The Sea of Cortés
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Excerpt
Peter heard the whales one warm, hazy morning in December, though neither of us got too excited at first—we’d been wrong before. Our hydrophones were positioned throughout the sound channel and often picked up noise, commercial ships and Naval activity, and it was difficult to tell the industrial from the organic. After confirming via the Aerocam and sonar that we were, in fact, seeing a cow and newborn calf, it was hard to rein in our excitement. It had been six breeding seasons, half of our tenure at Flores Lab, since we’d seen healthy offspring.
The morning’s activity had drawn us from our living quarters to Flores Lab’s enormous roof deck where, sitting in our folding chairs among the weather monitors and air handlers, we had an unobstructed view of the Sea of Cortés, due east and some two hundred meters below us. We’d encountered untagged humpbacks before, ancient or ill stragglers or orphans from the Gamma Group, but we’d never observed a rogue cow that was so healthy, nor had we anticipated the sudden appearance of a fat calf in what was, essentially, our back yard.
Nate Brown
Nate Brown is a writer and editor who lives in Baltimore, MD.
Patrick Ryan on “The Sea of Cortés”
One of the things I love about speculative fiction is that it involves world-building, which allows the writer and reader to enter into a special kind of shared hypnosis of imagining. At its best, this happens seamlessly. That is, the details of the world being constructed for the sake of the story emerge organically, so that the reader’s acclimation is smooth and almost unnoticeable. At its very best (when it comes to short stories, anyway), this happens with a minimum of detail.
“The Sea of Cortés,” by Nate Brown, is set in our world, in the not-too-distant future, in a remote lab facility perched above the shore of a rising sea. Its scientists, Mari and Peter, study the migratory pattern of humpback whales—a species whose existence is in peril. They’ve been collecting data for years, with no good end in sight, and they’ve tried several times to have a child, with no success. Their life together is isolated, and while the outside world is rapidly changing, things inside the lab have remained the same for a long time. That is, until two new scientists, Vida and George, arrive.
This is, in part, a story about the trappings of expectations in an environment that cannot be controlled. It’s also a story fueled by a sexual tension that stems from the world’s having moved on from certain expectations and labels, allowing for sex and coupling without the traditional onramps. And all of it takes place in a world that has been vividly rendered with a sparsity of description that echoes the story’s tone. With what seems like sleight of hand, Nate Brown builds a world, weaves into it Mari and Peter’s troubled past, then teases that past to the forefront with the arrival of their new research partners.
“The Sea of Cortés” is speculative fiction at its most resonant. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.
Q&A by Patrick Ryan
- PR: Where did you get the idea for this story?
- NB: This is weird, but the story started with a title, which was different than it is now. Years ago, I was talking to the poet Jane Lewty about why people chose to have (or not to have) kids, and I said something pessimistic about not wanting my hypothetical children to witness the death of the megafauna. So, I had that phrase, “death of the megafauna,” in my head for a long, long time. Last year, I was doing some research into ecosystem resilience and was planning a research trip to California to visit the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest because I was curious to know what climate change might do to these incredible trees. As part of that research, I read the 2023 World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report, which describes a number of complex environmental, climatological, and ecological problems that are occurring simultaneously—a polycrisis—like extinctions, ocean acidification, intensification of hurricanes, the proliferation of plastic and chemical pollution. You get the picture. I started the story by imagining the waning days of whale populations—the death of oceanic megafauna—and the story sort of dragged me along from there. I’m an incredibly slow writer, but the rough draft of this story came out in just a couple of sittings.
- PR: How long did it take you to finish a draft you were happy with?
- NB: I put the first words on the page about a year ago, and while the draft came quickly, I didn’t get a good revision finished for a few months, and that was only because I’d been invited to read something here in Baltimore and really wanted to have a solid draft done before that reading. I had to bust my butt to get that draft done, and I think I finally stopped tinkering with it just a few hours before the reading. Not a very polished or professional move on my part, but that’s how it happened. Later, I took the story to my writing group, which was especially helpful for ironing out some critical revisions. A couple of months later, I think I was satisfied with where it was at, but truthfully, I’d probably still be tinkering with it had One Story not accepted it, edited it, and scheduled it for print.
- PR: This is, maybe, an obnoxious question, but how would you classify “The Sea of Cortés”? As speculative fiction? Dystopian fiction? We’re living in a time when both are becoming hard to distinguish from “realistic” fiction, but I’m curious if you think of the story as being in either of those categories.
- NB: Not an obnoxious question at all. I think about genre a lot, and I’m an omnivorous reader. My mom loves high fantasy, sci-fi, and horror, and my dad has always liked westerns and detective novels. I’m grateful to have grown up around people who didn’t really see the difference between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jean M. Auel. If they thought it was a good read, my parents would read it, and that attitude rubbed off on me. All of which is to say, I’m comfortable calling this story speculative fiction. And I happen to agree with you: if you’re writing about people living in today’s world, you’re almost certainly engaging, in some way, with the continually unfolding environmental catastrophes that surround us. You don’t need to be a psychic to see where we’re headed, and where we’re headed is pretty fucking scary.
- PR: Did you have events of the story all worked out before you started? Was there anything that happened along the way that you didn’t see coming?
- NB: Like me, the protagonist of the story is bisexual, and even though I hadn’t set out to write about queerness in the story, I found myself wondering what queer life would be like in such a broken future. Maybe one of the story’s only bright spots is that nobody seems to bat an eyelash about anybody else’s gender, race, sexuality, or embodiment. In some ways, that might be the story’s most far-fetched detail! I had a lot of hangups about my queerness as a young person, and it was a pleasure to write about characters whose worries were about everything except their sexual orientation.
- PR: Did you do significant research to be able to write about the science of the story?
- NB: I did, though I still live in fear of having gotten stuff wrong. I teach at Johns Hopkins, which is a STEM-heavy school, and at that reading in February, I was shaking in my boots that a cellular biologist or ecologist or neurologist would catch an odd detail and call me on my bullshit. I tried to indemnify myself against that by reading a ton about the Gulf of California, the Baja peninsula, humpback whales, mass extinctions, magnetic fields, et cetera, though very little from that reading shows up directly in the story. Mostly, the research gave me a solid footing and some confidence. I firmly believe that the fiction writer’s job isn’t to report truth in decimal points and raw facts—that’s what we’ve got journalism and academic peer-review for. The fiction writer’s goal should be to tell vivid stories. I just hope that the things I’ve inevitably gotten wrong don’t mess up a reader’s experience or pull them out of the story.
- PR: The tension you create among these characters is palpable, and the world you’ve created feels very quietly convincing. Have you written other stories that involve these characters and this situation (or related situations)?
- NB: Thanks for saying so. While I’m not terribly interested in world building, it was strangely exciting to imagine even worse social stratification than we have now, worse economic disparity, worse isolation, worse health outcomes, worse pollution, worse everything except for the aforementioned freedom from basic bigotry. I haven’t written more about these specific characters, but I am working on a story set in the same world and period. It’s about an epidemiologist who lives in a wealthy, sun-shielded community. If “The Sea of Cortés” is the downstairs story about the working people of that world, then this newer story is the upstairs story about those privileged enough to find shelter from the worst dangers of that world.
- PR: Anything else in the hopper?
- NB: No joke, I have been writing a novel for about two decades. It’s a beast. I’ve periodically pushed it to the back burner—sometimes for a year or more—but I’ve never quit it. This summer, I spent a month at the Vermont Studio Center and pulled that big, honking manuscript back out and was pleasantly surprised to find that it doesn’t suck. So, for now at least, I’m working on that new story and on my doorstop/albatross/millstone of a novel.
- PR: What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
- NB: I recently saw the journalist and mystery writer Gwen Florio give a craft talk in which she emphasized the importance of making things happen on the page, of resisting the urge to write backstory and exposition in place of action. In editing sections of the novel this summer, I realized that there were so many pages I’d written as build-up to a moment or as a way of explaining a character’s demeanor or behavior. But those pages weren’t very active or engaging, and they were ultimately pretty easy to cut once I realized that I’d only needed them to get me to where I was going. Those pages were the onramps I needed to get to where I wanted to be, and once I was there, it was relatively straightforward to deconstruct the onramps. I’m very grateful to Gwen Florio for the reminder that the Delete key may be the most important tool a writer’s got.
