The Chicago Review of Books website this month published a fantastic resource, 28 Stories You Can Read Online For Black History Month. The items on the list cover a whole range of genres, and include links both to the story and to the collections they come from. This week I decided to take a look at a few of the ones that fall into the science-fiction category.
Ark of Light – Victor Lavalle
“Has anyone ever come back?” I asked.
“Why would they? The point is to leave.”
Victor Lavalle is the author of the 2016 novella The Ballad of Black Tom . His story here is a long way away from the turn-of-the-century Harlem in his novella, but there are hints that people are possibly dealing with a lot of the same problems. It’s the shortest one on the list, and it features a new kind of transport with shades of the Underground Railroad. Surprisingly kind and sweet, it’s full of the hope that comes from leaving behind what’s no longer wanted.
The Era – Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
This one’s an interesting variation on the dystopian future where people can choose to engineer their children to be genetically perfect. The genetic engineering exists here, it’s just that it goes wrong. Routinely. To the point where there are even names for the people with each kind of defect. (Unoptimal. Para-one. Shoelooker.)
But believe it or not, the snafus of scientific tinkering aren’t the central issue in this story. They just paper over the the actual problem, allowing people to dismiss unhappiness as a genetic failing.
“So even though people said all these things and acted like everyone else was important there were still wars and hurting, which proves it was a time of lies…”
You’ve probably read at least one story where society is so determined to make everyone equal in every way that the government crushes anyone for being exceptional. The trope is practically its own genre; Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” is just the most famous example. Adjei-Brenyah’s story takes things to the opposite extreme. It’s a chilling view of a society where all “political correctness” is done away with. It’s also an indictment of the “all or nothing” attitude, the false dichotomy which insists that if we can’t say exactly what we feel, to anyone, all the time, with no room for compassion, then our freedoms are being attacked.
Suicide, Watch – Nafissa Thompson-Spires
…posting vaguely about therapy at least left something up to the imagination of her followers. She mentioned her experiences there frequently in her “Think About It” Tuesday posts, with captions like, “Who says black people don’t go to therapy?” and #therapy. If she mentioned it often enough, without saying why she went, people could fill in a sexier disease than narcissism, which you couldn’t exactly tell anyone you had, because it made you look bad, and she didn’t even have the malignant kind or the official personality disorder; even her narcissism was pastel pink, kawaii cute.
Content warning for suicidal thoughts, although these are the most shallow, obsessively empty thoughts that occur for the silliest of reasons.
I’m putting this one in the science-fiction category, although the science itself isn’t futuristic, it’s the real honest-to-God reality of social media. Jilly’s biggest source of pain in her life is that she’s never gone through anything painful enough to make her interesting. It’s enough to drive her to suicide, except she can’t decide which method will get her the best reaction from her followers.
It’s a darkly humorous story, with a sense of something horrible just beneath the surface.
Bear Bear Harvest – Venita Blackburn
I heard Bear Bear’s voice—“You’re not scared”—and how wrong he was and how wrong everyone was all the time about me and my body and my feelings. I thought there must be something broken because the two never seemed to match. My face and my skeleton could not accurately represent the nest of feelings I had inside, but after the Harvest it became even more apparent.
I’m not 100% certain what’s going on in this story, and I’d love for anyone to comment with their thoughts. The “harvest” from the title is something that could be played for humor – very very dark humor – but it isn’t. It’s something that’s celebrated as a rite of passage, as well as an innovation that made the main character’s family fairly well off. It removes something harmful and creates physical attractiveness in the process (what society deems as attractive, anyway).
And yet…
It’s a technology that lets a society put off dealing with the real problem by creating a workaround that lets someone else profit from it. That’s got to be dystopian, right?
There’s pain here, and the feeling of not being able to fit in, and the harm that comes from not being able to accept change (especially when something about that change just seems wrong). But there’s also beauty, and family, and tradition, and transformation.
Banner Image by Arianna Vairo.