I can never resist a generation ship story, especially during another pass through the weird contained world of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun*, this time along with the boys from the Alzabo Soup podcast and their listeners, so when I found out about River Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts I ran, didn't walk, to my local library when I found out their copy was at last available, and now on hold for me.
Only it wasn't a hardcover. Sad trombone. And they didn't have the ebook in that lending pool, either. Sadder trombone.
But then I noticed that the audio book edition is part of the "Included in your subscription" selections and my head exploded into candy, especially once I listened to the sample and heard the narrator, Cherise Boothe, who has a pleasantly androgynous voice and a true talent for a variety of accents and speech patterns that makes her the perfect choice for this material.
The Matilda, on which this story takes place, is a hell of a generation ship, you guys. Like, Snowpiercer in space, only so much worse. Because it's basically a plantation in space, you guys. With all the horror that implies.
Our main characters are immediately people I wanted to cherish close to my heart even though I knew that they were both going to be in so much danger. There's Aster, born and raised and stuck in the levels of the ship referred to as the "Tarlands"**, where a hereditary underclass that just happens to be highly melanated live in semi-squalor between shifts doing manual labor on the gigantic ship's complicated array of enormous Valley Forge type farm modules where the whole ship's food supply is grown and tended to by hand. No cute little Hueys, Deweys or Louis, here. But at least no short-sighted bureaucrats are ordering that all of these modules get scrapped as economically unviable.
Everybody who lives in the Tarlands has to do a daily ten-hour shift in the farm modules, even if, as Aster is, they are devastatingly intelligent, educated, inventive and creative. Since Aster is all of these, Aster is perpetually stressed out, especially since she also serves the Tarlands as a sort of space age medicine woman, with a secret botany lab carved out of some forgotten sections of the ship where she experiments on everything from plant genetics to pharmaceutical development in addition to serving as an old-fashioned sawbones, in which role we first meet her as she is required to amputate a child's gangrenous foot -- the child having gotten severe frostbite when the upper decks of the ship decided to dramatically reduce if not outright cut off the power and heating to the Tarlands when their ancient ship myseriously stopped functioning at optimal levels. Better that than sacrifice their recreational uses for that power.
Aster gets away with this side work of hers largely due to her close-but-ambiguous*** relationship with an upper decker, Theo, himself born of a Tarlands mother but was light-skinned enough to pass as an upper decker and thus whisked into his father's privileged world. Theo has grown up to become an actual shipboard physician and, as the son of a late"Sovereign" of the vessel and nephew of the brutal warlord who is poised to become the next Sovereign (and as the novel begins, the current Sovereign of the ship is suddenly very unwell), Theo is actually the ship's Surgeon General despite still being in his mid- to late 20s. Raised at least partially by the same foster mother as Aster was, he has grown up as Aster's playmate and friend and most trusted confidante despite the difference in their stations, and uses (and abuses) his privilege to shield her from the consequences of her disregard for regulation and protocol as they hit adulthood. That they have sort of noticed that maybe they have developed feelings for each other that are not exactly of the sibling variety crops up, but really, for the most part, Aster considers herself mostly gay and Theo is taking advantage of some botanical decoctions of hers to sort of subtly transition into even more of a "girlie man" than his evil uncle already takes him for. A fraught and fascinating pairing, is Aster and Theo's... and then there's Giselle, another foster sister, who is cantankerous, moody, sexy, attention-grabbing and mean as a snake...
That's all just setting up the pieces before Solomon starts moving them around the board in a bloody spaceborne chess game from hell. Aster's roommates perpetually come under undue scrutiny by sadistic power-drunk guards acting on the Lieutenant's imprimatur, who single out Giselle for sexual abuse and a pair of openly lesbian lovers for good old fashioned beatings. Aster's own movements keep getting curtailed as the Lieutenant, who fancies himself even more of a god-king than the usual "sovereign" of the Matilda does, begins to tighten his grip on the whole ship but especially upon those dark-skinned "animals" in the Tarlands, even to resorting to the good old fashioned "low diet" of Nelson's navy, to keep the Tarlanders' just healthy enough to work but not so energetic or capable of cognition to actually rebel against his increasingly cruel tactics.
Ah, but while the Lieutenant and his thugs are excellent at authoritarianism, terror and violence, they don't really understand the ship they and their ancestors before them have occupied for over 300 years and on which their descendants are likely to be stuck for hundreds of years more before it arrives (assuming it doesn't break down en route, or collide with an asteroid, or...) at the "promised land" of some unspecified exoplanet out there that might not even have been chosen back when the Matilda was launched. But there are other people aboard who do understand the ship, and one of them happens to have been Aster's mother, Lune, who was a genius engineering type despite the circumstances in which she lived, and who taught herself many secrets before giving birth to Aster and then disappearing, presumed dead...
BUT, someone else seems to have covered Lune's tracks, tearing pages out of precious library books and having "checked out" all the important ones 29 years before the events of An Unkindness of Ghosts. Aster's story shifts then into a detective narrative of sorts as she uncovers clues, interviews witnesses and does all the usual gumshoe stuff while also performing all of her other responsibilities and trying not to get brutally assaulted in the process because curfews keep getting tighter and Theo's passes start getting honored less and less frequently. Eventually she pieces together what needs to be done (and Book of the Long Sun echoes some more) but not before things come to a truly violent head that even seems to have troubled audio book narrator Boothe. So, some trigger warnings for violence and sexual assault and racism are in order, very much, yes.
But it's a fascinating enough tale to reward the (comfortable, white) reader who bows to the need to live with and digest narratives like these -- even though that reader is probably the one most likely to use the story's unabashed brutality as an excuse not to finish it. Don't be that reader. Be the reader that finishes it and honors Aster's and Theo's and Melusine's and Giselle's and Mabel's and Pippa's and Vivian's stories, and the Lieutenant's too, because they echo stories from our collective past, and warn us what our collective future is going to be like if we keep ignoring the lessons the past is always, always trying to teach us.
Let's take better versions of ourselves ad astra.
**Yeah, yeah, it's not subtle. But look at what's going on in this endless year of 2020 And Some Months and tell me that subtle is going to get the job done.
***Really close but also really ambiguous. Because both of these characters, in addition to other burdens of their respective births, are also kind of gender fluid. Aster is what we'd call assigned female at birth, but she is powerfully muscled, has hard and masculine features (by her own description) and more than a touch of hirsuitism. Theo was always a bit too girly for his family's liking but eventually found their favor by his choice of profession, even though some of the medicines that Aster makes for him have some estrogen-like effects on him. Cherie Booth voices both narratives brilliantly, which is why she was the best possible choice for this audio book.
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