A Song for a New Day
by Sarah Pinsker
Summary
Luce Cannon is playing a show when the news comes through that a bomb has gone off in a stadium somewhere, and by the end of her set the venue is being cleared. That night turns out to be the last live performance for a very long time. A wave of bombings, then an epidemic, and public gatherings are banned, then criminalised, and a generation grows up with concerts, congregations, schools and offices replaced by immersive virtual reality supplied by a company called StageHolo.
Years later Rosemary Laws works customer support from her parents' farm, has almost never been in a room with strangers, and takes a job as a talent scout for StageHolo, which requires her to find illegal live shows and sign the acts.
She finds Luce, who is running exactly that, a house venue in Baltimore where a few dozen people stand in a basement together, and who understands precisely what signing would cost the scene she has built.
Pinsker plays in bands, and the writing about performance is the best part: the load in, the bad monitor mix, the moment a room turns.
Rosemary is the more interesting of the two. She is not a villain and not naive exactly, she has simply never been in a crowd, and watching her learn what a room full of people does to a song is the novel's real argument.
Around three hundred and seventy pages, warm, angry and structurally straightforward, alternating between the two women across a decade.
There is no great twist and no conspiracy to expose; the company is just a company doing what companies do. Best for readers who want a novel about music, and about what is lost when gathering becomes a product somebody sells back to you.
Historical Context & Significance
A Song for a New Day won the 2019 Nebula Award for Best Novel and was published in September 2019, several months before the first COVID cases were reported, which gave it an eerie second life. Readers found it in 2020 describing lockdown, the ban on public gatherings, the migration of every shared activity into a screen, and the companies that profited.
Sarah Pinsker is careful that the pandemic in the book is only part of the cause. The bombings come first, and the shutdown is as much about fear and commercial opportunity as about disease.
She is a working musician with several albums as well as a writer, and has won the Nebula for short fiction three times, including for the novelette Our Lady of the Open Road, from which this novel grew.