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Time has changed its personality

Time, when left to its own devices, has been, historically, in no particular hurry. It’s only the psycho-emotional states of humans that have fostered the illusion that time is speeding up or coming to a grinding halt. Time has been neutral, paying humankind no mind at all—until now. With the rapid melting of glacial ice around the planet, time has changed its personality. It’s frenzied, accelerated, driven by a demon created by corporate greed, a fire-breathing crocodile scaling the Himalayas intent on unleashing the voluminous secrets of ice, secrets best left frozen. “At a glacial pace” means something very different in the 21st century than it did in the past.The Glacial Pace is a work of speculative fiction, but more specifically a climate-fiction novel with mythological, historical, and eco-feminist underpinnings—and one that might ultimately be described as a distinctly non-dystopian space opera. Inspired by James Joyce's structure of Ulysses in its intertwining of narrative with poetry, songs, and plays, the protagonist is placed in a time-traveling maritime odyssey as well, but one that covers a significantly longer span of time than Leopold Bloom’s 24 hours. It's interesting to consider, however, that part of Joyce's genius lay in his manipulative acceleration of time, a quantity moving so quickly in his 1922 masterpiece as to seem haphazard. In early outlining of The Glacial Pace, climactic flooding of the Bay of Bengal was set in a futuristic 2050. As drafting progressed in the summer of 2024, however, cataclysmic flooding in Southeast Asia had already begun.The reader first meets protagonist Lily Spencer as a West Virginia teenager planning to finish high school with an athletic scholarship and swim for the WVU Mountaineers. Things take an ugly turn, however, when she’s abducted by the evil overlord of an empire located quite literally underground. Idiago holds the girl captive for two years, keeping her in the watery grotto of a dungeon he shares with Old King Coal and a decidedly industrial dragon. Fantasy intersects with real events when the Buffalo Creek flood occurs in 1972, an environmental disaster that sets the stage for Lily’s heroic metamorphosis into the Blackwater Mermaid. She then begins an aquatic journey that will take her across the Ohio, down the Mississippi, into the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic, and finally the Indian Ocean—with many interesting layovers en route. Her nemesis, however, isn’t done with her. He’s just waiting for the right moment to reappear.The theme of environmental peril ebbs and flows throughout the story, continuing with Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and climaxing in 2024 with rising sea levels in the Bay of Bengal displacing an entire nation. Lily remains committed to swimming for the team and increasingly the team is all of humanity. Surprising cameos from a reimagined Ophelia and a number of historical and contemporary figures drive this story to its dramatic and inevitable conclusion: a cosmic sisterhood in an intergalactic battle for the soil and sea of Earth itself.Lastly, while the subject matter is quite serious, of course, the full spectrum of human emotions is in play here, including love in all its forms—and much joy.

Environmental activist, educator, songwriter, playwright, and now novelist, Lainie Marsh grew up in West Virginia, studied music at Berklee College, and subsequently honed her writing skills in Los Angeles before settling in Tennessee. She has consistently focused on environmental advocacy, using her maverick vocal style to protest Mountaintop Removal Mining in her native Appalachia, as well as global warming. Lainie’s songs have been recorded by Emmylou Harris and Cerys Matthews, featured on NPR, and performed at the Boston Greenfest and FSU's Cinema Verde. Lainie's green theater pieces have been presented on various stages in Nashville, and as professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Tennessee State University, she created Green Kabaret, an educational platform combining environmental advocacy with drama and music. Inspired by writers like Octavia Butler, Rachel Carson, Richard Powers, and Robert Macfarlane, The Glacial Pace, an only slightly futuristic work of climate-fiction, integrates her ballad operas Mermaid Asylum and Black Ophelia and marks the most ambitious convergence of Lainie's artistic and activist life to date.

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