enthusiasm from other artists?
FB: I could go on and on about this, so I’ll try to keep it short. Under US (and most countries) copyright law, works published before 1978 are held in copyright for 95 years after publication. Works published after 1978 are held in copyright for the life of the author, plus 70 years after the author's death. These are really long terms and effectively mean that re-use, modification, adaptation, and sharing is limited to corporations who can afford to buy the rights. More obscure works can become “orphaned” if no rights holder can be found – stuck in copyright but benefiting no one, with no way to adapt or reproduce them at all.
So this is really bad! Changing the law itself is probably not possible, as every media corporation would go against it. So, I think the burden of nurturing and expanding the commons ultimately falls to creators. Copyright grants us the ability to reserve the rights to our work, or to sell them, or to waive them. It’s our greatest tool for demanding compensation for our labor from publishers, but it also empowers us to free our works for the use of contemporary or future artists.
When I die, I want the things I’ve created to be freely modified, translated, abridged, adapted, or just shared. I don’t want them sequestered for seventy years, or just generating royalties for a publisher and some relatives of mine. For now, ceding one work a year is a way to stay committed to that project, and to do so vocally, publicly. I got some of my artist friends to join me a couple years ago, but it’s mostly just me doing it. I’d love for more people to participate, and that’s something I want to focus on more in the future. Like I said, I’m going to be banging this drum for the rest of my life, so I hope to grow and deepen this practice with time.
MVU: That’s very cool. I hope this gets some other authors curious and interested in participating. I also like to ask authors for a charity they deeply care about and would like to raise awareness for. Could you share a favorite charity of yours and let readers know where to find it?
FB: The Philadelphia Community Bail Fund (www.phillybailout.org/) is a grassroots organization which posts bail for Philadelphia residents who can’t afford bail otherwise, and advocates for the end of cash bail. I recommend US readers look into bail funds in their own communities—the National Bail Fund Network has a directory of funds arranged by state here (www..communityjusticeexchange.org).
MVU: Thank you so much for letting me pick your brain about stories and the world! Before we sign off, can you tell us about any projects you’re working on now, or any recent or upcoming releases?
FB: Thank you for these wonderful questions!
For most of the past two years, I’ve been working on a long fantasy novel about city planning. I’m getting feedback on it from beta readers now and will hopefully be moving into agent querying later this year.
As far as new and upcoming releases, I self-published a collection of stories, Stories About Kids Stealing Things, a little over a year ago, and this year I plan to put out a couple short stories as zines—little print booklets.
