Alien Virus Love Disaster
Abbey Mei Otis
Small Beer Press, 2018
Reviewed by Jason Resnikoff
When the world ends, things will be pretty much as they are now, only worse. After the aliens arrive and when robots walk among us, when people live on the moon and truckers shuttle daily between the Earth and the asteroid belt, everything will be as it is today, just a little more so and a few shades darker. In Abbey Mei Otis’s beautiful and haunting debut story collection, Alien Virus Love Disaster, it is the absence of change that will make the future a disaster—the disaster won’t be a future at all, only the world as it is at present, in perpetuity.
Readers seeking dystopian portrayals of a future that is only slightly not-the-present currently enjoy a wide selection of titles to choose from. Alien Virus Love Disaster offers something more. Otis swims among the tropes of science fiction much like Philip K. Dick—dreamily, with winning irony and wry gallows humor, with real love and deep sympathy for human weakness, as a means of exploring characters’ inner lives. For example, in “Moonkids,” children born and raised on the moon must, at age sixteen, take an unreasonably difficult exam (think the SATs but with differential calculus). If they fail, they are deported to Earth, where the overpowering gravity of 1g leaves their lithe lunar bodies crushed and deformed. Typical of the collection as a whole, Otis uses the metaphor to explore with great poignancy the trials of being embodied, of facing exploitation, of growing into your body, and of the sexist expectations that make adolescence that much harder.
The collection feels as though it inhabits a single, coherent universe, and the stories maintain a consistent pseudo-adolescent tone that Otis wields to great effect. The prose naturally navigates its way between casual, teenage vernacular and fresh idioms of arresting beauty—“watch the blood fall out of me in ropes”—that are by turns disarming and powerful. While the perspective is, for the most part, that of youth and early adulthood, it seeks to describe the bitter realities of living under—there’s really no other way to put it—unchecked neoliberalism. If, in the future, humanity has reached the stars, so has labor exploitation and primitive accumulation. The major constraints of this world will be familiar to readers: governments that poison you, doctors who don’t care, suburbs that have become slums, teachers forced to read off scripts word for word. In the story “Rich People,” an interloper attends a party where the wealthy entertain themselves with demonstrations of unforgiveable waste. Otis draws a dreamscape of the all-too-familiar Teflon-like protections that shield the rich from the possibility that justice might stick: “He pinched the spine of the blade between his thumb and forefinger and flung the knife high up into the night. It vanished into the darkness, and he was so rich—everyone was so rich—that it never came down.” If, in the future, someone were to ask me what it felt like to live in the early twenty-first century, I could confidently point to this passage and say, “Like this.”
That’s no mean feat. Still, a part of me wants more. If this collection suffers from a fault, it might be its relentlessness, its repeated one note of despair. There’s something a little too typical and a little too easy about the widespread and admittedly reasonable conviction that something must be done and that there’s nothing to be done. For an exemplary expression of the resignation that runs through the collection, take one of the last lines of “Not An Alien Story”: “Things aren’t going to change. We aren’t going to get jobs. Animals aren’t going to pad through our dreams and whisper the answers. The sea will keep creeping. The Earth will grow smaller and shiver in its sleep.” It would be unfair to burden this accomplished collection of stories with the demand that it also serve as a political manifesto showing a way out. The volume is a subtle articulation of the current moment. It does what some say art should do: it holds up a mirror. But this mirror image doesn’t quite seem entirely true. These stories dream vividly, with great richness and inspiration, but maybe they could dream just a little bigger. This is not so much a criticism of Otis specifically, but of dystopianism as a genre, or a style, or a conviction. It may offer a beautiful elegy of coping, but one that’s also too often bereft of hope. As one who shares the criticisms made in Alien Virus Love Disaster, I find myself suffering from dystopia-fatigue. The hopelessness is too total, too paralyzing. There is more contingency in the world than we know.
But perhaps that criticism says more about me than it does about Alien Virus Love Disaster. To her credit, Otis tries to reclaim something from the mess we’re in. Even the immiseration that neoliberalism wreaks has not foreclosed the possibility of beauty for her characters. In the title story, “Alien Virus Love Disaster,” the narrator, infected by an alien virus and on the verge of a stupendous transformation that will most likely also result in her death, succors herself with the consolation, “Like I don’t have to worry anymore about anything, no regrets or what-ifs, because before I go, I’m going to make something beautiful.” In a way, that’s precisely what Otis has done with Alien Virus Love Disaster. As the waters rise and ruination promises to devour what it doesn’t flood, she has wrought something beautiful out of the wreckage. That might be about the best anyone can hope for in the dystopian near-future—or perhaps I should say the near-now. And maybe that isn’t too shabby. But I think we can demand even more. Not just roses, but bread too.