James Nicoll Reviews

Chana Porter’s 2020 The Seep is a stand-alone science fiction novella¹.

A world ended the day the aliens arrived². A new world began.

Surviving the end of a world gave Trina FastHorse Goldberg-Oneka valuable coping skills she will need the next time her world ends.

The Seep was delighted to encounter humanity and the planet humans lived on. Humans offer the Seep experiences the incorporeal entity would not otherwise have encountered, such as linear time and individual corporeal bodies. The Seep offers humans nigh-godlike control over their bodies, a post-human world of global abundance, even a rudimentary collective unconsciousness.

A few traditionalists retreated to the Compound, where they could enjoy the old way of life without Seep influence. Everyone else, Trina and her wife Deeba very much included, embraced the glorious new world order. Everyone gets to be who they want to be, something transwoman Trina especially appreciates.

Trina begins to appreciate being who you want to be is a concept with drawbacks when she discovers that former colleague Horizon Line isn’t the black man she thought he was. Rather, Horizon appropriated the face and race of his dead boyfriend. For Horizon, this is freedom of expression, while for Trina it smacks of appropriation.

Trina’s next unpleasant lesson comes when Deeba reveals that she is ready for a next step in personal development… which will not involve Trina. At all. Deeba will regress to childhood, abandoning every memory, good and bad, including every memory of Trina.

Trina does not handle her loss well. What’s the point of utopia if Trina has to be alone? The Seep’s clumsy efforts to comfort her fall short. Therefore, there’s only one logical solution: kill Horizon Line.

~oOo~

This is another entry in an informal series I call ​“publishers other than tor dot com offer novellas,” brought to you by ​“I have how many theatre shifts in May?” Long books are going to be challenging to cram into my schedule³. More Words, Deeper Hole.

So, how can an author possibly have a plot in a utopian setting, if the story they want to tell isn’t about an outsider showing up for a guided tour of the People’s Department Stores amid lectures on the benefits of an intercontinental pneumatic tube network, gold-based currency, and volcanically-facilitated laundry services?

The answer is, of course, by having those elements of the setting that are utopian be largely irrelevant to the problems with which the protagonist is struggling. The Seep goes one step farther, because not only do the purposes to which the people around Trina put the Seep make Trina’s problems worse, the people around Trina are spectacularly unhelpful.

If getting dumped weren’t bad enough, Trina’s neighbors are inordinately unhelpful. They object to her abruptly declining hygiene — Trina is too depressed to do the dishes or run the vacuum — and also to the fact that she’s living in a home intended for two or more people. Obviously, the responsible thing for a woman who has just been discarded without warning by her wife of decades is to immediately downsize, because unexpected relocation is totally something a depressed, grieving person should be able to manage.

Horizon Line is the sort of person for whom consent is really more of a me thing, something he gets to have but which is an optional extra for other people. Other people should have the grace to not harsh his mellow by disagreeing with or criticizing his decisions. In fact, as Trina discovers, Horizon has discovered how to use the Seep to guide the people around Horizon towards the decisions they would have made, if only they were as enlightened as Horizon. Shooting him might be an overreaction but it’s an entirely understandable one.

As for the Seep? It means well, but to quote the author:

The Seep had the nuance of a golden retriever. 

Thanks to above, the author has absolutely no trouble giving poor Trina many opportunities to rise to the occasion or, by failing to do so, learn valuable life lessons.

To be honest, I picked this novella because it was short, because I’d never heard of it, and because the cover caught my eye. Result: success! Porter’s skillfully told story was a delightful discovery. I will be searching out more works by this author.

The Seep is available here (Soho Press), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Bookshop UK), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: Although by the standards of the pre-1980s, it would be a novel.

2: USA delenda. Presumably, you could insert any nation name before delenda.

3: Especially since I am now a Beaverton contributor who needs to justify that title by actually contributing.