All Those Vanished Engines

Acclaimed science fiction writer and Williams lecturer in English Paul Park grew up in Williamstown as the child of two professors. He returned to the college to teach while raising his family in North Adams. In All Those Vanished Engines, published by Tor books in July, he draws on these experiences in the three novellas.

Set in the past, present and future, the novellas offer a vision of Northern Berkshire County that is larger, darker and grander than the one we know. Park imagines the U.S. split in two after the Civil War and then takes readers to an alternative present-day Williamstown, weaving his own experiences with a mysterious tale about secret projects at MASS MoCA, missing steam engines and a dystopian future.

The author of more than a dozen works, this is the first book in which Park has drawn deeply from his own life. Characters are based on his late parents, physics professor David Park and English lecturer and author Clara Claiborne Park. His younger sister Jessy is also an important character whose real-life autism is central to the narrative.

“There are places (in Northern Berkshire) with enormous, powerful significance to me,” Park says. Among them is the old Sprague Electric facility, now MASS MoCA, which figures heavily into All those Vanished Engines. An installation at MoCA by artist Stephen Vitiello shares the book’s name and features text written by Park, which became the starting point for the book’s middle novella.

At Williams, Park teaches expository writing and a class on the utopia in fiction. His books have been nominated for Arthur C. Clarke, Nebula and World Fantasy awards, and he helped organize the David G. Hartwell ’63 Science Fiction Symposium on campus last October.

Excerpt

Now as I left, I passed a room on the first floor and noticed the name beside the door. An old man sat on the side of his bed, his hair white and yellow and unkempt. “Mr. Whitney,” I said, “could I come talk to you?”

Startled, he looked up. His eyes were rimmed with pink.

“Somebody told me you worked in the old boiler house at Sprague Electric. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

I was looking for a breakthrough. I took out my laptop, on which I had a slide show of the power plant. “It looks like something’s been removed from there,” I said, indicating one of the big tanks. “You can see where the bolts have been cut away. Was there a pump there? A hydraulic pump?”

“Pump?” he said. His face took on a creased, thoughtful expression. “I don’t know there was a pump.”

I got to my feet. With no desire to go home, I stood in the doorway for a moment, wasting time. But then Roy Whitney began to speak, and it was obvious from the difference in tone that he had dropped the embarrassing impression of senility that had made contact difficult up to that point. He turned onto his back and closed his eyes, and as if to himself he started talking about the frustration of trying to switch back, after the end of the Second World War and the termination of a number of Department of Defense contracts, to making small electronic components for commercial product, and of course steam…His voice seemed to come from someplace far inside, as if produced by a mechanical process no longer under his control. The vocabulary he used was increasingly specialized, but even so, ignorant as I am, I could not but guess at the excitement of these nascent technologies, even as his tone and his delivery grew increasingly arid and more formal. I could not but glimpse the excitement of his early research, all but forgotten now, into optical masers and microwave amplifiers in the 1950s. I could not but catch a glimpse into a field of privately funded research that anticipated modern photovoltaics.