The present revealed in the future
Invisible Things
Mat Johnson One World
Mat Johnson's latest, Invisible Things, a work of cultural and political satire, is framed around a discovery on Jupiter's moon Europa. Before we get to that, however, take a close look at the novel's opening:
“After months in deep space conducting an intensive field study of social dynamics aboard the cryoship SS Delany, Nalini Jackson, NASAX Post-doctorate Fellow of Applied Sociology, D.A.
Sc., came to an uncomfortable conclusion: She didn't really like people, on the whole. It was an embarrassing realization given that her life's work was studying them.”
There's a lot going on here, but consider the SS Delany, which will later be joined by a second cryoship called the SS Ursula 50. What's the point of these obvious genuflections to Samuel R. Delany and Ursula K. Le Guin? Johnson may be signalling that in this future a person's race and sexual identity — prominent concerns of Delany and Le Guin — are no longer flash points. What's important are economic, theological and political systems and how they shape a society.
During the SS Delany's flyby of Europa, photography drones record an bubble shape on the moon's surface, a biodome. It turns out that the inhabitants of “New Roanoke” have been “collected” from Earth. According to officially sanctioned dogma, each citizen was chosen by God, in effect, “raptured.” Yet in this biodome, one finds all the shops, fast-food restaurants, class inequalities and political chicanery we know from Earth.
Mysterious beings called the “Invisible Things” supply the population with food and supplies. These unseen entities might represent, metaphorically, any of the anti-democratic deities of modern society, tech monopolies, political dark money, much social media, all of which seek covertly to control the world they move in.
Plainly, a reader only needs to squint a little to see that Johnson is regularly pointing to the Trumpian United States. After all, members of the Founders' Party “believe in democracy — they just don't believe anyone who can't afford to rig an election should be able to win one.”