The bulk of the stories collected here reflect this mentality. Individualism, freedom, creativity and imagination are all noble burdens to bear. "I was cursed with an imagination," laments the narrator of Steve Savile's post-apocalyptic survival tale Last Night, and it's easy enough to see in the shared jeremiad of the Rush fan. And it's this rarefied class of Rush fan, the lifelong indoor kid with a self-justifying thirst for tales of against-all individualism, who might find themselves absorbed by a volume such as 2113. It renders loneliness and social isolation the fault of society and not the loner. So naturally, the idea of society being repressive/boring/mediocre is appealing. The "indoor kids," who spent middle-school recesses slugging it out with Atlas Shrugged. The band's admirers are – at the risk of generalizing and, again, counting myself as one – geeks. (There is a frankly shocking amount of material connecting Rush and Rand available online, if you're so inclined or just have literally nothing else better to do.) Beyond being recognized as one of the most proficient drummers in rock music, Peart self-identifies as a "bleeding-heart libertarian." His lyrics and worldview are commonly linked with Ayn Rand and philosophical system of "rational self-interest." While Peart has denied being a full-on Randian objectivist, Rush's songs tend to focus on the triumphal spirit of the individual over societies and systems that are either suffocatingly oppressive ( Anthem, the A-side of the 1976 concept album 2112) or drearily banal ( Subdivisions, Distant Early Warning).Įven the band's logo, a naked man standing inside a red star(taken from the 2112 album art), starkly opposes the individual against the collectivist will – the connection between the red star and 20th-century ideations of communism obvious enough that any self-styled Grade 8 iconoclast hearing Rush for the first time can likely pick up on them. Rush's chief lyricist, and the de facto architect of their ideology, is drummer Neal Peart. Rather, it's more of a philosophy: one that permeates the band's lyrics, album art, music videos and arena rock pyrotechnics. It may not be the kind of cohesive narrative worlds, such as the fictional realm of "Gamehendge" chronicles in the music of Vermont jam band Phish, or the frostbitten demon-scape of "Blashyrkh" that recurs in the music of Norwegian black metallers Immortal. See, the thing about Rush – and here I'll disclose, again, that having collected several of their albums, a few t-shirts and having seen them live in concert on more than one occasion, I suppose I would qualify, however bashfully, as a Rush fan – is that their music amounts to more than just a sprawling, musically complex catalogue of songs about spacemen and evil wizards and anthropomorphic trees. But such is the disposition of the hard-core Rush fan. What kind of Rush fan exactly? Who on our planet, or in any of the innumerable alternate realities and spiralling galaxies far, far away in which Rush songs lay their scene, is so singularly obsessed with a band that they would read a bunch of stories sparked by their music? This perplexing level of fandom seems to far exceed that of the record collector who can rattle off catalogue numbers or the Beatlemaniac who knows Ringo's blood type. As to the question of who would want to read such thing, the answer again may seem obvious: Rush fans. ECW Press, archivist of many works both Canadian and vaguely pop cultural (including, full disclosure, my own forthcoming non-fiction title). And who would bother publishing such a thing? Easy. Who writes short stories based on Rush songs? Well, there are at least 18 people (or 16 two of the stories packaged in 2113 played a role in inspiring Rush's music, not vice versa). The obvious bafflements produced by such a book can be swiftly dispatched. And it's down through such an extraordinary, celestial gateway that you'd expect a short story collection inspired by Rush to fall – like a cast-off artifact from some entirely alien dimension. So begins the namesake story in 2113, a new collection of short stories inspired by the music of Canadian progressive-rock group Rush. "High above Earth, a portal tore open from a parallel universe."
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