![]() ![]() ![]() One queer character, Surgeon General Theo Smith, describes life on the ship as one of stark degradation:Ī queer. ![]() This novel is unapologetically queer and astutely rendered Solomn’s deft world-building creates an evocative portrait of a childhood bound-up in slavery, misogyny, and homophobia. Aster soon realizes that she, along with her slave compatriots, must rebel or face a fatally ominous future. The challenges faced by Aster, and her community are searingly visceral. Solomon’s work is the love child of other queer science fiction writers of color whose publications align the historical politics of colonization and the intergenerational mental and metaphysical damages caused by subjection.Īster, the novel’s black protagonist, is a brutalized passenger on the HSS Matilda, a large spaceship dedicated to moving the last remnants of humanity to a supposititious “Promised Land.” All the dark-skinned passengers on the ship are made to live under the strict and dehumanizing rule of the ship’s leaders, similar to black people living in the United States’ plantation-era South. River Solomon’s new speculative fiction novel illuminates a dark corner of our collective past and current reality: slavery’s psychological impact and cultural trauma as its own grueling and coded character. ![]() ‘An Unkindness of Ghosts’ by River Solomon ![]()
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