Astrid Falls
Author: Andrew Cownden
Release: June 12, 2024
Tagline: A Legend of Vancouver
Publisher: Tellwell Talent
Genre: Urban Fantasy, Fantasy
ISBN-10: 0228867908
ISBN-13: 978-0228867906
Synopsis: Vancouver is falling down–crumbling into sand. To save it, Astrid O’Brien boards a bus to a parallel dimension, there to confront the demons of the city, and to answer the question: Are we who we’re told we are, or who we decide to be?
Declassified by Agent Palmer: Hope woven through soon-to-be-legendary Astrid Falls
Quotes and Lines
In the telling of this story, the author tries to be accurate with the facts and to portray human beings sympathetically. He fails in both these things. To what extent he fails in sympathy is up to the reader.
Astrid had anxiety.
Most people feel anxious from time to time. They may, for instance, feel awkward at parties. Well, Astrid felt so awkward at parties that her every waking hour–party or no–was spent avoiding any interaction with people. With all people. Even people she knew. People she liked.
Astrid perked up. All this time she’d thought she was having a catastrophic mental breakdown. Now that she knew it was a perfectly normal catastrophic mental breakdown, she could cope.
“A theatre,” said Emily, “is a giving place.” She looked about the auditorium, at the people, at the crumbling plaster in the walls. “It is a sharing place. Here we share music. Share stories. Share the ghosts of who we’ve been and the dreams of who we might become. Here we bring our lives to burn like firewood, to warm each other by the flame. And when this place dies, that flame will burn on, inside of us all.”
There are few things more empty
than an empathy theatre.
You can see all the places where people should be
but aren’t
It is important never to be seen running as a public official, not unless you are wearing track pants and holding a bottle of water.
“They lose themselves,” said the driver gently, almost reverently. “It happens all the time, in all sorts of ways. You lose your family. You lose your job. You forget where you’re going, where you came from … However it happens, you forget who you are. And then life loses meaning. And when life loses meaning, life won’t hold on to you anymore. It lets you go. The chill of the void sets in, and you fade away. You fade into shape without form, shade without colour.”
“We all need a little help in this life. There’s no use pretending we don’t.”
And waiting can be dangerous. If you wait around long enough for something to happen and nothing keeps happening, you may find yourself tempted to make something happen, and anything will do. (Anything will help.)
“I’m afraid it’s the end of the world, my dear.”
“A good prophecy is always esoteric nonsense. People don’t take it seriously otherwise. Read your Nostradamus.”
“No,” said Markov, “they don’t. But human brains can’t accept that. There’s a fault in our grey matter that needs cause and effect, that needs a story. That’s how we understand things, y’see: with stories. So we put a story there. We put connections between the flips. We play roulette and we think, hey, red hasn’t come up in forever–it’s just gotta come up now! And then we bet our life savings…”
“But the theatre will never die,” she said. “They can’t kill it, try as they might. Oh, the places they call theatres will die, that’s true. The Globe itself burnt down, but then they rebuilt it. And then they knocked that Globe down, and then they rebuilt it again four hundred years later–one of the hottest tickets in London today. And I expect they’ll knock that Globe down too, just so they can go and build it again…No, you can’t kill it. There’s something too exciting about being given permission to stare at people, to be with them in their private moments. It’s such a vulnerable thing, and vulnerable things are alive. Ever alive.”
Respect, Mr. Baagh had found, was just the absence of disrespect.
There are moments …
There are moments in life when the rules change. They change without regard for what is comfortable or convenient, and they change whether or not you will survive their changing. But there are moments when the rules change, and in this moment, they changed for Jiao.