Mindscape

"Mindscape is a challenge book for me, and hopefully for anyone reading this. Andrea Hairston is a genius. She has done a billion things. She’s a musician, she’s a poet, she’s a playwright, and she wrote this novel – which belongs to a category of alien invasion story I think people really like, even though it doesn’t involve aliens coming out and waving their tentacles and talking to us. That category is the barrier story. A famous example is Annihilation , the Alex Garland movie based on the Jeff VanderMeer book. The Jeff VanderMeer book got a lot of hype in the last ten years. It’s a fantastic novel. Annihilation is about this region called Area X that is surrounded by a bubble, and inside the rules of nature are different, and strange things are happening. An expedition goes into this bubble, and it’s much weirder than they expect. Or Roadside Picnic , the novel that inspired the classic Soviet film Stalker and the Ukrainian video S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl … They’re all about zones where reality is different, and people go in there to find precious things; but they also encounter great danger, and they’re transformed. This is an alien invasion of our geography, but also of our mastery over the world. Humans have pretty much mapped the whole planet, and we’ve figured things out. We’re not used to a part of the world saying, ‘No, you don’t know what’s here.’ Our biggest problem right now is finding species before we kill them. So I think we are fascinated and frightened by, and romanticise, the idea of an alien force taking part of the landscape and saying, ‘This is now other. This is something else that can kill you, that can change you. You don’t know what’s in there.’ Annihilation and Stalker are great examples of this kind of work. It’s such a hard book to describe. The basic premise is that Earth is chopped up by this winding, crazy energy barrier into many little pockets, and people at first cannot pass between these pockets. So civilization breaks down. Nearly everyone dies. The book is set when people have figured out how to re-establish contact between the surviving pockets of civilization, moving through the barrier in a dangerous but controlled way, and they’re trying to rebuild a world government and culture. It’s not an easy book. I’m white, and this is a Black book: Andrea Hairston is Black, and she writes a character in this book who is supposed to be what she calls an ‘ethnic throwback’ – a Black woman who has the culture of a Black woman from the 1990s or the early 2000s, talks in African American vernacular English, and just makes no concessions to the reader that she’s going to act white for you. And I think that’s a really important part of her message, because the book is about how this alien barrier divides humans, and as soon as humans reestablish contact across it, there are differences of race, economics, health… The world has gotten into a really shitty place. And the question of the book is, ‘Can we overcome these barriers? What will it take to do that? What is the value of our barriers?’ Sometimes they’re a good thing, because they allow different kinds of people to exist. What do we get out of reaching across them? This mysterious barrier is not here to take our resources or to kill us all, or to set up a colony and pretend to be our friends while sterilizing us, or any of the things aliens do in stories. It’s much weirder than that. If you want a chewy read, go for Mindscape. There are people who can communicate with and even open passages in the barrier, and they come from what I believe is an animist African tradition. They’re kind of griots, or singers. They do a lot of drugs. They have a very spiritual connection to the barrier, because the barrier is psychological as well as physical, and they’re very important to the story. The book starts with the most important one of them signing the treaty that’s going to bring all the separate domains of humanity back together, and almost immediately an assassin comes out of the crowd and tries to shoot the people behind her, and she puts her body in the way and takes the bullets. That’s the first thing that happens in the book. So the relationship between these women and the barrier is very mysterious and important. So I will say up front that probably a good chunk of readers did not find it comprehensible and fun, and I do wish we had done more aggressive editing to tighten it up. But I love stories about investigating the unknown, especially when it’s dangerous. Have you heard of the SCP wiki? ‘Secure, contain, protect.’ It is a community, a horror website that began with a brilliant, formal idea – formal in that it’s literally about a form. Someone wrote a series of procedures for keeping an object safe and unable to kill you, without describing what the object itself was until the end. You get clues about what the monster is from the instructions for handling it. Exordia sprang from a desire to have a bunch of characters investigating something weird and analysing it methodically, and running into the boundaries of human knowledge – but not necessarily the boundaries of their own ingenuity. It is a book about a woman, Anna. She lives in New York. She is a war orphan, for very distressing reasons, from Kurdistan. She was raised by foster parents in America. She is very unhappy, and one day she meets an alien in Central Park. She’s the only one who can see it, and because of the particular way she is screwed up, she doesn’t conclude that she’s hallucinating, but rather that this alien is real and has a special connection to her. So when the alien later shows up at her apartment, bleeding to death, and says, ‘Listen, I need your help. There’s something on this planet that is important to the fate of the whole universe, and you and I have this cosmic bond that will help me find it’ – she just accepts it. She rolls with it because she wants to be in the kind of story where she matters. The object that the aliens are looking for, which ends up being called Blackbird by most of the humans, seems like a crashed spaceship at first. But when you get near it, it changes you, and it changes you in ways that are constantly changing. So a lot of the book is devoted to running experiments. What happens if we put a mouse near this thing? What happens if we send a signal to it? And the humans involved must make – I hope! – intelligent, thorough efforts to not die as a result of the experiments. Their failures have to be both unforeseeable enough that you don’t blame the characters for not predicting it, but just tantalizingly comprehensible enough that you can believe there’s a solution – which there is. Blackbird is trying to do something, and all of its apparently bizarre behaviour is united by an underlying principle, which is really what a lot of the book is about. Is there an underlying logic to the universe, to different kinds of behaviour? And I do, in a modest way, attempt to propose the reason the universe exists… I do think one of the fundamental questions in science is the same as one of the fundamental questions about aliens. Why do we exist? Given that we exist, is our existence inevitable or a complete freak accident? Are we alone in the universe because the existence of life is just incredibly unlikely, or is the universe in some way set up – not by a divine hand, but by its own logic – to produce complex systems that end up looking like human beings or aliens? Is there some basis, without resorting to the divine, for the idea that the universe is driving towards life? Not because it has a plan, but because the laws of mathematics and nature themselves somehow militate towards a certain kind of complexity? There are people who’ve suggested in real life that, with good enough math, you can prove that a system of random stuff happening – like static on a TV screen – given energy and time, will tend to evolve structures that maximize its ability to capture that energy and release it as waste. We think of entropy, the idea that everything breaks down, as something that rots and simplifies, but maybe part of thermodynamics is that systems will tend to get more complex and structured so that they can produce the maximum amount of waste, so that they can use up as many resources as possible. We humans are pretty good at using up energy and turning it into waste, and more advanced aliens than us would probably be even better at capturing energy from the sun or whatever, and using it to do things. So yes, Exordia is pretentious enough to propose a fundamental reason for all of existence. Why else write science fiction? Yes. The book is set in the long-ago, nostalgic year of 2013, which really seems to slip by people sometimes – they’re like, ‘Why is this book constantly talking about Obama ?’ One reason is that it is set in Kurdistan, and I wanted to have a character who had been through Anfal, the genocide campaign against the Kurds by the Iraqis, and was still fairly young. So I couldn’t set it in the present day, although there are plenty of old women who survived that genocide, and I do try to speak about them in the story. But another reason is that one of the basic premises of Exordia is: what if aliens showed up and they treated us the way America treats the Middle East ? A place to send agents, proxies, and drones. One of the protagonists, who works in the Obama administration, is trying to explain to American soldiers, ‘Listen, the way you have treated Iraqis and Afghans and Pakistanis is the way the aliens are treating us, so the fact that they just accidentally killed a bunch of us? You’ve just got to take it. We can’t do anything about it.’ There’s a fair bit of anger in there from me, but also from my attempt to represent the perspective of Kurds and other people about how America acts as an alien invader, going into these situations it doesn’t really understand, pursuing a very narrow objective, and leaving devastation in its wake. There’s the other part of Exordia, too, that is kind of trashy… I just love books like The Andromeda Strain , the classic Michael Crichton novel from the 1960s, where a space probe crashes in a town in Arizona, and there’s something inside that just kills everyone. It clots their blood within seconds, and they are found lying dead on the ground with their bodies just full of hardened scab, and the rest of the book is scientists trying to figure out what did this. They’re all in their space suits and laboratories, and we get details of all the instruments and the experiments they’re running…. I just love that stuff. I love the soldiers walking around in the hazmat suits, waiting for an alien to jump out and bite them. I can’t get enough."