32 pages • 1 hour read
Rivers SolomonAn Unkindness of Ghosts
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Generation Starship
Science fiction storytellers have long been interested in two interdependent ideas. The first idea is that humans can render Earth unlivable through pollution and nuclear war, and the second idea is that there is unlikely to be another planet to which humanity can escape. After all, to render a nearby planet habitable, or to travel the unimaginable astronomical distance towards an already habitable planet, seems a difficult task for a society that cannot coordinate itself enough to take steps to save its own planet. The generation starship story is a compromise between the science fiction writer’s desire to see other planets and the hard facts of scientific reality.
As with any story that begins with the inhabitability of Earth, the genre is often characterized by its bleakness. The humans who would abandon Earth, after all, must be inherently flawed and self-destructive, unable to leave behind their societal flaws through a mere trick of engineering. The question of “what would a society that went through several generations in an enclosed environment look like?” is usually answered “much like us.” What is special about Solomon’s book is that it creates a world in which slavery—which has, in our reality, been abolished—continues into our future. In the starship America, says Solomon, only direct confrontation with past racism and inequality will right the ship and set it on a meaningful course.
Storytelling
The characters in Solomon’s novel tell one another stories. There are myths about melancholy Little Silver, who must destroy herself to destroy the king who covets her, or about the clever Raven, who tricks his captors into swallowing him whole so that he can peck them from within. There is the heroic Night Empress from comic books, who reminds Aster of Giselle. There are the stories Giselle and Aster make up as children, in which they learn gender identity. There is also the story one tells of one’s own history, a point Solomon suggests regarding Aster’s history: “With history, with memory, with retellings, people often settled for the obvious answer. Aster wondered if that was what she’d done with her mother’s journals: written Lune off as mad instead of investigating obvious clues” (50).
Unlike the stories told by Melusine and by the long-dead creators of Night Empress, the story Aster must reconstruct has no ironic lessons or neat conclusions. The authors who began her tale, such as Lune, have had that tale interrupted by political violence. In her case, Lune had to erase her tale as she told it or face retribution for the guards. She left no key to these clues; Aster and Giselle must figure them out on their own. In this way, Aster’s story mirrors the complicated act of reconstructing identity from the wreckage of oppression. Tales and myths may supply a template for such stories, yet discovering them on one’s own is nevertheless difficult and frightening work.
Gender Presentation and Identity
The polyglot culture of the lower decks of the Matilda has a different sense of gender normativity than the rigid monoculture of the upper decks. As Solomon writes, “Due to a broad range of hormonal disturbances, Tarlander bodies did not always present as clearly male or female as the Guard supposed they should” (20). The rules about such things are not always clear, but it is plain that women are not allowed in certain places. For instance, Aster must dress as a man in order to attend the coronation festival for Lieutenant. As a dark-skinned person, Aston—Aster’s masculine name—is allowed where upper deck women are not.
Since women are singled out for sexual abuse by the Matilda guards to a degree that men are not, Aster begins to see that going around as Aston smooths out interactions with guards. However, since she still presents ambiguously—she has no beard—she is singled out for abuse as a potential homosexual. In short, the rules on the upper decks are hard and unyielding, a prison for all concerned. By contrast, the low-deckers do not have the luxury of such hard and fast rules. In the extreme cold of the lower decks, it is sometimes necessary for people to sleep together for warmth and comfort, no matter their gender or orientation.
The Chosen One
Science fiction is written in a variety of subgenres and with a myriad of styles and attitudes. A dominant subgenre of heroic science fiction popular in America is infused with fantasy and thematically engaged with the fight between good and evil and with violent, rollicking solutions to emotional problems. This form of science fiction is sometimes called science fantasy, but such is its popularity that is often treated as synonymous with the genre itself. Such fiction foregrounds heroic archetypes. The villains depicted in such fiction are often inhumanly bad, motivated by nothing but a love of destruction. The heroes, on the other hand, are distinguished by some form of special merit. Perhaps they inherit a lightsaber, are marked by a scar that marks them as a great wizard, or possess an inherit charm, toughness, or intelligence that gets them through scrapes. Many of these stories are written by white men and favor white men as protagonists.
Critics often scoff at this form of storytelling for its simplicity. At their worst, these stories lean heavily on damaging tropes in which, for instance, hordes of dark-skinned monsters roam the countryside, or in which women are helpless to defend themselves, or in which the sidekicks with less merit than the heroes sacrifices themselves so that that the heroes may continue their journey. At their best, however, these tales of heroic daring are among the few stories in which it is suggested that there is any such thing as a meritorious worth inherit in ordinary people. When written carefully and inclusively, these stories can be empowering, especially for people who are not often represented in these tales, such as Aster.
In this regard, An Unkindness of Ghosts is rife with mixed messaging. It is mindfully inclusive, foregrounding characters who are not often seen in such stories. In fact, Aster herself is a myriad of inclusivity, at once dark-skinned, queer, and neuro-atypical. She is also an unparalleled super-genius, blessed by the privilege of others into the highest echelons of society. She is recklessly brave and heroic, and she has inherited magical knowledge of faster-than-light-speed travel through her mother. In this, her inherent merits are not shared by the other people in her cohort, intelligent and capable though they may be. Many of her friends sacrifice themselves so that Aster may see her story through, including Giselle, whose last request is not justice for her death but a place in Aster’s heroic journey towards memory. The chief villain acts with no stated material interest of his own, but with self-destroying and monomaniacal obsession with Aster. Finally, the culmination of revolutionary violence against the state culminates not with a description of power and equity regained, but with Aster’s personal, doomed journey to Earth to reclaim her identity. Solomon’s book complicates the fantastical story of the Chosen One in ways that underscore both the strengths and the weaknesses of the science fantasy genre.
