AUDITION, Kiwi social SFF-lite that sets a tendentious trap of prose

AUDITION
PIP ADAM
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.8* of five

The Publisher Says: A genre-defying novel—part science fiction, part social realism—from one of the most powerful voices in New Zealand literature today.

A spaceship called Audition is hurtling through the cosmos. Squashed immobile into its largest room are three giants: Alba, Stanley and Drew. If they talk, the spaceship keeps moving; if they are silent, they resume growing.

Talk they must, and as they do, Alba, Stanley and Drew recover their shared memory of what has been done to their former selves—experiences of imprisonment, violence and misrecognition, of disempowerment and underprivilege.

Pip Adam’s uncategorisable new novel, part science fiction, part social realism, asks what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much room—about how we imagine new forms of justice, and how we transcend the bodies and selves we are given.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Like Stand on Zanzibar a half-century ago, this story is making a point along multiple fronts of effort. Stylisically it's resolutely avant-garde, modernist, and uses that tradition of liberation from centuries old linear narrative convention to oppose itself as completely as possible. Oppose from what? That verb needs a subject!

It takes the opportunity to set oppositional positions to, well, modernity; the way the modern world steadily relentlessly inexorably shrinks the essential liberty, autonomy, self-determination of Humanity. This is a powerful theme to pursue. It leads into some dark meditations on confinement.

It is most evidently a story in support of the anticarceral abolitionism gaining ground among progressives. More quietly it enables, encourages, examination of the ways individuals accept labels and thus limitations, even when the labels aren't very good fits. It's not foregrounded the way opposition to the carceral state is. It's there for you to consider.

I enjoy novels that expect me to bring my own ideas and knowledge to bear on reading them. I enjoy being asked to hold a thought more than a page or two before the thought pays off, hooks into another thought to make a distinctive picture. It is a pleasure to be exercised and entertained and experience elucidation of a viewpoint while immersing oneself in lovely phrasemaking.

Alba searches around her body and there is not an ounce of homesickness. She misses nothing. She was born into the world and it was not happy to see her. This isn’t her home. She doesn’t want to take advantage or be any more of a burden than she already is here. They hadn’t asked her to come, she hadn’t asked to be there. It isn’t a welcome—it’s an extremely advanced form of attack and defence.

I think that, in its compactness and its rhythm, carries more than surface meaning. Alba's is a point of view I think many could and should attend to. Her sense of...wrongness...is it all external? Is it self-recognition without self-acceptance? Is Alba...are Drew and Stanley as well...forced to keep talking as the means of propelling their starbound prison moving away from Earth in order to get their pasts out of their heads? What does the taking up of physical space have to do with the implied relationship to psychic...emotional...space? All the way into eternal exile and utter Othering in order to get permission to be ecstatically oneself. A price paid without any kind or sort of reward is rare, if one becomes an other self in response to it. A different self, an intentional self, a truthful self.

The ending of this story offers that future of selfness to the giants. It's not found the way a lot of readers will be comfortable with. But if you can read about people told they are too much for this world being thrust out of that world by being squashed into sealed containers and hurled into lethal vacuum, you really should look at why this particular ending bothers you (if it does..I found it the most liberating part of the story).

Pip Adam is a writer who reckons with ideas in her fiction. It's not always clear to me that I'm on the same train of thought as she is. That is, for me as a reader, very interesting and gives a dynamism to the words I'm reading. I experience the need to consider, "did I read that sentence and change my view of the story I thought I was reading by Pip Adam's design or my own?" very involving.

It's a story I felt repaid my attention with well-honed ideas I'd had in duller forms before that. I'd wished, during the read, for...ornamentation...flourishes...a bit of zhuzhery. I can't say the directness of prose was unpleasant or uninvolving, so I can't call it a flaw. I can say that me, reader me, the id that devours Story, wanted it; so I can't offer a perfect five but I can't take much away from that height. It's a cruel place to land:

It’s a strange feeling to know that they will never have to explain this to any of their kind. They will never return. They had been sent to die. That’s clear now. Maybe they had been sent to take over this world, as some kind of front guard or maybe no one that sent them could imagine this. But they are lost to their own world now. They don’t belong where they have have come from and they don’t belong here. They are the only ones of their kind who will make it.

Pip Adam made it.