When I was nine or ten, my family vacationed at Disney World. The Magic Kingdom was indeed magical, though the aspect that remains hooked in my memory thirty years later isn’t the Florida sunshine, or my autographs from Mickey and Minnie, but the Carousel of Progress. 

Situated inside a futuristic-themed Tomorrowland, the Carousel of Progress is a rotating stage show starring an animatronic family whose members narrate a century’s worth of American innovation and invention from the early automobile, telephone, and radio to television and the automated dishwasher. But the most exciting set piece was a projection of life in the next millennium, when technological progress would include voice-activated devices and virtual reality video games. 

Much like the Carousel of Progress, the Century of Progress—otherwise known as the Chicago World’s Fair—envisioned that tricky word “progress” as a march towards a more perfect world achieved through an American combination of manufacturing, capitalism, and democracy. 

In Dawn Raffel’s richly imagined Boundless as the Sky, democracy is far from her characters’ minds as they eagerly anticipate the arrival of the “Roaring Armada of Goodwill” at the 1933 World’s Fair. Helmed by Italo Balbo, one of Mussolini’s right-hand men, the Armada arrived in Chicago at the culmination of an historic seven-thousand mile journey. As much an aeronautical feat as a display of fascist power, the achievement was praised by everyone from Hitler to President Roosevelt to the Pope. As this history is usually told, it will take a few more years for U.S. and Italian relations to deteriorate, facilitated in part by Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler. Traces of Balbo’s feat exist in Chicago today—there’s a Balbo Drive and a monument to the armada’s landing—yet they remain disconnected from the historical context. Tensions in our understanding of and reckoning with the past are at the core of Raffel’s book. She challenges readers to consider how we understand the past, particularly when it persists in the present. 

Structured as a diptych, the book’s first part, “The City Towards Which My Journey Tends,” is loosely a narrative of real and imagined places. In individually titled and distinctive pieces, this section engages in everything from retellings of myths to life in future societies to the use of dictionary definitions. The second part, “Boundless as the Sky,” is also composed of short, individually titled pieces, but offers a more traditional narrative. As the point of view shifts among twenty different characters, a kaleidoscopic story emerges with characters occasionally entering each other’s scenes as the Italian armada approaches. Both sections ask the reader to look closer at whom we choose to memorialize and what we decide to preserve in the historical record. Who is lost to history? What events disappear into the silence of the archives, lost forever to the future?

Raffel is an incisive writer. Through the accumulation of words, images, and ideas, a layered and complex narrative tapestry rises from the page. In “The Uses of Fire on Earth,” which appears in the opening diptych, Raffel lists eight words that rhyme with crematorium. Not included on the list is the word infantorium, which appears in the book’s second half. A real-life exhibit at the Chicago World’s Fair, the Infantorium invited visitors to view premature babies inside “glass ovens,” or life-saving incubators. Impossible to uncouple the words in one’s brain: one a technology used to achieve mass murder perpetrated by the Nazi state, the other a major advancement in neonatal care that saved thousands of infants but was criticized by those in the eugenics movement for diluting the white race. (Not incidentally, eugenics was a fair exhibition located inside the Hall of Science.) As readers of Raffel’s thoroughly researched and propulsive nonfiction book The Strange Case of Dr. Couney will know, the Infantorium was a touring marvel with a permanent exhibit at Coney Island. As the Armada approaches, a jilted lover wonders: “Can a body simply vanish? Evaporate? Into thick air.” In a telescoping moment, we learn that one character does vanish, dead in a plane explosion over Nuremberg. 

Boundless as the Sky is laced with grief and loss, and a current of melancholia runs beneath ideas of progress and the future. Words and images that accumulate in the first part reappear in slightly altered or new ways in the second, lending coherence to the whole. Both sections raise questions about “progress.” How can we anticipate the future when we haven’t truly reckoned with the past? The author enters the narrative in direct and indirect ways: through personal connections to Chicago, familial loss in war, and genocide. There are echoes of our current cultural wrestling over monuments, the built environment, and fuller acknowledgement of our history. As Raffel evocatively and beautifully shows, circling again and again in a technique of startling glimpses, erasure is inherent in the building and rebuilding of cities. Raffel’s own pieces of a now-changed Chicago, captured in photographs spliced into the book’s midsection, no longer exist—most of the photographs were lost in a flood. 

I haven’t been to Disney’s Carousel of Progress since childhood, but the future that I watched unfold in 1993 is already in the rearview mirror. Much has been made lately about the intersection of AI with creative pursuits such as illustration and writing. Is a novel composed by a robot the twenty-first century progress we’d hoped for? If preservation is a specific cultural act that enshrines and protects certain narratives and is dependent, in part, on human language and memory, what will a robot preserve, if anything? The future, it seems, is inscribed in the present moment which itself is underwritten by the past. This is true of cities as much as people, of cultures as much as events. And robots can only experience today. 

But, Raffel hints, there is hope. As the sword swallower at the Century of Progress says, “Who cares if a robot can swallow a sword? You need humans to do the things that humans can’t do.” Preserving invisible stories, raising them into the light, is a uniquely human endeavor as well as a calling, one that is as critical today as it was in 1933.

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Dawn Raffel is the author of five books, most recently The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies (Blue Rider Press, 2018). Other books include two short story collections, a novel, and a memoir. Her stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies including NOON, BOMB, Conjunctions, Exquisite Pandemic, New American Writing, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and Best Small Fictions.

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Lacey N. Dunham‘s writing has been published in Ploughshares, Witness, The Normal School, Southwest Review, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others, and she is an arts fellowship recipient from the DC Commission of the Arts and Humanities. A first-generation college graduate living in Washington, DC, she is the fiction editor at Necessary Fiction and a contributing editor for Story.