The short story “Earthrise” by Lavie Tidhar was published for the first time in 2012.
Sandoval is an artist whose life is wrapped in a number of legends and rumors often impossible to verify. He gained a reputation as a rebel when he got rid of the node that allowed him to remain immersed in the Conversation and managed to erase the information available about him. It0s said that it was obsessed with the Earthrise image.
“Earthrise” is built on an attempt to reconstruct the life and works of Sandoval, an artist who lived in an era in which everything is communication and yet there’s very little certain information, a real paradox. The consequence is that even in a future in which human beings have neural implants it’s impossible to separate legends and rumors from reliable information. Lavie Tidhar mentions the Conversation, a sort of digital consciousness he also writes about in his novel “Central Station“: the two works are set in the same fictional universe and are completely independent but can complement each other.
A piece of information that’s considered reliable regards Sandoval’s obsession with the Earthrise seen from Moon. Lavie Tidhar was inspired by the famous photo taken by astronaut William Anders on December 24, 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission from the Moon’s orbit that was named the Earthrise. In the story, that image used to create what for him is art represents only a part of the legend of Sandoval, who becomes an outlaw to express that art freely.
The reconstruction of Sandoval’s life is sometimes surreal when it’s based on rumors but in some cases has dark tones such as when it concerns Rohini, an artist with whom Sandoval is said to have collaborated as for her terror is an art form. For both of them there’s a strong link between art and crime but also in Rohini’s case it’s difficult to separate legends from reality so bombings attributed to her could be the result of deception.
In some ways these are digressions that can give some idea of what it means to be a rebel artist at the time of Sandoval but in the end Lavie Tidhar returns to the Earthrise. It’s a powerful image that in this short story is linked to the expansion of human beings beyond the Earth. Perhaps Sandoval managed to go beyond that image to go who knows where in space, will humanity be able to do the same? “Earthrise” is also available in the anthology “Future Science Fiction Digest Issue 0”.
