The Nobody People by Bob Proehl (manga ereader TXT) 📕

For Story and Alex, who are growing up with strange abilities I can only hope to understand

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wouldn’t have even attempted this book without the encouragement and support of my agent, Seth Fishman. This book started from a “you could do something like that” conversation over beers when my first book was still new in the world, and I cannot thank him enough for the times between then and now when his enthusiasm has managed to overwhelm my doubts.

At some point, a book needs someone to see something in it that isn’t quite there yet. Thank you to Sarah Peed at Del Rey for seeing what this book could be and helping to get it there. Thanks as well to Andrea Schulz at Viking, whose early reads on it helped me rein in my natural impulse toward sprawl and turn what was a guided tour of a world into a focused story.

Thank you to my incredibly talented writing group, Melanie Conroy-Goldman Hamilton and Jennifer Savran Kelly, for their willingness to speed through large chunks of novel, guided only by breathless summaries of what’s come before or which draft we were on, or what characters had been changed, replaced, or cut entirely. Thank you to Mariam Quraishi and Khaled Malas for advice when asked, correction when required.

This book owes an obvious debt to a half century or more of X-Men comics. There’s not enough room to list every writer and artist whose work on those books I admire, but I’d be remiss in failing to acknowledge the impact of Chris Claremont’s writing on me as a kid, and still as an adult. Thanks also to Jay Edidin and Miles Stokes, and Ramzi Fawaz, whose loving and critical assessment of those comics has shaped the way I think about them.

This book also has Octavia Butler’s Patternmaster series deep in its DNA, and now that you are (presumably) at the end of this one, I urge you to go pick those books up, if you haven’t already.

A lot of the thinking and approach of this book comes from the discipline of disability studies. Enforcing Normalcy by Leonard Davis, The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability by Elizabeth Barnes, and Deaf President Now!: The 1988 Revolution at Gallaudet University by John B. Christiansen and Sharon N. Barnartt were touchstone texts as I was writing, as were Wesley Lowery’s They Can’t Kill Us All and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, and, from another vector entirely, Andrew Solomon’s Far from the Tree.

I started writing this book late in 2016, and the ghosts of David Bowie, Prince, and Leonard Cohen haunt the text. The book evolved while watching resistance movements forming around the country in response to what was happening at a national level. I began from a point of despair, convinced America was unsalvageable or, worse, not worth saving. It was a long path back from there, and this book and the next trace that arc. The way has been lit by the efforts of amazing, impassioned people who manage to imagine a utopia when dystopia seems alarmingly close. This book is a sort of long, elliptical thank-you note to all who fight, who strive, who resist.

And thank you, always, to Heather, for suffering through the emotional and economic swings of my particular form of employment. It’s difficult to float away in one’s head all day without knowing you have a safe place to come back to, and you’re mine.

BY BOB PROEHL

A Hundred Thousand Worlds

The Nobody People

PHOTO: © HEATHER AINSWORTH

BOB PROEHL is the author of A Hundred Thousand Worlds, a Booklist Best Book of the Year. He has worked as a bookseller and programming director for Buffalo Street Books in Ithaca, New York, a deejay, a record-store owner, and a bartender. He was a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Fiction and a resident at the Saltonstall Arts Colony. His work has appeared on Salon, as part of the 33⅓ book series, and in American Short Fiction.

bobproehl.com

Twitter: @bobproehl

Read on for an excerpt from THE SOMEBODY PEOPLE The gripping conclusion to The Resonant Duology!

Fahima Deeb looks out the window of the headmaster’s quarters of the Bishop Academy onto the glittering and changed face of New York. The light in the mornings is pale and milky but illuminates a city warped from drab concrete into a science-fiction dreamscape. Bullet-shaped public transit craft piloted by telekinetics slice the air between spires of polished onyx that gleam in the dawn light, their architecture inspired by coral growth and the mycorrhizal root structures of fungi. The map of the city is altered, office buildings repurposed for housing or torn down to provide green space, sidewalks widened to shift dominance from cars to pedestrians. Looking up shows the biggest changes: Well above the ground, the air is full of traffic. Flyers dash and dart between vessels piloted by telekinetics. Fatima’d been initially concerned about the likelihood of collisions. People had enough trouble not smacking into one another with two vectors, introducing a third opened up potential for an exponential increase in accidents. What she didn’t figure for was the amount of space. Every street in the city was a Grand Canyon. As long as the number of objects in the air didn’t see a massive increase, there was space enough for all above the streets.

Fahima’s not the first to adopt New York City as her home and alter it indelibly. She wonders if the ones who came before her felt they’d evolved the city into its final form. Her changes are more than cosmetic. The buildings are a sign of shifts beneath. Capitalism is an inefficient engine: so much waste for such low yield. New York was built to fuel it with bodies,