51 by Patrick O'Leary

Published by Tachyon Publications on February 8, 2022

Patrick O’Leary has a day job. At one point, he worked for Steve Jobs. Prior to 51, his most recent novel was published almost twenty years ago. His first two, Door Number Three and The Gift, are wildly imaginative, although The Gift is more fantasy than science fiction. O’Leary says it took him sixteen years to write 51 (and even longer to write The Gift). He’s produced some short fiction in the interim, but not all that much. O’Leary is deservedly proud that Harlan Ellison called him science fiction’s J.D. Salinger.

Speaking of imaginative. Remember the imaginary friend you had when you were a little kid? You probably can’t remember any details about your friend, but the friend was real. Every imaginary friend (IF) is real. We imagine them into existence. They make us forget them as we grow older, yet they exist for the sole purpose of having people believe in them. They exist because children need them. They provide comfort, inspiration, love. They help children fight their fears when they are most vulnerable. They disappear when we no longer need them. Or they did before things changed. For the last several decades, our IFs have continued to exist, invisibly, living in closets, long after we forget them. That’s a clever premise.

It’s not just IFs we forget. Forgetting is one of the novel’s themes. We forget the Native American tribes that were wiped out to expand white America. We forget the slave labor that built white America. We forget the bombs that have been dropped, the wild animals that have been caged, the democracies that have been toppled, the species we made extinct. Our IFs are invisible because so much is invisible that we can’t see what we’ve become — or so one of the IFs tells a character named Nuke.

Alcoholism is another prominent theme, related to the theme of memory and its loss. Alcoholics often drink to forget. To forget how to feel pain. To endure a personal tragedy that friends have barely noticed until “not one of your friends, colleagues, or drinking buddies can recognize the man you’ve become.”

The IFs aren’t in the closet during most of the novel’s time frame (mid-1950s to 2019). They’re in Area 51, where they’re washed and stored and become the subject of experiments. Winston Koop begins working at the base in 1972 and quickly spots an equation on a blackboard, an equation that accidentally made a door to a place called “the Anywhere.” Scientists don’t know how to close the door. Koop is one of the few who understands the equation. He’s also one of the few who can retain a memory of the IFs he sees at the base. To Koop they look like kids in nightgowns. To others they look like white cats. Their true form is something different. They are masters of camouflage.

The door and the atom bomb have something to do with why IFs no longer fade out of existence when the children who imagine them grow up. Now everyone sees them but nearly everyone instantly forgets seeing them. At Area 51, they help the defense establishment create advanced weaponry. In exchange, one of their number (nicknamed The Pope) is put in charge of the portal and allowed to set a certain number of IFs free each year.

Koop’s job eventually evolves. He learns how to make others forget. He’s responsible for security, for making sure that nobody with knowledge of Area 51 remembers. Sometimes they need to die to make that happen.

The narrator, Adam “Nuke” Pagnucco, was a college friend of Koop. Nuke was the best man at Koop’s wedding. Nuke has forgotten the wedding. He’s forgotten Koop. The forgetting was Koop’s doing. Nuke starts to remember him after a chance encounter in 2018. At that point they are both 73, “long past our denials and excuses.” Koop fills Nuke in on forgotten details before enlisting him in a mission — to close the door. And there’s your plot, although it makes multiple detours on a nonlinear path before it finally zeroes on its destination.

In addition to its creative exploration of intriguing themes, 51 is notable for its unpredictable moments. Some are funny (the Pope’s interactions with American presidents are priceless). Others are poignant. All are surprising and a few are downright weird. They give the plot an offbeat, unbalanced, ever-changing rhythm. The story is a bit more muddled and a bit less amazing than Door Number Three, but it is similar in its complex structure. Both novels probably merit a second reading to fully understand their meaning.

The appearance of 51 gives me hope that O’Leary will retire from his day job (if he hasn’t already) and pull other projects off the shelf, or create new ones, without making us wait another twenty years for a finished product. O’Leary has a story-telling perspective that is uniquely his own. I’m grateful that he shared that perspective again in 51.

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