Harlem native Michael A. Gonzales has been on the trail of neglected Black writers for a number of years, first with his feature The Blacklist for Catapault and now with CrimeReads. More recently, he was instrumental in getting the short stories of Diane Oliver, whose life was cut short at the age of 22 in a motorcycle accident, published for the first time in Neighbors and Other Stories, just published in February 2024 by Grove Press. He wrote about his latest discovery, Elaine Perry’s 1990 dystopian novel Another Present Era, in CrimeReads just last month.
I was fascinated by Michael’s article. “Another Present Era,” he wrote, “touches on many of the same subjects (global warming, corporate greed, racism and disease) as [Octavia] Butler’s more well-known Parable of Sower, but that book wasn’t published until three years later.” It was Perry’s only published novel, though an article in Perry’s hometown Lima, Ohio News from 1990 quotes her as working on a second novel, Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven But Nobody Wants to Die, which she said was “about the civil rights marches in the South during racial strife in the 1960s.” Whether it was the few and cursory reviews that Another Present Era received, frustrations with her work in progress, or just, well, life, Elaine Perry chose soon after to put her brief career as a writer behind her. Just the initial hardcover edition of Another Present Era was published and used copies are few but not (yet) unreasonably priced. It’s also available on the Internet Archive (link), which is how I read it.
The book opens with Wanda Higgins Du Bois looking out from the 58th floor of the Savings of America building lower Manhattan at a New York City beginning to show signs of the impact of climate change:
No one is out on the streets. Searchlights sweep across the sky and the fog above the neighboring blocks of four- and five-story buildings and the hypnotic stream of headlights and taillights on multilane West Street. Civil Defense klaxons wail, indicating the severity of the flood warning. Four long blasts followed by a brief silence, repeated endlessly. On her nightstand is the booklet every New Yorker has, explaining why and when the klaxons sound and what to do.
Wanda is an architect working on an ambitious proposal for the Toronto waterfront. She is alone, or so she finds her colleague and boyfriend, Bradley, is there as well. Though he greets her warmly, he soon produces a gun, spins its cylinder, and points it at his mouth. Wanda stops him, but Bradley’s distress becomes just one of the streams of psychological conflict running through her life. Bradley is distraught over the fact that he, like Wanda, looks to be a textbook Nordic Aryan when they are both African-Americans. Wanda’s mother is Black; her father the son of one of Hitler’s rocket scientists, an Air Force colonel working on the space program who used to beat Wanda with a steel ruler when she let slip that her mother was neither white nor dead.
The ambiguity of identity is a major theme in Another Present Era. Wanda looks white and identifies as Black. She soon meets an elderly German man who introduces himself as Werner Schmidt, though she recognizes him as Sterling Cronheim, a Wisconsin-born artist who became a member of the Bauhaus school in Germany and who disappeared sometime after the fall of France in 1940. Sterling pretends to be straight and pursued a brilliant physicist named Lenore Hayden throughout his time in Germany in France, despite the fact that she knew he spent many nights crusing the streets of Berlin and Paris for rent boys.
If Another Present Era shows signs of first novel weaknesses, it’s primarily in how Perry deals with a complex and intricate narrative in which few steps are straightforward and sequential. This is far more a work of atmospheres and undercurrents, and Perry does not shy away from weaving her way through decades of history, scattering enigmatic and passing references as she goes. I can imagine obsessives constructing a long and elaborate concordance of all the characters, places, and cultural references in the book, much like those that have been creating for Lord of the Rings or Gravity’s Rainbow.
With its mentions of the Nazi rocket programs and the Weimar Republic, it’s easy to sense the influence of Gravity’s Rainbow in Another Present Era. Like Pynchon, Perry works on a maximalist scale when it comes to history. And she takes advantage of her futuristic setting to play with the relativity of history. People talk to each other over video phones and watch streaming television services (the German silent movie channel) while they also listen to big bands (Eddie Heywood and his Orchestra) playing on the radio live from the rooftops of New York hotels as if it were 1939. And Wanda still clings to idealistic visions of the future that certainly wouldn’t have survived the troubles of 1968:
Wanda believed in the future, not a future of space exploration, but one of the harmonious and cooperative society human-rights leaders always talked about.She really thought everyone would be like her some day, neither black nor white, but something in between. It might take decades or even centuries, but it would happen. And sooner than that, racism and the concept of race itself would become completely obsolete.
There is much about Another Present Era to applaud. Time and again, Perry tosses off remarks that shows a deeper recognition of the impact of global warmingthan most of her contemporary writers. As Wanda works on her design, she muses, “So much fanfare and civic pride pouring into the Toronto Harbourfront, but the ocean will swallow all the buildings in a matter of decades or even years.” A new generation of Hoovervilles are popping up on the landfills constructed to keep the Atlantic from swamping the streets of Manhattan, populated by climate and economic refugees, while the rich find ever more expensive ways to distract themselves. Perry’s treatment of race and identity and their complexities, innovative in 1990, seems familiar today. There is more than enough material to populate a few PhD dissertations here.
I must admit that I had a selfish motive in rushing to read Another Present Era. It’s exactly the sort of unique, utterly forgotten, and deeply intriguing book we’re publishing in the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press, and Michael Gonzales was kind enough to communicate my interest to Elaine Perry. Although she chose not to entertain a reissue at this time, I hope we will see Another Present Era return to print sometime in future. For the moment, I strongly encourage anyone looking for a strikingly original novel to track down a used copy before they become the stuff of antiquarian and rare book dealers.