First impressions reviews: An Unkindness of Ghosts, by Rivers Solomon

 

I wrote recently about 'Paradises Lost' ; this is a very different, and much darker, generation ship story, but equally creative and unique. In LeGuin’s story the world of the ship improves on current society so much that a large faction of the passengers deny they are ever meant to leave. Here, the HSS Matilda resembles the antebellum South – a racially stratified, highly patriarchal society. We see this world mainly through the eyes of Aster, a low-deck healer/physician, as she and her closest companions struggle to survive and eventually to change their world.

 

** BTW, ALL the trigger warnings for this book, and to a certain extent for the rest of this review, as I’ll be alluding to instances of racism, sexual assault, and queerphobia slightly more specifically than usual** 

 

Aster is fascinating character. She is a self-taught scientist who breeds plants and invents things in her cobbled together “botanarium” and is possibly the most capable doctor on the ship. She is also clearly autistic, being very literal-minded - “I cannot discern whether or not your offer is in earnest. It should be obvious I cannot perform an amputation in mittens. Are you joking again?” - prone to get overwhelmed by too much sensory input, and having trouble expressing her emotions even though she feels things deeply:

“Dear Theo”, she wrote… “I am off to the Shuttle Bay.” Deciding the note not suitably warm, she added: “You are not unpleasant to look at when you sleep. Love, Aster.”

She doesn’t seem like the obvious person to start a revolution…but, then again, someone who doesn’t automatically comprehend social rules is in some ways a natural gadfly. She is aided (in more or less deliberate ways) by her friend Giselle, the Surgeon Theo, and her deceased mother Lune, who set many of the events of the story in motion twenty-five years prior.

Giselle is about as different from Aster as it is possible to be: impulsive, talkative, and emotionally volatile (possibly bipolar). She has a self-destructive streak and, while Aster feels the expected emotions in a given situation but doesn’t express them well, Giselle notes that she doesn’t always feel things, like guilt, the way one should. She is very intelligent, though. Being better at subtext and metaphor, she is the one who figures out that the notebooks Aster’s mother left behind are in code: for example, that the “fish dissection” is an electrical map of the ship. This discovery leads them to the shuttle bay and more of Lune’s notes, which in turn provides the answer to why the ship has been experiencing regular blackouts as well as a possible way out of the hellish life on the Matilda.

Theo is technically much higher in status than Aster or Giselle, being the Surgeon General (the “Hands of God”) and the son of a former Sovereign. But even though his complexion is pale enough to pass on the high decks, his mother was a low-deck woman – one we’ve met, we find out later – which forced his father to abdicate. His usefulness, status, and religious devotion largely protect him from receiving more than the occasional insult for his ancestry or effeminate traits, but his position is certainly more precarious than most upper-deckers. Theo doesn’t mind either aspect of himself, though; in fact, one of the reasons he goes to Aster for pain treatments related to his prosthetic leg is that the chemical she uses also acts as a testosterone blocker. He hates the Sovereignty almost as much as the lower-deckers, although having more to lose he is hesitant to act, even though he has much better opportunity. Also – somewhat less plot relevant - Theo probably has OCD. Obsessive hand-washing, though, is a trait that passes mostly unnoticed in a doctor except to the sharp-eyed Aster!

By the way, I’ve been using “he” for Theo and “she” for Aster, because those are the pronouns they use…but they have some doubts over whether that’s accurate. Ambiguous gender is common in the lower-decks population; individuals are considered female unless otherwise demonstrated. Theo takes after his mother’s side of the family in that respect, evidently. As for Aster she is more robustly-built and hairy than the average woman, but would be on the dainty side for a man. She at one point dresses as “Aston” and gets into a vicious fight over “girly-man” insults partly because they remind her of the abuse she’s suffered as a woman and partly out of indignation on behalf of those (Theo) for whom the insults are meant. They eventually put it like this to one another:

“You are an anomaly of a man,” she said. “Perhaps because I’m not a man at all.”… “Aye. You gender-malcontent. You otherling…Me too. I am a boy and a girl and a witch all wrapped into one very strange, flimsy, indecisive body. Do you think my body couldn’t decide what it wanted to be?”  “I think it doesn’t matter because we get to decide what our bodies are or are not,” he answered… “Is that so? Then I am magic. I say it, therefore it is true.”

I’m unsure if Aster, Theo, and Giselle technically form a love triangle. Aster and Theo’s feelings for one another are clearly both romantic and sexual. Aster and Giselle’s relationship could be called “friends with occasional benefits”, but that would be underselling it. Aster loves Theo, but her friendship with Giselle is the deepest, strongest connection that she has. It doesn’t matter how many times Giselle and Aster’s respective traumas and mental challenges cause damage to the other – each will be there for the other to the end.   

While the true antagonist of this story is of course the social system aboard the Matilda, there is a human villain too: Theo’s uncle, Lieutenant. That’s his name, not his title, BTW, but he is a terrifying enough embodiment of the system that you don’t feel inclined to snicker at it. He has a personal antagonism toward both Aster and Theo, and so the prospect of him becoming Sovereign heightens the stakes. Given the way that low-deck women face a constant threat of sexual violence¹, you might expect Lieutenant’s threat to Aster to be of the physical variety. In fact, it is Theo who was probably molested by Lieutenant when he was young². That’s not to say Lieutenant isn’t a threat to Aster’s physical well-being – repeatedly having her arrested and once assigning her to a breeding program³– he just doesn’t get his own hands dirty with such things. He views her as a disruptive force and is obsessed with trying to make her follow the rules. The Sovereignty relies on the fact that everyone knows that a generation ship is a fragile thing, and that its continued voyage relies on social harmony. What Lieutanant doesn’t grasp, however, is that if you keep pushing people until they truly have nothing left to lose, they won’t care about that.

For better or for worse, the Matilda feels like a real place. The fact that different decks have developed different dialects and sub-cultures gives you a sense right away of how long they must have been traveling. You also get to see how, much like slaves in the Americas, the people of the lower decks have carried fragments of their old culture with them and even in their current circumstances have created something new and vibrant. For instance, the recipes they’ve developed – when not under Lieutenant’s unnecessary restrictions – sound amazing, including spicy oxtail stews and plantain-dough hand-pies. They also find a way to educate themselves, mothers counting out crop rows or showing how to divide harvests by barrel to teach their children math and passing on knowledge of useful plants or how gears rotate the field decks. Like ‘Sula’ the story illustrates that beauty and pain can coexist, but the former doesn’t excuse the latter, or mean that the system doesn’t desperately need to be changed.

I like, too, the way that the various mental and physical differences of the main characters feel less like handicaps and more like a part of them: sometimes they are an advantage, sometimes a disadvantage, but most of the time they just are. Some might question how realistic it is that so many lower-deckers are both queer and non-neurotypical. Really, though, since such characters are so vastly under-represented elsewhere, I think Solomon just took the opportunity to right that balance somewhat and, in the process, explore the beauty and diversity of those identities in intersection with race⁴. Finally, it should be noted that, even carrying as much trauma as they do, the main characters are not immobilized. The wiser among them know that truly changing their circumstances requires the right conjunction of circumstances, of course, but they certainly haven’t given up! I’m not sure whether this to say this book has a happy ending or not. There is sadness in it, and multiple extra steps that will be needed before the surviving characters can be free, but there is at least hope for that outcome where there wasn’t before.

 

1. You realize how constant when you witness Aster applying mango butter before going out on a farmwork shift, just in case. This hit home for me on two levels, the initial “Auuggh, shit!” and then “Damn it. That’s probably EXACTLY what a meticulous planner like me or Aster would do in this horrific situation, isn’t it? ‘Well, if staying near the others and keeping my head down doesn’t work, I might as well try to minimize the physical damage.’” I mean, adding spikes would be more satisfying, but I can just see Aster shaking her head and pointing out all the practical problems with that idea.

2. At least, that’s what Theo concludes based on the strange gaps in his childhood memories and his intense aversion to being within arm’s reach of his uncle.

3. Before Theo secretly messed with the men’s hormone levels and got her the hysterectomy she requested.

4. They are well qualified to do so. This is how they describe themselves on their website: “Rivers Solomon is a dyke, an anarchist, a she-beast, an exile, a shiv, a wreck, and a refugee of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Fae writes about life in the margins, where fae's much at home.”

 

Overall recommendation: There is a lot of dark stuff in this tale, and if you have experienced any of it in real life you might need to be in the right frame of mind to read it, because it feels very real. If you haven’t, then this is an even more important read. ‘An Unkindness of Ghosts’ very effectively puts you in the minds of characters suffering multiple oppressions and makes you love them for their resilience, their ingenuity, and their brokenness alike; you will immediately want to see them succeed. Not that you shouldn't want that for the underdog anyway...but this book is a good example of how characters don't have to be perfect to be admirable and relatable.