THE generation ship story has been enjoying a minor resurgence in recent years. Writers like Kim Stanley Robinson and James Smythe have used its confined setting to convey feelings of claustrophobia, and to explore what happens when humanity tries to craft a habitat and society from scratch.
In her debut An Unkindness of Ghosts, Rivers Solomon uses the generation ship setting to craft a challenging narrative of inescapable racial prejudice. In an explicit rejection of sci-fi鈥檚 typical futurism, Solomon transposes the antebellum plantation system on to her novel鈥檚 setting, the spaceship Matilda.
While white 鈥渦pper-deckers鈥� live in luxury, black 鈥渓ow-deckers鈥� are crammed together, brutally policed, and made to perform backbreaking labour producing Matilda鈥檚 food and resources. The ship is governed by a philosophy that combines white supremacy, quasi-Christian fundamentalism and restrictive gender roles. Its leader, the Sovereign, can subject the citizens of the lower decks to sadistic punishments, or even the cavalier withdrawal of their basic means of survival, at whim.
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Some readers might baulk at the obvious metaphorical weight of this. It doesn鈥檛 really make sense that a spaceship hundreds of years in the future, even one in which racial prejudice holds such sway, would model its society so exactly on the slave-holding South. But Solomon quickly makes it clear that her goal in creating Matilda isn鈥檛 verisimilitude, but affect.
Her world-building is impressionistic, focusing on seemingly trivial details, such as the pronouns that different low-decker groups use to address children who haven鈥檛 yet chosen a gender. Through these snapshots, she paints a portrait of low-decker society as vibrant, sophisticated, highly adaptable and responsive to its environment.
It鈥檚 a direct rebuke to the stereotypes of slavery in historical fiction. The slaves on the Matilda are powerless, but they are neither passive nor lacking in awareness. Their circumstances may not be what we associate with sci-fi or the generation ship story, but they are precisely the kind of people we expect to find in such stories: curious, bold and intelligent.
A new book by M. John Harrison is an event. For more than four decades, he has been dismantling the heroic assumptions at the heart of genres like epic fantasy and space opera, exposing their emptiness with equal incisiveness and compassion. His latest collection, You Should Come With Me Now, comprises more than 40 stories, some of them short-shorts or experimental pieces, others more traditionally structured. They run the gamut of fantasy, sci-fi, horror and plain weirdness, but all are suffused by a typical and familiar sense of sadness.
The recurring idea in many of the stories is the need for escape, and the impossibility of it. Trapped by family, jobs or the sheer mundanity of their lives, Harrison鈥檚 characters seek a fantastical way out.
鈥淭he slaves on the Matilda are powerless, but they are neither passive nor lacking in awareness鈥�
But even for those who find it, the result is seldom as liberating as they had hoped. The fantastical worlds they escape to always turn out to be as shabby as the ordinary one. The queen of fairyland is a resigned old woman showing tourists around her castle. A spaceship engine gifted by aliens takes us to an advertisement for hair gel.
In other hands, this might come across as cynical or hectoring, but Harrison is far too subtle a writer for that. There is genuine sorrow here, for people so desperate for an escape that they would break the rules of reality to find it. And genuine anger too, at a world that leaves people so disappointed that escape feels like their only option.
There is also humour, moments of absurdity in which the ridiculousness of all worlds, real and fantastical, is laid bare.
Book details
Akashic Books
Comma Press
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淏reakout time鈥�
