The Aftervibe is the Message

I’m finally better after having been sick for weeks, the sickest I’ve felt in as long as I can remember. Not covid, not flu (bird or otherwise), but pretty much all the symptoms. Had to be semi-quarantined in our guest bedroom, previously dubbed the Baby Oasis – now Jack’s Den of Sickness. This was the first week I didn’t wake every morning in a pool of my own sweat.

It hasn’t helped that my distractions from sickness have put me underground. After we finished watching the second season of Silo, I tore through the source Hugh Howey books and found them to be grimmer than the series – and not best mental space to be in at this present time in history. Then we started Dark Matter. Two episodes in, I learned my lesson and stopped.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking in my semi-sick-delirium: it’s less that the medium is the message than the aftervibe is the message. The aftervibe can be a factor of the medium, for sure, but the content also does matter – or at least what emerges out of that content.

Why aftervibe and not during-vibe? Are they any different? Maybe not. But in the moment, I get distracted. In the moment I get wrapped up in character and story, carried from beat to beat, scene to scene. I can care easily about characters, buy quickly into setups and payoffs. It’s fine entertainment – in the moment. Just like you can have an app that’s technically sound, with an interface that’s perfectly dialed in for the feature set, an app that anticipates your actions, that as soon as you close it also makes you feel more overwhelmed and scattered than before you opened it. Junk food is super satisfying, in the moment.

Everything about a work effects – with an e – its aftervibe. The key effectors are themselves effected: style, voice, outlook on life, love for the world. You don’t create an aftervibe so much as you work on becoming the kind of human through which that aftervibe can make itself felt. Aftervibes are absorbed and radiated, re-radiated. The best way to hone an aftervibe is through experiencing similar aftervibes.

What I’m saying is: pay attention to the aftervibe. Pay utmost attention to the aftervibe. It might be the truest measure of how you feel – how you really feel – about something.

I finally got around to reading Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, which has been on my list since it first came out in 2013. Here is a novel that takes place in a dystopic universe without also having dystopic aftervibes. In part, it’s Leckie’s choice of narrator, the AI of a former warship who commanded both the ship and its thousands of crewed formerly-human ancillaries – but who is, when the story opens, down to a single fleshy body.

From later in the book:

“If you’ve got power and money and connections, some differences won’t change anything. Or if you’re resigned to dying in the near future[…] It’s the people without the money and the power, who desperately want to live, for those people small things aren’t small at all. What you call no difference is life and death to them.”

You’re already getting Story Club with George Saunders in your inbox, yeah? I’m digging some Chekhov for a side gig, and revisited Saunders’ read of the titular “Gooseberries” in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. Talk about a big-hearted aftervibes. The both of them.

Keeping the link list in this issue short because, frankly, I’ve been too incapacitated to think that far ahead. So I leave you with an encouragement to pre-order, if you haven’t already, Craig Mod’s Things Become Other Things. If the aftervibe is anything like Craig’s independently published fine art edition – I, for one, expect it to be even stronger after this revision and expansion – then it will be well worth the cost of admission.