by Colin Hamilton
Speculative Book Reviews
Writers are sometimes advised to write the book they'd most like to read. We invite you to write the book review of a book of speculative nonfiction you wish was out there, or a book that was never written but could have been, or a lost book of which there is scant evidence, or a book to be written in a hundred years. We invite you to consider the aesthetic qualities of this book and to use the opportunity of your review to push, adhere to, or reconsider the boundaries of speculation in nonfiction, as you see them. We see these reviews as furthering the conversation this journal seeks to encourage. We invite you to have fun. The limit is the limit of your speculation. Traditional reviews of nonfiction books that utilize speculation are also welcome.
Among Antonia Wallace’s six largely unread books, perhaps the least appreciated and most unread is Clea, which imagines a future in which scientific leaps, anchored in gene editing, pharmaceutical precision and surgical enhancement, have allowed humans to alter any number of physical imperfections and fragilities, through which we first escape aging and ultimately the necessity of death itself, although it continues to linger, wolf-like, on the margins of society, occasionally making an unexpected, violent entry into this otherwise protected time.
In this era of dystopian obsession, a different author might imagine a world in which everyone is granted permanent youth apocalyptically. It’s not hard to project the angles: the exhaustion of natural resources that goes into sustaining endless life; the infinities of boredom that accumulate like barnacles on the years; the nihilistic thrill-seeking of the near immortal; the supremist ideology that progressively narrows the gene pool to a singular ideal of perfection. (I was just reading a review of a new book, Chana Porter’s The Seep, in which an alien entity discretely invades Earth, solving all of our problems and eliminating our humanity in the process...) The society Wallace describes, however, is mostly idyllic, and her future, by any historic standard, is a well fed and tolerant place. But.
But despite all the promise of eternal youth and a generous diet of anti-depressant-infused beef-like proteins, there are in Wallace’s future still some who fall victim to “a mind of winter” and indulge an inner compulsion not just to give into their own decline but to embrace all that it means to age and weaken, to die. These people, “the rotters” as they are called, are deeply disturbing to their robust, beautiful peers, and are perceived as another virus in their midst to be expelled, a societal glitch, a flawed algorithm.
Most are shunned and driven away like lepers of another age, but Wallace’s world retains our dual reaction to horror, both repulsion and, for some, an irrepressible compulsion to pull back the curtain. To touch it. Beneath the elegant, logical sheen of this world, a sub-culture has developed in which those who embrace their own ends become something akin to performance artists, enacting their decline in the far corners of a dark web or through secret cabarets for the entertainment of voyeurs. The most popular rotters amass cult-like followings, existing somewhere between Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist” and YouTube Svengalis.
Wallace’s story is told through the experience of Justine, an accomplished physicist who, despite her evident vim and vigor, has lived far into her second century. Intrigued by the rumors she’s heard and perhaps by some primordial stirring in her enhanced hippocampi, one night she ventures with a crowd of colleagues into one of the underground, velveteen clubs where the aging gather and the curious stray. There she sees Clea.
Generations of middle-age men in both fiction and reality have found themselves unnerved by adolescent flowering, and the story of their humiliating, doomed pursuit is one we know well. Wallace inverts this tale: restored Justine is fixated by Clea’s exotic pallor, by the unknown liver spots that, leopard-like, ascend her arms, by the charms of her dry cough, by the coarseness of her grey hair. Every description is written in a way that eroticizes Clea’s mortality, while marking Justine’s robust health as sterile, scentless and numb.
“Clea,” Wallace said in an interview I found buried deep online after nearly giving up my search, “is my rejection of the cult of possibilities in favor of the hard church of difficult pleasures. I find the young exhausting, but even worse are mid-level, middle age executives wearing shorts and baseball caps or grown couples on dates at Disney movies. Homes in which ‘young adult’ fiction comprises the only dozen books, displayed beside staged family photos in matching polo shirts. I’m appalled by adults who are applauded for speaking the truth when all they’ve actually done is throw a childish tantrum. There was a time when we strove toward rites of passage, celebrated them, when we fought to be accepted as the adults we’re becoming, but increasingly I feel as though an entire generation, maybe three, would reject all the terrifying freedom of maturity for one long suck on the teat. It’s as though, given another bite of the apple, we’ve opted to Edenic ignorance instead.”
For Justine’s curiosity seeking friends, the evening’s entertainment is a daring and momentary distraction, and they quickly return to the simple lives they’d been leading, but the image of Clea in all her doomed glory has somehow attached itself to Justine and begins to infect her. In her physics journals, Justine finds herself drawn to articles about orbital, optical and particle decay, bedrocks of twentieth century thinking that her own highly praised work has called into question for their defeatist assumptions. She covers white boards with complex mathematical equations, which are meant to bring her peace but do not. She visits a spa and has the last two weeks peeled from her skin and sucked from her pores, but that little taste of death has burrowed deep. Eventually she goes back.
What she discovers is that she is far from Clea’s only suitor. In fact there are varied, equally perfect rivals – a plasticine gameshow host, a senator known for his moralistic stance against reproduction, a captain recently returned from a long space voyage two years younger than when he’d left – but there is something in Justine’s urgent need that matches Clea’s own lack of time and a surreptitious affair is sparked. While Justine is first drawn to all the unknown, forbidden secrets of Clea’s flesh, which are described in long and longing paragraphs, the more dangerous seduction is ultimately by Clea’s mortal thinking: the vitality of doing almost anything for a final time, the rare power that one amasses by being able to say “no more.” Although Justine repeatedly begs Clea to accept her protection, to allow Justine to give her life, it is her own attachment to health that unravels.
At this point, Clea devolves, unfortunately, into a very traditional, even male, perhaps colonial novel, in which Justine, as a representative of an advanced society, sets out to save the seemingly weaker, more vulnerable Other, who never emerges as a fully realized character in her own right, only to find herself ultimately corrupted by Clea’s primitive ways. “Going native,” as it were, Justine abandons the world as she knows it, and the final chapter devolves into a long, lecturing monologue, not unlike the quote above.
Colin Hamilton is the author of a novel The Thirteenth Month (Black Lawrence Press), and a poetry chapbook (Kent State University Press). He is currently working on a collection of stories based on imagined books found in the discard room of a library. He has helped create a library, a center for dance, and multiple affordable housing projects for artists. He lives in St. Paul, where he runs a consulting business for nonprofits.