PheNoumenal

Ever since I got disillusioned in reading scifi written decades before my birth, I never got into more contemporary authors. I like the big movie blockbuster as much as the next guy; yet the few recent books I tried to pick up never spoke to me.

But as the world is getting more confusing by the day, our limiting factor on telling the truth becomes not so much a direct ban, but an attempt to see a signal through the noise. To cut through the noise of the news to the important things, we need science fiction. Science fiction breaks the known laws or scientific observations in just a tiny way and carefully explores the implications. Axiom's End and Truth of the Divine, the first two released novels of the Noumena cycle by Lindsay Ellis, spoke to my deep-seated anxieties of today in just the right way.

I need to explain who Lindsay Ellis is. She is a YouTuber, a video essayist prominent for her commentary on pop culture. Pop culture is the de facto holy scripture for many people today, and the main cultural export of America. Like readers and interpreters of holy texts before, pop culture needs its own hermeneutics, its own commentary, and the decentralized group of film school graduates is only happy to provide the workforce for that. Among those, Ellis is a pro, teaching us about the protest music of the Iraq War and applying successive lenses of literary criticism to the Transformers franchise. In 2020 she published her debut novel, and now the sequel.

The books are not set in the present, they are set in the past, the kind of past which we rarely think of as a distant historical period. Action kicks off in California, in the fall of 2007, complete with flip phones. That's when the aliens arrive. The metaphor of aliens as the Other is as old as science fiction, prominent with H.G. Wells and probably before, yet this metaphor is constantly reborn. If for a second, for the sake of the argument, we set aside the question of what constitutes an alien, if we meet someone (or something) who is not human, not Homo Sapiens, not of this planet, what do we do with them?

The answer Ellis gives is a sad one, but disgustingly real. The primary entity that deals with the aliens is the military with their endless talk of capabilities. Militarism of government and of civil society is a major theme. Xenophobia at times is so blinding that the military actors are only building communication barriers, not resolving them. These same actors hold a hot dial for jingoism, toxic masculinity, and outright fascism, and are only eager to unleash the armed paramilitary militia. Even those who subvert the military machine, the defectors, the whistleblowers, more often than not pursue their own mission and advancement and career rather than the common good of humanity.

Who then gets to be on the good side of history? Those who want to build bridges, who want to talk not just about but to the aliens. Those who care about nuance, about writing, about storytelling. Those who know the custody of which US federal agency feels the worst. Those who moved across the borders and know what it takes legally - and culturally. College dropouts and immigrants are apparently humanity's last hope, against not the aliens but itself. And the alien individuals who made it to Earth are not the routine run of the mill functionaries, for something special had to happen for these representatives of their species to come to our remote space rock.

Several other themes of the book are less prominent, yet each gets several triple-fact-checked pages to shine. The commentary on the US healthcare system is short, but not subtle at all for anyone who dealt with it. The ideas of kinship, love, relationships across boundaries of culture, race, and species are sprinkled throughout. There is a passionate discussion of how our ideas of biological sex, gendered pronouns, and gender roles are negotiated anew for the species with a different set of primary and secondary sex characteristics and partially cybernetic bodies. PTSD and substance abuse also appear - and not only for the human characters. Maybe it's a coincidence with my recent life events, but the book commented on several big things that I have been wondering about, before I was able to ask explicit questions.

This is not scifi written by a trained engineer or a scientist. It's not a book written by a nerd, it's a book written by a geek. While the exposition on some technicalities like space travel or body reshaping is pretty solid, it is not the point. This book is not about technological artifacts but pop culture ones. The First Contact with aliens will be shaped by our ideas of ourselves, by our trust, by our desire to communicate, and by the cacophony of stories we tell and amplify to each other. And it doesn't matter where the aliens come from: from across light years of space or from across a line in the sand.

Previous
Previous

Computational data wizardry

Next
Next

The Nontriviality Argument