How science fiction has seen me through the pandemic (so far)

Since the pandemic started in March of 2020, I’ve been watching and reading a lot of science fiction during the pandemic. I often like to say flippantly that it’s because I’d really like to escape this planet. The problems and politics of fictional space worlds are much more appealing than the ones we’re all entrenched in right now.

And it appeases my daughter, who says I watch and read too many depressing things: “These aren’t real! So they’re ok!” I explained to her she when pointed out comments that the politics, oppression, and human horror that I described in my scifi favorites were just as bad—if not worse—than what’s happening in the real world. And it gives me hope to see other humans like us solving problems bigger than ours, so I keep finding new scifi stories for my escapist cravings.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I said that our initial quarantine was a basically really slow, boring YA dystopia novel, and others have compared our reality to scifi as well. But while I’m getting ready for COVID 4 (the 4th school year affected by COVID), I thought I’d take a few minutes to recommend some amazing scifi and fantasy books and shows.

Space and politics, reimagined

For me, it started with The Expanse, which I loved watching. (There are books, too, but I haven’t read them.) It was the people, mostly. I’m always driven by compelling characters, and the crew of the Rocinante are complex people who draw me in. But it’s also the politics and the scope of it all. On Earth, Mars, and in the belt, I see the national, ethnic, gender, and racial tensions reimagined and scrambled. Our problems, but different, and instead of sapping my energy and driving me further into depression, they give me hope.

Seeing our problems reimagined gives me hope. We’re in a pandemic and we are ignoring science while Holden and his crew are fighting to stop the world from being overtaking by a novel, alien protomolecule. The believers and the deniers are at war for humanity, but it’s not my war, and I can trust that Holden and Naomi and Alex and Amos will prevail. Other problems will arise, but the righteous, complex, noble characters will ultimately prevail.

In a similar vein, my current obsession is For All Mankind, an alternate history of the space race. It begins with Soviety cosmonauts landing on the moon in 1969, and then chronicles how the space race, technology, U.S. politics, and international relations shift in response to that one major swap. Again, I love the characters (except for Danny—he’s definitely the weakest link in terms of character development), and I love the way it uses archival-ish footage to recreate a historical feel to it.

One of the best things about it is that women became part of the space program earlier (the third episode, “Nixon’s Women,” is one of my favorites), and that also changed the course of history, affecting presidencies, the ERA, and more. I’m still processing the way that LGBTQ charactesr and politics are intersecting in season 3 (no spoilers!), but it’s interesting to be sure. And of course, I firmly believe that the last episode of Season 2 is one of the best of all time.

Other space-based shows I’ve watched are Away (so disappointed there won’t be another season!), Lost In Space (I’ll always cherish memories of watching it on Teleparty with my son while I had COVID over Christmas!), The First (slow, meh), Invasion (slow, WOW!), Foundation (I feel guilty for not reading the books, and I hear they’re very different), Another Life (I didn’t make it past the first several episodes)…and I feel like I’m probably missing something.

Unsettling but settling literary speculations

In literature, I love the term “speculative fiction,” because it covers all manner of what ifs. I suppose it works for screen narratives as well, but it feels truer in fiction because as a reader, I’m invited and required to do plenty of the speculating in order to fully imagine the visual, spatial, and otherwise sensory world of the book. In a recent-ish article in The New Yorker, journalist Jia Tolentina quotes Queens College English professor Seo-Young J. Chu’s book Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science Fictional Theory of Representation (which I have not yet read) and describes her notion that science fiction is not “imaginative” or “unrealistic,” but that it’s is particularly appealing in today’s world because it, like our own realities, is “cognitively estranging.” By this she means that so much of our everyday lives is basically mindblowing. We understand it, but we don’t and/or can’t. From financial derivatives to metadata to the effects of climate change, so much of our realities are less concrete than the checkbooks, card catalogs, to weather forecasts of days gone by.

Yes. Maybe that’s what’s been so bewildering about these pandemic years: although the concrete details of life have shifted and shifted again so many times, it’s increasingly hard to understand all the mechanisms that connect us—and those that divide us. So instead, I want to lose myself in books and other stories where the “cognitive estrangement” is less jarring—because it’s supposed to be feel distranced from reality since it’s in a book. Real life isn’t supposed to feel quite this unsettling…so reading unsettling books somehow helps me feel more stable.

So here are some of the best speculative books I’ve read:

• N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy is at the top of my list. The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, and The Stone Sky are just plain stunning, and when I finishe the series, I thought: “I need to read the entire series again because I’m just starting to understand this world.” I haven’t gone in for the re-read yet (too many books to read!), but I’m hoping that the movies are indeed in production and will be faithful adaptations that capture the complexity of the world and its characters. N.K. Jemisin is a MacArthur Fellow, and I can’t say enough about how she blew my mind with her world of seismically-sensitive-and-powerful people. This one really made me think about our world and my own work for change in the world. I wrote more about it in a previous post, “To be or not to be patient.”
• The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin: I really wanted to love this book, but it felt to me like it could have been a great short story rather than a novel. After I finished it I found out it originally was a short story, and she’s actually a sequel. I hope that second one does more to develop the characters…I don’t know…I loved the idea of it, but it just felt like there were too many main characters to really develop them fully. I liked the parts that hung with a single person/avatar for longer…but when they were all together they just didn’t feel very interesting.
• Kindred by Octavia Butler: I had been meaning to read this for years, and as a time travel book, it’s less scifi and more speculative. Wow. It was an intense reading experience, and it showed me the legacy of unflinching representations of the violence of enslavement from which books like The Underground Railroad spring.
• Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago by Octavia Butler: I first read Dawn in college, and it was the first book that hooked me into scifi. I love the world and Lilith, the main character. I enjoyed reading the second and third for the first time, and it was interesting to see the world and species develop over time. Highly recommended! In some places it’s called the Xenogenesis series and some it’s Lilith’s Brood.
• Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler: I know these are supposed to be her best, but I love the Dawn trilogy so much more. The whole “I’m starting a religion called Earthseed” always felt strange to me. For me, Parable of the Talents was both more intersesting because I thought the characters were developed more thoroughly and more painful because it just got horribly violent and devastating on both graphic and emotional levels. Ouch.
• His Dark Materials series: I started the series first, but then finished the second book (and third) before watching season 2. I’m glad I read it, and it was engrossing and entertaining, but I think Mrs. Coulter is too much of a caricature to be believeable in both iterations.
• The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa: A dystopian world where objects and the memories of them disappear…very surreal. I loved it.
• Janelle Monae’s The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer: I wanted to like this more than I did…I liked some of the stories but was a little bored by others. I wonder what it was like to co-write fiction stories…I’d like to hear an interview about that.
• The Cave by José Saramago: I have never read a book with such long sentences and paragraphs! I loved the potter and his family, the same-not-sameness of the world, and allegory.
• Night Bitch by Rachel Yoder: More of realistic-ish allegory, but this one was such a pleasure because it reminded me of those baby days when I felt like I was losing myself or becoming someone/thing else. Also one that I think could have been a short story instead of a novel.

And an Emily St. John Mandel coda

I read Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven several years before the COVID pandemic, and I absolutely loved watching the HBO iteration of Station Eleven this summer. Wonderful acting and storytelling, and it made me want to re-read the book (though I haven’t yet—see above, too many books to read!). I read The Glass Hotel this year as well, though I don’t think it has much in the way of speculative-ness…until you also consider the connections that are revealed in Sea of Tranquality…though maybe I’m forgetting something?

Sea of Tranquility was astouding because it fulfilled all the things I love in books in general (intense emotions, lovely language, compelling characters) and in a speculative genre (space, time, making sense of self and the world). Reading it made me want to go back and read her previous works—and also to beg her to write more. I feel like there must be more in her brain and this world. What happened to Vincent? Did she fall through the anomoly?

A meta-postscript: Why I won’t write more book review/list posts like this

I guess there’s a reason why I just put stars on Goodreads instead of writing book reviews. I don’t enjoy writing reviews and I’m not good at it. In the future, I’ll just write more idea-based posts about books and films and television–like the top part about why speculative stories help me in the pandemic and my reflections on the idea of “cognitive estrangement” that I read about.