My short story titled "Hiroshima Was Another Word For Love Then" was recently published in Remains #3 and as usual I'm blogging a few words discussing how the story came to be written. There may be spoilers within.
"Hiroshima Was Another Word For Love Then" is one of twelve recently written stories which take French New Wave cinema as a starting point and then run with an alternative version of it. In this case, the film in question is "Hiroshima mon amour" (1959), directed by Alain Renais. In that film, the unnamed male character is from Hiroshima and his family died in the bombing while he was off fighting in the war, and the unnamed woman is a French actress who is in the city to make an anti-war film. In my version, I have flipped the genders and set the story before the dropping of the atomic bomb. There are other nods to the film within my story, but no knowledge of "Hiroshima mon amour" is needed to appreciate the stilled development of their relationship, set against the ominous threat that the reader is aware of and that history is about to make happen.
Whilst it might seem odd for such a story to appear in a magazine of 'new horror fiction' I expect it's exactly that oddness which chose Andy Cox, the editor, to take it. This is validated by a couple of reviews which have already been published:
From Sam Tomaino in SF Revu: "A lead-up to one of the most horrible events of all time. Quietly horrifying."
From Paula Guran’s review in Locus (not yet online): "Snippets of life in Hiroshima before it was obliterated by a nuclear bomb at the end of World War II are presented in Hiroshima Was Another Word for Love Then by Andrew Hook. So are more current memories of a European who briefly visited and loved there. 'History has acquitted his guilt by being the greater offender.' History and humankind are vast. Tragedy can only be understood on an individual basis, and this story does it well."
Here's the opening:
Some years afterwards the man awoke following a dream where he had concealed the body of his father. Bright sunlight sieved through net curtains - a thousand cuts - and house sparrows flung shadows against the walls. Their song strove for meaning and reminded the man of the Japanese bush warblers – uguisu – that had sung before the war. He stilled his breath to concentrate, but instead of hearing into the past there was only the high-pitched tinnitus hum that reminded him of the whistling sound certain bombs made as they fell.
Those screaming bombs were a form of physiological warfare. Small whistles – Jericho Devices - were attached to the tail of SC/SD 50 and SC 250 bombs, producing a loud, characteristic noise to reduce morale.
The man thought it unlikely that a gun-type uranium bomb would also make such a sound, but had often wondered whether the woman would have known her fate was hurtling towards her, and if she had decided to protect herself by hiding under a table before it was splintered in the blast wave, the tight kitchen space increasing airspeed, causing pressure to reflect off the walls and bend around corners to produce a force equivalent of eighteen times her body weight.
