Warren Ellis said that we already live in the future, we just don’t notice it. It makes sense, therefore, that Julian K. Jarboe uses the future in their stories in order to better illuminate the present.
Although the stories in this collection vary strongly in terms of length and genre, the dominant note for me is near-future dystopia. Climate change drowning cities and rich tourists moving in to gentrify everything that’s left (plus the underwater ruins), locking the citizens in strictly controlled zones, while late capitalism sends precarious part-cyborg employees to work on the Moon with no holiday (after all, everyone is essential personnel). It sounds wild, but for many people it’s already part of their lived experience.As such, the characters mostly focus on survival rather than fighting to change the world they live in. It frequently feels too vast, complicated, and powerful to be changed by a small group of individuals. The best one can do is to cling to the communities one has for as long as they last; particularly since the characters frequently don’t quite realise the extent of the abuse and exploitation they are subjected to: it’s usually taken in stride and described very matter-of-factly (see for example the family abuse in the title story). It’s a very effective way of making the readers feel for the characters.
The fantasy pieces – “The Seed and the Stone” and “We Did Not Know We Were Giants” – seemed to me to be the few more outwardly positive stories in the collection, as there seemed to be more that the characters were able to do to change their situation, particularly in the latter, with its themes of apotheosis and wrenching control away from inscrutable and unpredictable powers.
Among the stories written in a more literary realist fashion (I’m thinking slice of life, not strongly driven by plot, focused more on personal epiphanies, such as “Self Care” or the titular “Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel”), there are also a few that utilise strong central metaphors to talk about certain experiences. “The Heavy Things” has been a favourite of mine ever since I read it in Transcendent 3 and it’s a frankly terrifying portrait of reproductive violence that removes the bodily autonomy of people experiencing periods. “Estranged Children of Storybook Houses” is a similarly affecting story about a neuroatypical person searching for their place in the world (and what a great idea to use a metaphor of the changeling, given that a popular theory is that they were a figure representing neuroatypicality), while “I Am a Beautiful Bug!” is a playful riff on Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” that talks about the alienation (not to mention oppression) that befall you once you undergo a significant alteration of your body. This is a great use of the fantastic and I enjoyed all of those stories very much.
Aside from full-length short stories (some of which probably cross over into novella territory), there is also flash fiction that borders on prose poetry and some poems. They showcase Jarboe’s facility for beautiful, poetic language*, though of course the longer stories are also full of sentences you want to underline and re-read over and over.
* See for example a bit from “The Android that Designed Itself”: Make me large and soft and rolling: a photovoltaic mucus that envelopes all it touches. Make me edible but make me poisonous. Give me one of every face that has ever been called ugly. Give me one of every skin that has ever been called excessive. Give me a way of moving that no space can admit or accommodate, and then reshape the entire world to hold me. I could go on.
This is a collection that captures very well what it’s like to live under capitalism while (gender)queer, disabled, mentally ill, when you are unwilling or simply – particularly – unable to climb higher in the great chain of oppression. But it also offers moments of joy and liberation that come with the possibility of self-expression and with finding your community. The rareness and fleetingness of those should make us all the more determined to fight the forces that threaten to take those things away from us.
Thank you to the author for sending me an e-ARC of this collection in exchange for my honest thoughts.
