Janelle Monae's THE MEMORY LIBRARIAN AND OTHER STORIES FROM DIRTY COMPUTER

The summer of 2018 was a challenging one for me. Due to a medication I'd been put on for a chronic health condition, the slow growing cataracts we'd first discovered in both of my eyes when I was in my early 30s (it's mostly caused by frequent/long-term steroid use and nobody ever talks about this as a consequence so educate yourself on this before it happens to someone you know and care about) were suddenly maturing like crazy. An operation I'd been told I'd maybe need someday when I was in my 60s was suddenly necessary very, very soon -- except I also had glaucoma that wasn't responding to ordinary treatment measures. The cataract surgery couldn't happen until this was brought under control. Meanwhile, my world was disappearing in, not so much a cloud as a blinding refraction that multiplied every image by five. I wasn't just seeing double, I was seeing quintuple.

The last thing I remember watching on TV was the Emotion Picture Janelle Monae & co. made to accompany her then-new album, Dirty Computer. I might have seen a baseball game or something as the actual last thing, but I watched Dirty Computer over and over and over again. It wasn't just great music and beautiful visuals, it was really good, fully imagined science fiction with a fully realized world, intensely believable characters and incredible high-stakes tension. Plus, the imagery employed made it feel like it was made just for me, even though I'm a cisgender ace woman from White-oming, aka someone with very little in common with the divine Cyndi Mayweather. Even as I watched for the 14,000th time, even as I listened with delight to the album (which I bought on physical media because someday some jackwagon is going to buy up the streaming services that host it and delete it as too controversial or whatever), I wanted to know more about this world Janelle and her co-creators had dreamed up, which is a dystopia every bit as terrifying as the fucking Handmaids but is fully inclusive of the BIPOC/LGBTQA+ people of the world in a way dear old Atwood never quite is.

Anyway, the divine Mayweather heard my prayers and had already pretty much answered them, only book publishing do take its own sweet time to get stuff into my hot little hands, don't it?

The stories in The Memory Librarian are collaborations between Monae and a small cadre of award winning writers of speculative prose fiction, and while each co-writer has a resume that should impress any critic, their individuality disappears in service of the whole work; each story shares not only a world and a handful of characters drawn from Dirty Computer but also a clear and straightforward prose style that makes The Memory Librarian feel like the work of one amazing hive mind. Ordinarily I'd find this a little disappointing; I look to anthologies in part in order to find new-to-me-writers to stalk from afar and I usually end up with a favorite whose works I then move forward to devour greedily. In this case, though, well, I'm just going to have to follow them all like one of the creepy surveillance droids that loom in all of these stories. Except I'm hoping I won't be noticed, that they won't run away. I'm not really an NDR (New Dawn Robot, I think is what that stands for?), I just look like one, really! Hello...? 

That being said, I do have a favorite story, the longest entry, "Nevermind," which functions the most as a direct sequel to Dirty Computer as it expands on the themes and imagery -- and the fates of its principle characters -- of Monae's original Emotion Picture. "Nevermind" finds Monae's character, Jane, resident of the Pynk Hotel (the scene of the music video with the infamous vagina pants), where a motley assortment of the kind of marginalized/minority characters that are most at risk of being abused and wiped out in both our world and that of Monae's imagined future, in which a techno-dystopian power known as the New Dawn has seized power in the United States (or maybe all of North America? Or maybe the whole world?) and put a terrifying combination of surveillance technology that can penetrate even into a person's thoughts and memories and a gas called Nevermind that can be used to erase those thoughts and memories, the better to re-program a person into a perfect "clean" citizen of the New Dawn's Orwellian world. At the end of Dirty Computer, Jane, her girlfriend Zen, and their boyfriend Ché escaped from a facility in which all three of them had undergone various degrees of Nevermind treatment and brainwashing; the last hopeful scene has the trio clearing the exit and leaving the New Dawn behind, hopefully forever.

As "Nevermind" (co-written with Danny Lore) opens, we learn that it was to the Pynk Hotel that Jane and Zen escaped (we don't hear much about Ché), and that the Hotel is a hidden location in the desert where BIPOC/LGBTQIA+ and any other misfit women can make a life and all the art they want as long as they contribute some of their talents toward keeping the place running. But there is trouble in paradise: there are hints that New Dawn has come close to sniffing them out, and some of the residents of the Pynk Hotel don't have quite as inclusive an idea of who is welcome there as Jane et al would like. The story takes Monae's original work's focus on the endless struggle of the individual against the forces of society who want conformity at any price and both expands and contracts it, broadening its inclusiveness while narrowing in on the experiences of one resident at Pynk who has become a protege of reluctant not-officially-leader Jane but is treated with suspicion by a faction within the community in a sad analogy of, say, 21st century feminism's internal debates (which, how is this debate still even happening, you guys?) over who, exactly, counts as a woman.

Other stories bring us into the world of a high official of the New Dawn. "The Memory Librarian" (co-written with Alaya Dawn Johnson),  is a bit of a taller poppy than she at first would seem but is struggling to keep that a secret even as she secretly tries to help others like her survive in the city she guides and keeps Clean for the New Dawn. When her mission and her heart come into irreconcilable conflict, the tension over how she will handle it becomes almost unbearable and doesn't quite resolve as the story nonetheless comes to a satisfying conclusion. As I said, Monae chooses her co-creators wisely (witness all of the incredible music videos she's unleashed over the years).

Another stand-out is "Timebox Altar(ed" (co-written with Sheree Renée Thomas in which a group of children, many of whom have been effectively orphaned by the New Dawn's habit of kidnapping non-conforming adults for "Cleaning" without much regard for the welfare of any offspring they may have, follow a series of incredibly subtle memory-clues to find an all-but-enchanted locale that gives them each a glimpse of a better future in which each of them has, as adults, helped to create, a message of hope that reaches beyond The Memory Librarian's pages to all of us as we watch our kind-of, almost pluralistic, wannabe egalitarian maybe someday society come under threat, not from fancy sci-fi gadgets and gases, but the same bullshit intolerance and bigotry that's always held us back. While we probably shouldn't ever get too comfortable with the idea that these forces can be defeated forever (as isn't quite suggested in the world these kids get to glimpse but could be), sometimes it's nice to at least think about how a better world can still be possible and might even be in our reach.

Someday, though? We really need to stop just believing that the kids are going to fix things. We were the kids once, did we?

Anyway, I hope this collection isn't the last we see from these creators and in this world. Monae has tapped into some powerful, powerful veins that still have plenty of good ore in 'em.