Tell Me How Long, A Modern Merfolk Mystery | Ebook Preorder Launch
What do you get when you combine generational nihilism, Blackfish, and Jurassic Park? A sordid tale criticizing the apathy toward environmentalism, and a case study into the commodification of the natural world.
I have a new short story, and I’m gonna talk about it.
This is not a novella built for individual heroes and villains. Yes, there’s a narrator and a protagonist, but Finley and her little team of marine biologists are more representative of an idea. They represent the place in society that our generation faces: The ones that came before us left a mess we have to clean up.
It’s not about Millennials or Gen-Zers or Zoomers or attempting to arbitrarily create division between them, it’s all of us who will still be here after the Boomers are gone, stuck with the world they neglected.
The main theme of the story is this: Is commodification of the natural world justified, if doing so prevents its extinction?
Take something like Sea World, that argues that its parks and animal shows raise awareness and give exposure to species many people will never see in the wild, and the issues those animals face because of humans.
However, Sea World also profits off the idea of having these animals perform for their existence and the company’s image still hasn’t recovered from Blackfish.
Companies like Sea World and Marineland are built off the exploitation of the natural world, justifying their existence as if their sole passion in this world is conservation, and, especially in Marineland, their animals are paying the price.
Take a story like Jurassic Park that ended in… kind of a bittersweet tragedy? Humans attempt to exploit beings well beyond their control for an amusement park of all things. Everything goes horribly wrong when, literally and metaphorically, the power goes out across the park during a hurricane.
People get eaten, the park is a total loss, but the message isn’t “dinosaurs are evil” it’s more like “fuck around and find out when you try to play god”.
And as a native of Florida, who wanted to be a marine biologist when I grew up, going to Sea World and watching JP on repeat even when I was too young to really understand it, let’s just say that the state of the oceans is important to me, and the cynicism toward the possibility of reversing the damage is hard to shake.
So I wrote a little book about it, from the perspective of a protagonist, Finley, whose whole career dies at her feet as the passivity and apathy shown by the world at large toward global warming and ocean pollution have led to the very real and nearly inevitable, slow collapse of global reefs due to bleaching that is happening right now. She’s out here, every day, attempting to save something that no one will miss until it’s too late.
Enter the opportunity to save it: Merfolk aren’t as extinct as the world thinks. Finley’s team has the chance to expose them and bring awareness to the plight of the oceans with a shock to the world that might actually do something. Kind of like Happy Feet, when penguin protagonist Mumble enthralls the world with his dancing and suddenly every government everywhere is compelled to reduce overfishing.
Or, it doesn’t change a damn thing, and instead merfolk might be ripped out of the oceans, tossed into big tanks and forced to dance for their dinner in some exclusive, Jurassic Park-like prison.
They must weigh whether the risk of the loss of one species is worth the potential of saving the rest of them, all while knowing that it might be too far gone and they’re all dead anyway. They also must weigh the idea of abusing a sentient, near-human species as non-consenting sources of entertainment, or food, or who knows what else.
To have to ‘dance for your dinner’ is to say that you are not inherently entitled to basic needs because you exist. Not only do you have to work for it, but you have to do it in a demeaning or derogatory way and call me a cynic, but if mermaids existed, they’d absolutely be exploited.
The idea for this to be about the reefs specifically came from a Netflix documentary that I adore, Chasing Coral, and if you are able, I highly encourage people to watch it.
Tell me How Long is only 22k words, though it was originally planned to be a far bigger story, JP already exists, and I wanted to focus on the decision of whether this is justified, instead of, now that we’ve justified it, how we go about it.
Which… does make this book a little preachy, but, I think, I am preaching to my choir, no? It was cathartic to write, and I hope it’s cathartic to read.
Tell Me How Long is available for preorder now through Amazon Kindle, releasing on February 7th. It will go live on all other platforms on February 21st.
