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WORK TITLE: An Unkindness of Ghosts
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.riverssolomon.com/
CITY: Cambridge
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Stanford University, B.A.; University of Texas at Austin, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Freelance writer; also works part-time as a teaching assistant.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Rivers Solomon’s debut science fiction novel is titled An Unkindness of Ghosts, and it has attracted attention for its provocative examination of race, gender, and sexuality. It is set on a multigenerational colony ship that is sharply divided by race. Protagonist “Aster has little to offer folks in the way of rebuttal when they call her ogre and freak,” explained a Qwillery website contributor in a plot summary linked to an interview with Solomon. “Aster lives in the lowdeck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South. For generations, Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way, the ship’s leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions and deep indignities on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster.” However, Aster is not as powerless as she seems—she has inherited her late mother’s notes on making medicines from herbs grown on the ship, and she has been asked to use them to heal the ship’s commander. “Embroiled in a grudge with a brutal overseer,” continued the Qwillery contributor, “Aster learns there may be a way to improve her lot—if she’s willing to sow the seeds of civil war.”
The inspiration for An Unkindness of Ghosts came from a variety of sources. “Unkindness welled up from a lot of different places inside me. I’d been disturbed by what I was seeing in the media, the slaughter of Black people by the state. I’d been thinking a lot about maps and the arbitrariness of land and borders. That one Ursula LeGuin bit from The Left Hand of Darkness comes to mind,” Solomon said in an interview on the Illustrated Page website. “I’d been meditating on geography and diaspora and the idea of how living in space would change all of our notions of that. Star Trek was an inspiration, for sure, as was Battlestar Galactica. US history. Languages I’d studied in college.” “We have our real world, our Earth, and the experiences therein, but what do those experiences look like, feel like, sound like when filtered through a sci-fi lens?” Solomon asked in a Rumpus interview. “How do you write these life-based experiences into a fantastical setting? People are people, sure, but to my knowledge, no one has spent the entirety of their lives enslaved on a space ship lost in the void.” “Space heightened and emphasized many of the themes that were most important to me,” Solomon said in a Shelf Awareness interview. “I wanted to talk about the trauma of being a refugee, of being homelandless, of being part of a diaspora; the cosmos–a big black vacuum where pieces of matter, let alone real land, are light-years and light-years apart–allowed me to discuss how deep that trauma could be. When you’re abused, it feels like there’s no escape. What better way to convey the sense of no escape than a vessel lost in space? It’s life under a brutal regime or certain death.”
Critics enjoyed Solomon’s debut. Their dystopic space ship “is a well-crafted world,” assessed a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “and while the tyrannical regime of its leadership feels like a familiar dystopic trope, the diversity of the people who inhabit it … is refreshingly visible and vital.” While “the story momentarily strains here and there to contain everything,” declared a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “the overall achievement … is stunning.” “A simply riveting read from cover to cover,” asserted an Internet Bookwatch reviewer, Solomon’s debut “… is a ‘must’ for the personal reading lists of dedicated science fiction fans.” The novel “will appeal to a wide variety of readers,” concluded Anna Mickelsen in Booklist. “Solomon’s impassioned, speculative, literary book is sorely needed on library shelves.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, August 1, 2017, Anna Mickelsen, review of An Unkindness of Ghosts, p. 46.
Internet Bookwatch, December, 2017, review of An Unkindness of Ghosts.
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2017, review of An Unkindness of Ghosts.
Publishers Weekly, August 14, 2017, review of An Unkindness of Ghosts, p. 53.
ONLINE
Foreword Reviews, https://www.forewordreviews.com/ (September 1, 2017), J.G. Stinson, review of An Unkindness of Ghosts.
Illustrated Page, https://theillustratedpage.wordpress.com/ (October 2, 2017), “Author Interview: Rivers Solomon.”
Qwillery, http://qwillery.blogspot.com/ (October 11, 2017), “Interview with Rivers Solomon, author of An Unkindness of Ghosts.“
Rivers Solomon Website, https://www.riverssolomon.com (May 9, 2018), author profile.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (September 26, 2017), Claire Vaye Watkins, “Magical Systems and Fusion Reactors: Rivers Solomon Discusses An Unkindness of Ghosts.“
Shelf Awareness, http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ (October 27, 2017), “Rivers Solomon: A Wider Array of Possible Futures.”
Author Interview: Rivers Solomon
Posted by COOLCURRYBOOKS onOCTOBER 2, 2017
An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon is hands down one of the best science fiction novels I’ve read in 2017. It’ll be released on October 3rd, 2017, so you don’t have long to wait! Until then, I’m fortunate enough to be able to bring you this interview with author Rivers Solomon!
34381254Can you tell us about your new science fiction novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts?
Of course! I’m really excited to be at a stage where I can discuss the book freely and share it with the world. So far it’s been really fascinating seeing the various ways people talk about it. The summaries people use on various review and articles, while often clearly guided by the write-up in official marketing materials, reflect a range of points of view and impressions. I love that. I love how even at this early in the game, readers are leaving their own mark on the book based on their interpretations.
All that said, An Unkindness of Ghosts is about a young, enslaved Black woman living in the steerage-deck slums of a generation ship in deep space and her investigation into the mysterious death of her mother decades prior. It touches on themes of gender, race, and generational trauma, but to me it will always be about a woman trying to figure out her past and how it relates to who she is.
Can you talk some about the process of getting published?
It was harrowing, to say the least, but it’s all worked out extraordinarily well and I could not possibly feel more blessed.
Shortly after I signed with my agent, after we agreed that I’d make quick edits so we could go on submission before the summer season when publishing kind of takes a break, life really got away from me. I’d just brought my baby home for the hospital after the three months they were in the NICU, and I was going through a pretty intense gender-identity related crisis. I’d been very ill throughout my pregnancy, and it seemed to have permanently changed my body for the worse. I felt really ill.
Needless to say, the quick edits didn’t happen, and it was a little bit more than a year later until my book was ready to go on submission to editors at publishing houses (I made some pretty dramatic changes). I had been hearing lots of stories of books that never get picked up by an editor and that was so scary! I thought everything would be easy after I had an agent and had written what I thought was a very fine book, but that seemed not to be the case.
Then I finally got the call that there’d been an offer from the Brooklyn-based press Akashic Books. The more I became familiar with them, the more I impressed I was and the more good I felt about having An Unkindness of Ghosts There. I felt they understood the book and what I was trying to do, and they do seriously good work diversifying the publishing world with very smart, needed books. I don’t think Unkindness could’ve found a better home.
They’ve worked really tirelessly to make An Ukindness of Ghosts into a success, and I can already see the ways that it’s paying off. It is such an honor to see my book out in the world. It’s already being read and reviewed by complete strangers. What an experience.
I was intrigued by the structure of An Unkindness of Ghosts, particularly how it included chapters in the first person POV of characters other than the protagonist, Aster. Why did you decide to structure the novel this way?
The first first-person chapter I wrote was from a character called Giselle, who in the earlier versions of the book was a much smaller character. Even though I understood her, I felt that the protagonist, Aster, didn’t, so I wanted Giselle to have a chance to speak her truth so that readers had a chance to see where she was coming from.
I found that chapter such a breath of fresh air to write so I decided to do it with some of the other characters as well. When writing a book, it’s really easy to get stuck in certain modes even though it doesn’t necessarily best serve the narrative, so I let myself experiment, and I think it turned out really well. In addition to the first-person chapters, I actively reminded myself to free myself in other ways, too.
What was the inspiration behind An Unkindness of Ghosts?
Unkindness welled up from a lot of different places inside me. I’d been disturbed by what I was seeing in the media, the slaughter of Black people by the state. I’d been thinking a lot about maps and the arbitrariness of land and borders. That one Ursula LeGuin bit from The Left Hand of Darkness comes to mind:
“How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry?”
I’d been meditating on geography and diaspora and the idea of how living in space would change all of our notions of that. Star Trek was an inspiration, for sure, as was Battlestar Galactica. US history. Languages I’d studied in college. It’s hard to link it back to something singular, because in a way, my whole life had been leading up to that book.
I loved how An Unkindness of Ghosts is set in the future but tied so firmly to our past and present. Oftentimes, science fiction can serve as warnings for what our societies can become. Do you view An Unkindness of Ghosts in this light?
I prefer to think of it as a book about how we survive, because like you said, it is firmly tied to our past and present. The way things are is completely unacceptable. There are people alive today whose living conditions are worse than that of those in Unkindness. The horrors and oppressions discussed in the book are nothing new or that I invented. So I wrote An Unkindness of Ghosts as a tribute to all my ancestors who survived (and didn’t survive) unspeakable thing, and for myself, and for my siblings in arms.
I really appreciated how An Unkindness of Ghosts centered around marginalized characters. Do you have any recommendations for other science fiction stories centering marginalized voices?
I recommend Jamie Berrout’s Portland Diary, which is a collection of speculative short stories. She’s a brown trans woman and her stories feature that demographic. It’s beautifully written. I love anything by Nnedi Okorafor, but Who Fears Death is my favorite. Planetfall is fantastic by Emma Newman.
There’s more out there, of course. I think one of the best things anyone can do if they really want to center marginalized voices in what they’re reading is to check out smaller presses and self-published authors.
Do you have any current writing projects? Any other releases we should watch out for?
I’m working on a lot of short stories at the moment! I have a million and one novels in progress, and am currently looking for “the one” that might be my NaNoWriMo project. To keep updated on my work, following me on Twitter @cyborgyndroid is a good idea, as well as supporting me on Patreon!
This isn’t a question, but I also wanted to tell you how much I loved the queer representation in An Unkindness of Ghosts. I’m grey-aro ace, so Melusine’s chapter meant a lot to me.
I am so glad! I have to tell you, it really didn’t require a special effort. It’s just a matter of painting a world that looks like the one I live in, one filled with people like my friends and family. I really wish it wasn’t so difficult to find diverse works. Like, yes, it’s out there certainly, but there is not enough of it.
About the Author
Rivers Solomon is a dyke, a Trekkie, a wannabe cyborg queen, a trash princex, a communist, a butch, a femme, a feminist, a she-beast, a rootworker, a mother, a daughter, a diabetic, and a refugee of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. They write about life in the margins, where they are firmly at home.
Rivers’ debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts—pitched as “a science fiction meditation on trans-generational trauma, race, and identity”—is forthcoming from Akashic Books. Like much of Rivers’ work, the book blends speculative and literary elements. Genre, like gender, is a social construct, but when pressed, Rivers considers their work in the tradition of afrofuturism.
Though currently based in Cambridge, UK, where they live with their family, Rivers is originally from the United States. There, they received their BA in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity from Stanford University in California and an MFA in Fiction Writing from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. They grew up in California, Indiana, Texas, and New York but spent much of their childhood wishing the mothership might come save them. Their literary influences include Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Ray Bradbury, Jean Toomer, Doris Lessing, and countless more.
Wednesday, October 11, 2017
Interview with Rivers Solomon, author of An Unkindness of Ghosts
Please welcome Rivers Solomon to The Qwillery as part of the of the 2017 Debut Author Challenge Interviews. An Unkindness of Ghosts was published on October 3rd by Akashic Books.
TQ: Welcome to The Qwillery. When and why did you start writing?
Rivers: I’ve been writing stories since at least Kindergarten, I think, one of my earlier efforts winning some silly prize for first graders and put on display at a local mall. That type of encouragement made me keep at it, and I definitely learned to think of myself as a very writerly, literary sort of person. We all get tracked into things, don’t we? At varying points I left and came back, but in college I had a professor who was really amazing and made me believe I could actually make a go at doing it more professionally.
I wish that I could remember all the fanciful tales I concocted in my early elementary years, but they are lost to time, I’m afraid. I do remember a story from middle school I wrote about a kid who wakes up and it turns out that all along the Earth has been flat. Everybody’s talking about it at school and he feels left out, having not watched the news that morning. I distinctly recall he overhears a girl in the hallway say, “If even the Earth is flat, there’s no hope for my chest.”
TQ: Are you a plotter, a pantser or a hybrid?
Rivers: I am a bit of both, so a hybrid—but I suppose everyone’s a hybrid to some extent because it’s impossible to write purely using either method.
I’d say if forced to choose I’d go with plotter. I do not usually let the words take me where they will beyond a few scenes or maybe a few chapters. I like to write purposefully and with meaning. Characters tends develop in a pantsy-fashion. Subplots, too. But I start most projects I write with a sense of the arc.
TQ: What is the most challenging thing for you about writing?
Rivers: I deal with chronic illness, so finding the energy and will to keep at it is definitely difficult for me. Also, I’m quite a meticulous person, in the worst sense of the word, so I will spend hours on single phrases when writing a story. I’m not exaggerating at all. I can’t just let go of the language and get the story out, not matter how hard I try! All that is to say I’m a pretty slow writer unless I happen to catch a manic burst.
TQ: What has influenced / influences your writing?
Rivers: Is it cheating to answer, “the world”? I bet it is. Hmm, let’s narrow it down. I’m definitely heavily influenced by Black Diasporic peoples’ culture, language, food, and religion. Jewish thought and practice. Battlestar Galactica (2004). Star Trek, specifically The Original Series. All sorts of history, from all times and all places. I really love Ursula LeGuin and Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker. I think about The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison a lot. A whole lot. Protest movements, now and today. The Russian Revolution, the Black Panthers, the IRA. The Matrix! The aesthetic eye in that trilogy is just next level. Isn’t Zion so beautiful? I like to keep an open mind and let in as much as the world as I can (as much as feels safe to me). I hope people read my work and see the wide world seeping into it.
TQ: Tell us something about An Unkindness of Ghosts that is not found in the book description.
Rivers: There’s a small but present romance in the book that is deeply meaningful to me. There are lots of descriptions of food. There are comic books! There is humor, believe it or not, despite the heaviness of it all.
TQ: What inspired you to write An Unkindness of Ghosts? What appeals to you about writing Science Fiction?
Rivers: When I started it, it was definitely at a time when a lot of really awful things were getting a fair bit of media attention. Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown (and countless other names). I was thinking a lot about queerness and reproductive justice. I was thinking a lot about my ancestors because that’s just something I do sometimes. I’d recently read a poem by Kiki Petrosino called “Ancestors” that still speaks to me and haunts me occasionally. Maps were on my mind. The violence of borders. All of it kind of meshed together, I guess, and the seed of an idea was born. The story has changed so much since I first started it, but it has always been about a young woman who rebels in some way, either for her own safety or that of others.
As far as sci-fi, well I’ve always been quite fond of it. Mostly just because it’s inherently a bit wild and surreal! I’d typically rather read a story that had something strange in it, something different that I’m not likely to encounter in my own real life. I love make-believe. I’m one of those people who eats a bowl of porridge and imagines that they’re on the Nebuchadnezzar eating that protein goop from the Matrix. Head in the clouds, as they say.
TQ: What sort of research did you do for An Unkindness of Ghosts?
Rivers: I had various points where I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the exact theoretical science of everything, but then realized I didn’t care that much and I remembered my favorite kind of sci-fi tended to be more magical sci-fi. I read a bit about fusion reactors, and a friend of mine who studied physics helped me think about designs.
TQ: Please tell us about the cover for An Unkindness of Ghosts?
Rivers: The cover is the protagonist Aster’s likeness against a background of stars. I don’t know the artist, and now I feel terribly bad about the fact! That’s something I’m going to have to look up, and I’m certain I should know. We (me and the editor and design people at Akashic Books) had a fair bit of back and forth before we landed on the final design, and I think it conveys something central about the book: a woman on the edge, a woman torn, a woman at odds with her life and surroundings.
TQ: In An Unkindness of Ghosts who was the easiest character to write and why? The hardest and why?
Rivers: Giselle was the easiest to write because I think she has very few inhibitions. It was always easy to figure out what she might do because she’s the sort that generally does the first thing to come to mind. Aster and Theo, the other two main characters, are much more controlled, I think. They don’t always necessarily behave in consistent fashions because life is a puzzle, and they’re trying to figure out what’s the best move forward.
The hardest to write was a character called Aint Melusine, because I think older Black women are often written in really narrow and limiting ways. There are a few ‘types’ out there. Mammies, basically, or really matronly, kind women who love to cook and sing, and there often isn’t much more to them than that. I was hyper aware of making her feel full and complete and also very complicated. I’m not sure if I 100% achieved it but it was definitely something I worked hard to at least make a go at.
TQ: Why have you chosen to include or not chosen to include social issues in An Unkindness of Ghosts?
Rivers: I think social issues are just life, really, so including them is not really different than talking about the weather or the time of day or the year. There are certain populations who feel social issues more because they are more personally affected by them. Perhaps they themselves are the ‘social issues’ depending on point of view. But that seems like a cop out; we’re all wrapped up in it one way or another. For example, the unequal distribution of wealth and power is a social issue, but like, either you’re a person with a lot of wealth or you’re a person with not a lot of wealth, and whatever side of the coin you’re on, it’s a social issue and you play a part in it.
TQ: Which question about An Unkindness of Ghosts do you wish someone would ask? Ask it and answer it!
Rivers: I don’t necessarily have one question I wish people would ask, but of course I have a lot of random thoughts about the book that people will probably never think to ask about! Here’s one:
What is your favorite non-canon romantic pairing?
Theo and Giselle. They are such complete and utter opposites but I think they both have a very mystical and apocalyptic way of viewing the world that would lead them to shared interests and goals.
TQ: Give us one or two of your favorite non-spoilery quotes from An Unkindness of Ghosts.
Rivers:
There was an excitement coming from Giselle. She was standing on the edge of a new world and so ready to jump. How Lucifer felt upon leaving Heaven. He didn’t fall. He dove.
TQ: What's next?
Rivers: The world is wide open at the moment, and I’m on so many paths I really can’t say exactly where I will end up!
TQ: Thank you for joining us at The Qwillery.
An Unkindness of Ghosts
Akashic Books, October 3, 2017
Trade Paperback and eBook, 340 pages
Aster has little to offer folks in the way of rebuttal when they call her ogre and freak. She’s used to the names; she only wishes there was more truth to them. If she were truly a monster, she’d be powerful enough to tear down the walls around her until nothing remains of her world.
Aster lives in the lowdeck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South. For generations, Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way, the ship’s leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions and deep indignities on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster. Embroiled in a grudge with a brutal overseer, Aster learns there may be a way to improve her lot—if she’s willing to sow the seeds of civil war.
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About Rivers
RIVERS SOLOMON graduated from Stanford University with a degree in comparative studies in race and ethnicity and holds an MFA in fiction writing from the Michener Center for Writers. Though originally from the United States, they currently live in Cambridge, England, with their family. An Unkindness of Ghosts is their debut novel.
Shelf Awareness for Readers for Friday, October 27, 2017
The Writer's Life
Rivers Solomon: A Wider Array of Possible Futures
Rivers Solomon graduated from Stanford University with a degree in comparative studies in race and ethnicity and holds an MFA in fiction writing from the Michener Center for Writers. Originally from the United States, Soloman now lives in Cambridge, England, with their family. An Unkindness of Ghosts (reviewed below) is their debut novel.
An Unkindness of Ghosts explores themes that include race, gender, mental illness, abuse and more. Why did you choose to go into outer space to address them?
Space heightened and emphasized many of the themes that were most important to me. I wanted to talk about the trauma of being a refugee, of being homelandless, of being part of a diaspora; the cosmos--a big black vacuum where pieces of matter, let alone real land, are light-years and light-years apart--allowed me to discuss how deep that trauma could be.
When you're abused, it feels like there's no escape. What better way to convey the sense of no escape than a vessel lost in space? It's life under a brutal regime or certain death. I thought a lot about slavery and the horrors people suffered, how fleeing North was not a possibility for those who lived on breeding plantations in the deep south. It was just too far. Only enslaved people in the most northern South had a chance, and escapees were truly few and far between.
I didn't want to feel like there was an easy out or some other place to aspire to go to. When you're chronically ill, when you are deeply depressed, when you're a child and the world is too big, it doesn't feel like there's ever going to be an after.
Space has this wondrous absoluteness to it that could show quite starkly the pain of being stuck.
Although the story is set far in the future, the citizens of the spaceship Matilda have divided into a ruling and a slave class along racial lines. Why do you think humanity insists on dividing itself?
I don't think dividing into hierarchy is a core tenet of humanity. Rather, European (and later U.S. American) empire has been so totalizing in its destruction of the world that it can be difficult for us to envision a life outside of it. Racism and colonialism have destroyed our imaginations, our visions of ourselves and what's possible. Powers in England, France, Spain, Portugal, et al. actively created a system that benefited them out of their individual, personal greed. The West plundered, and plundered, and still plunders--and it purposefully works to teach people from birth that this is the natural order of the world in order to maintain that system which gives them wealth.
The way it has gone isn't the way it had to be. I'll never be able to sleep at night if I believe humanity essentially has to have muzzles on it to stop subjugation and oppression. I prefer to think that history has etched the world with train tracks, and we're born on a speeding train riding along those tracks, but certainly, we can hop off.
I take so much heart in what Ursula K. Le Guin said in a speech she gave at the National Book Awards: "We live in capitalism, its power seems escapable--but then so did the divine right of kings."
The Matilda is fascinating. Tell us about the process of developing its physical design.
Matilda emerged in layers. I knew socially there was an underclass and a ruling class, and just like old steamships, it made sense to put steerage on the bottom and first class on the top. No sense reinventing the wheel and all that. The Field Decks were an early invention, and I spent a lot of time at different points sketching and imagining in order to figure out how they might logistically fit in. Sometimes, the story came out of the design of the ship, and at other times, the story necessitated a redesign of the ship. It would've been really easy to get lost in the physicality of it. Indeed, I did sometimes--sketching for hours, trying to render on paper what I could see in my mind. I can be quite a visual person, so to write certain scenes I had to know how it looked. The final version of Matilda didn't come until the very last draft. Funnily, no one on the ship really knows what it looks like in whole because they've never seen it from the outside.
You lived all over the United States before moving to the U.K. How has living in so many different places influenced your writing?
One of my favorite things about moving around a lot as a child--even on a small scale, such as moving from school to school--was how we form really tiny pockets of culture. How we move and talk is often informed by larger patterns of place and geography, but the use of certain turns of phrases, the way we style ourselves, whether or not your chili has pasta in it--in the Midwest it often does, but not so much other places, in my experience.
It showed me that there truly are infinite ways to live. It made me appreciate diversity. It made me appreciate sameness, too, the odd places where we converge. Almost everything I write has a strong sense of place. I love to write in those specific details that make a setting really breathe and feel alive, because it was often those little details I noticed.
Speaking of your influences, after finishing An Unkindness of Ghosts, readers will surely go looking for similar stories. What advice would you give them on what to read while they wait for your next story?
Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor is speculative fiction that tackles trauma in a wonderfully rich world, and I'm really fond of it. There's Fire on the Mountain, which is an alt-history by Terry Bisson positing a world where the revolutionary abolitionist John Brown had been successful. Jamie Berrout's speculative short story collection Portland Diary is full of quiet beauty and paints a world peopled by disabled, trans and queer people. Berrout is a really intensely thoughtful person and that comes across in the best possible way in her exquisite prose. Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers is an anthology worth checking out. For another brilliant short story collection full of magic and the speculative, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky is so very excellent.
Although the ending is open, An Unkindness of Ghosts feels complete. Will we see any of our friends from it in upcoming stories?
I'm really relieved that you describe the book as feeling open but complete, because that's my goal with any story--to gesture at other possibilities, to a life and time outside the book, but for there to be an exhalation that brings an amount of closure. To write An Unkindness of Ghosts, I had to flesh out a lot of what happened before the present and think about what would come, which led to me outlining a sequel (that also has prequel elements). I can't say if it will necessarily get written, but I really hope to share more from that world whether that be in print or other media. --Jacki Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads
My name is Rivers Solomon and I write about life in the margins, where I'm much at home. I'm reaching out to the community for help so that I can get support to keep doing what I'm doing: making art that challenges the status quo and uplifts the voices and stories the world tries to silence.
With a focus on speculative fiction - sci-fi, fantasy, magical realism, fabulism, afrofuturism - I create stories that paint a future (and sometimes a past) where society's most disenfranchised are front and center. I believe the histories of LGBTQ+ people, Black and Brown people, of disabled and sick people, of poor people, of women, are the stuff sci-fi is made of. We are Frankenstein's monster, and we will make our pained roar heard.
My novel An Unkindness of Ghosts, pitched as a "science fiction meditation on intergenerational trauma, race, and identity, where a woman traces the connection between the mysterious death of her ship's sovereign and the disappearance of her mother a quarter-century before," is out now! You can find it wherever books are sold! Though I'm blessed to have a wonderful agent and to have published a novel, the income from that is just not enough.
I'm on Patreon because my family needs to live. I'm a disabled writer who works park-time as a TA and stays at home with me and my (severely disabled) partner's two-year-old. I also do freelance writing to help make ends meet, and have essays in The Rumpus, the New York Times, Paste Magazine, and forthcoming in Guernica and others! However, it's NOT enough to stay afloat. Due to my illness, I am unable to work full-time (and even if I did, it would not be enough to support us).
Art heals. Stories heal. I want to do my part in that important, valuable work, but to do that I need support. I'm thankful for every bit anyone can contribute. I will provide short-short stories (think flash fiction), art edits/digital art, and short essays here. I cannot promise it will always be monthly, but I will do my very best.
(Header art is by Zea Barker, which was drawn to accompany an essay I wrote called Damned and Damaged Vessels at The Rumpus, about portrayals of Black motherhood and sci-fi and fantasy).
[Header image features a series of stylized portraits in reddish ink on beige background of the character Queen Akasha from Queen of the Damned, sci-fi author Octavia Butler, the character of the First Slayer from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and character Michonne from the Walking Dead.]
RIVERS SOLOMON graduated from Stanford University with a degree in comparative studies in race and ethnicity and holds an MFA in fiction writing from the Michener Center for Writers. Though originally from the United States, they currently live in Cambridge, England, with their family. An Unkindness of Ghosts is their debut novel.
MAGICAL SYSTEMS AND FUSION REACTORS: RIVERS SOLOMON DISCUSSES AN UNKINDNESS OF GHOSTS
BY CLAIRE VAYE WATKINS
September 26th, 2017
Rivers Solmon’s debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, will be released from Akashic Books on October 3. Its protagonist, Aster, has little to offer folks in the way of rebuttal when they call her ogre and freak. She’s used to the names; she only wishes there was more truth to them. If she were truly a monster, she’d be powerful enough to tear down the walls around her until nothing remains of her world.
Aster lives in the lowdeck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South. For generations, Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way, the ship’s leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions and deep indignities on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster. Embroiled in a grudge with a brutal overseer, Aster learns there may be a way to improve her lot—if she’s willing to sow the seeds of civil war.
You can read an exclusive excerpt from An Unkindness of Ghosts here, and below, we talk with Rivers Solomon about the process of constructing the HSS Matilda, the importance of writing corporealness and body movement into a story, and more.
***
The Rumpus: An Unkindness of Ghosts imagines a future wherein the brutal racism and other systemic injustices of our society have outlasted humanity’s time on Earth. The blood-soaked soil of the United States is long gone, yet the horrors of the antebellum South are with us still, built into the architecture of the HSS Matilda, the spaceship where Aster, a badass black queer healer-surgeon-botanist-freedom fighter tries to decode the truth about her mother’s death.
I was so into Aster and so into the ship, Matilda. It has kind of a Fury Road-in-space vibe. So, before we get too deep into the book, I would love for you to describe the process of building Matilda. In terms of process: did you have a schematic of it in your mind’s eye or elsewhere, or did Matilda just unfurl as you wrote?
Rivers Solomon: Early on I knew I wanted Matilda to harken backward just as much as it looked forward. There’s an impulse when writing science fiction to linger on the futuristic elements of the speculative world—the spotless metal walls and glass buildings, soldiers in gray bodysuits stalking the Citadel and prisoners in burlap tunics lining up for their ration of protein-sludge.
Some of my favorite sci-fi worlds are informed by this aesthetic, but visions of the future often leave out the ways the past persists into the present. I set out to write a story that resisted that inclination and actively engaged history: its styles, social mores, technologies, so on.
When designing the layout of the ship, as well as its culture, I began thinking about those places in our own lives where what’s come before collides with what is yet to come. Resale shops. Garage and estate sales. Old churches. Small-batch distilleries. A psychic’s hole-in-the-wall shop. I remembered my time in rural Arkansas picking blackberries after Sunday services where women and men had sung centuries-old songs. I thought of my mother’s two or three childhood books that were saved from a basement flood, on the shelf next to French language tapes we listened to during our morning commutes when I was a kid, next to a phone that has capabilities unimaginable sixty years ago.
Though the specifics have morphed over time, I’ve had a sense of the ship from the earliest chapters. Even the name, which is based on Clotilde, the last known ship to carry enslaved people to the United States, gives a sense of a bygone time. There have been many different blueprints, but the idea of Matilda as a place where the past never really leaves us hasn’t changed.
Rumpus: You’ve said in the press materials for the book that the spaceship Matilda interested you as a metaphor for the rootlessness you’ve felt as a black American, “without foremothers, without history, and without nation.” How did you transpose concepts like foremothers, history and nation to Aster, who has come of age an orphan on an ahistorical totalitarian plantation in the vacuum of space? I’m curious how you approach those sorts of puzzles, not only in the context of working in the speculative mode, but also stylistically, in terms of language.
Solomon: Transposition is a useful way of thinking about this phenomenon, so thank you for that term—I’m going to borrow it for future discussions of the book. It’s a much more nuanced approach to examining the interplay between the speculative and the real world than I’ve seen before. I’ve grown weary of “sci-fi as metaphor” as an analytic framework because it has the potential to overly distill complex realities. Sci-fi as transposition, that’s definitely my new thing. Love it.
Okay, so we have our real world, our Earth, and the experiences therein, but what do those experiences look like, feel like, sound like when filtered through a sci-fi lens? How do you write these life-based experiences into a fantastical setting? People are people, sure, but to my knowledge, no one has spent the entirety of their lives enslaved on a space ship lost in the void. And just like writing a major song into a minor key, the rules of a given world influence our stories such that the end result might be unrecognizable from the source material.
I made a lot of stuff up. Some of it on a whim, based on what I thought would be beautiful, visually stunning, narratively arresting, interesting, exciting, entertaining. Some of it I extrapolated based on my own experiences or historical research. It was important to me while writing that things rang true to readers as much as possible, but I also luxuriated in creating a brutal but picturesque world that was vibrant and detailed. I don’t know if humans would organize themselves into nation-like groups based on ship decks or wings, but I liked the idea of it, and it certainly didn’t feel impossible.
Rumpus: This book is asking big questions about history, nation, foremothers. And yet it’s got this dynamo plot zipping along. Aster is, as she says, chasing her mother’s ghost, while simultaneously sowing the seeds of civil war. How do you approach the toggle between a character’s interior and exterior worlds? Is there a tension for you between plot and theme, or would you characterize your approach differently?
Solomon: I don’t experience it as a tension. I find if I go into a piece of writing with a mental checklist of what I should do—oh, make sure you’ve got some action, top it off with some dialogue, oh, and of course include what the protagonist is thinking about!—the resulting scenes are very unnatural and lack dynamism. Instead I try to live in a scene as much as possible. I move my body how a character moves their body. I’ll often do a gesture myself multiple times to figure out how best to describe it. I’ve done a bit of playwriting and screenwriting, and that has taught me to think quite visually, to really see how a character moves. But how we move is intimately tied to how we think or what we’re thinking at a given time.
In real life, the interior and exterior world do not always braid together into a neat and tidy plait. There are times when we space out and go on ridiculous philosophical tangents, or linger on especially joyful memories, all while the world is happening around us and we can’t be bothered to be in the moment. Conversely, there are times when the world is happening so fast that we cannot stop to think.
Rumpus: Aster’s strength fascinates me. She is incredibly resilient and though her body is brutalized throughout the book, it is weaponized in interesting ways as well. She tends with her exhausted body a secret garden laboratory deep down in the ship, growing various medicinal plants, some of which she uses to make a numbing ointment to rub onto her genitals before heading to the fields. It’s a beautiful scene, her friends razzing her about masturbating as she applies it. And, of course, there’s a river of sorrow running under that moment. Aster has also undergone a double-mastectomy and a hysterectomy, which I read as an act of insisting on her own body autonomy in the face of the overseers, a direct rebuke, not tragic exactly, but not without loss. Can you talk about your approach to writing Aster’s body? Is “writing the body” a useful framework for you?
Solomon: Bodies are an essential component of who we are. To get to the heart of Aster, I felt it was important to understand her body and her relationship with her body. When we treat characters as ethereal and without form, forgetting they are flesh, they can easily feel less vibrant and true. Writing in a person’s corporealness allows us to get closer to them. We see that they urinate, menstruate, bleed. We feel closer to characters whose bodies we can experience or witness closely. It’s more cinematic as well as more intimate.
I think a body is more salient in our lives the more that body deviates from the norm. The less ‘default’ it is, the more aware of it we are. It determines our social location, how we experience the world, and how other people experience us. That comes into play with Aster. The body is a location of difference and trauma. In a different world, her relationship to her uterus and breasts would certainly be different, so there is a loss there. (Even if that relationship were different, happening somewhere else, I don’t know whether she wouldn’t still choose to remove them, however). A lot of these questions I can’t answer fully because I do feel the true motivations are deep within Aster in a way that I can’t access.
The beauty of writing the body is I can talk about the reality of it without necessarily understanding the interiority. That’s the same experience we have with the people in our lives. A knowledge of their bodies to some extent can lead to a closeness and level of intimacy in its own right.
Rumpus: Sadly, Aster’s body is far from the only in peril. There is a lot of pain aboard the Matilda, and these characters bears scars upon scars. Yet there’s a specific approach to pain in this book, something perhaps ecstatic—it almost shimmers. You describe one of Aster’s most intimate relationships beautifully: “Their partnership revolved around sewing up each other’s various wounds. They’d become intimately familiar with each other’s frailties. Theo knew her every brittle bit.” Pain and the aching tenderness of vulnerability are sutured up together in this book. Then there’s Giselle, whose self-inflicted pain approaches a kind of rapture, maybe. What are your thoughts on writing pain?
Solomon: What’s important about the writing of pain in this book is that it’s generally not experienced alone. I think it’d be difference if what the characters went through in this book happened on a more individual level. I think that’s what you could be picking up on, the sense of intimacy derived from their shared trauma. The characters are constantly witnessing each other at their most vulnerable states. It breeds a certain closeness. And, it might be easier for them to interact with a person’s pain than with the person themselves.
For Giselle specifically, pain is very grounding to her. She’s someone whose hold on reality isn’t always very firm, but pain can bring her back to it. There are few people in this book who aren’t hurting, so even for her it’s a point of connection that tethers her to her peers.
One of my writing teachers, Adam Johnson, often spoke to us in class about the “trauma narrative.” It was something he was very interested in and something I’m interested in as well. He spoke about an inherent tension of writing trauma: trauma wants to be silenced and kept hidden or confined to the past, but it also wants to be discussed, acknowledged, talked about. The same can be true with pain in general. It hurts so we do everything to minimize it, get rid of it. But it’s hard to keep it silent and leave it unexpressed. When writing pain, I like to make sure my characters are navigating that tension.
Rumpus: I’m imagining Aster being played by Janelle Monáe one day. Can you talk about the influence of Afrofuturism on An Unkindness of Ghosts? What draws you to that school and what, if anything, were you hoping to add to that tradition?
Solomon: In the movie adaptation of An Unkindness of Ghosts I dream about in my head, there’s a flashback scene where Janelle Monáe’s song “Sir Greendown” plays over a montage of the young protagonist playing house with her best friend. There’s a lyric in that song, “the dragon wants a bite of our love,” that has resonated with me since I first heard it, and that captures a lot of Unkindness: how big, large, frightening, terrible monsters try to feed on the beautiful things we create despite them. That song has such an airy, dreamlike quality, and the spacy singing voice coupled with the almost garbled recording give it a bluesy 1930s/1940s feel. Listening to it is like being in someone’s dream from long ago. And it’s a total fantasy. That mashup of a fairy-tale narrative with a blues sound, a hint of danger in the background, that’s what Afrofuturism is to me. It’s synthesis of past and future with a focus on the plights of Black peoples.
I love that it’s inherently genre-bending. As I mentioned earlier, there’s no reason for a sense of history and tradition to get lost just because we’re turning toward the future. There’s room for African diasporic religious beliefs and magical systems to exist alongside fusion reactors.
Rumpus: The language in this book is bananas. You seem an effortless ventriloquist, moving between registers as Aster moves around the ship. You move not only into various characters’ minds but their tongues, too. How did you do that? Did you have any models or antecedents in mind for the book’s voice?
Solomon: When I was a kid my cousins often said to me, “You talk like a white girl.” As a result, I’ve always been hyperaware of my use of language. I became quite deliberate with it, incorporating silly phrases I’d heard into my vocabulary to make people laugh, like “totally nectar dude I’m digging it.” I was a dork. I was also using echolalia to make sense of how language worked. If I heard it, I said it. Bumblefuck. Kit and caboodle. Ony tail (my Aunt Karlene once used this term to refer to an extremely short pony tail and it’s stuck with me). Johnny on the spot. Anal retentive. I didn’t know what it meant, but I remember being in third grade and telling some kid, “Stop being so anal retentive.”
I’ve always been fascinated by the way people speak to each other. I love regional dialects. Random idioms. Bygone turns of phrases. Somewhere as a child I read the phrase “by the by” and was so deeply in love and haven’t stopped saying it sense! My Aunt Florence once used the phrase “high yellows” (a term used to describe light-skinned Black people, presumably who hold some degree of snobbery about their color), and I remember thinking, nice.
I love Black language in all its myriad forms. I love poetry. I do consider language an essential piece of a story.
There’s so many layers to a character’s voice and a novel’s voice: the literal words used, the tone, the accent, how closely their words follow the grammar of a given tongue and what it says when we deviate from that.
Language breathes. There’s a fluidity to it. To bring the world of Matilda to life I thought it was important that the language feels real, flexible, movable because it’s been my experience that language is both extremely individual and extremely cultural. It reflects larger patterns and attitudes as well as a single person’s personality.
With that in mind, I let myself be as free as possible with the language. I didn’t want to police myself because I thought if I did what I created wouldn’t feel organic.
Rumpus: One of the many achievements of this book is its conjuring of all sorts of characters we don’t regularly encounter on the page. You’ve said, “I made a deliberate choice not to shy away from blackness, queerness, or disability. I made a deliberate choice not to shy away from examining the way capital decides which bodies have worth.” I wonder what these choices looked like during the day-to-day writing process. Do you any have advice for the writers out there, and I count myself among them, struggling to write across difference and/or into big ideas?
Solomon: One of my favorite books is a novel by Ann Patchett called Run. It’s not one of her best-known novels, but I love it so much for its frank, tender, and nuanced treatment of race. It takes place over one night and is about a white family and their two adopted Black sons (or it’s about two Black boys and their white adoptive parents). There’s also a young Black girl at the forefront. I was young when I first read it and I hadn’t heard of Ann Patchett and I just assumed she was Black. Of course, as I later found out, that’s not the case.
So, it can be done. It has been done. Why isn’t it done more often? Much of it is about examining our lives as much as it’s about examining our writing. Who are our friends? Where do we live? Who do we include in our lives and who do we deliberately leave out? People who are neglected on the page are just as neglected in real life. I feel really blessed and honored to be living a life where I get to be friends and family with people across the breadth of human experience. I don’t think it’s something I necessarily sought out, but I do think it’s something we can open ourselves up to. It helps to read widely and diversely, too, I suppose.
The only thing I am sure of is that I probably made some mistakes with how I discussed certain things in the book, and I believe it’s okay that it’s a learning process and it’s better to try and fall a little short. Seeing people as people helps—understanding that, across many differences, we’re all human. That might sound a bit harsh, but I’ve found myself guilty at it at times. I’ve realized I’m viewing people through a lens of assumptions, tropes, and stereotypes formulated from viewing media. It can be hard to see through to the individual persons when we’ve got a chorus of nonsense telling us to do the opposite. Actively challenging what we know is a good first step.
Rumpus: Did writing this novel teach you anything about yourself, and if so what?
Solomon: I’d say it taught me about how much I change over a relatively short period of time. My views about the world are in rapid flux, and that became very apparent over the course of completing An Unkindness of Ghosts. During the editing process, I’d go back to read a section I’d wrote six months ago and realize how much my views on a matter had been complicated since first birthing the scene.
This is a very simple treatment of the dynamics of this relationship, I’d think or, I’m not sure the narrative is in line with my current thinking or politics about this issue. And I’m talking purely from an ideology perspective. Nothing to do with writing technique. I wasn’t going back and saying, “Wow, I can’t believe I wrote this trash sentence with my own two hands” (though, okay, yes, I was also thinking that). I was going back and wondering, “Why did you romanticize the toxic interplay between these two characters?” That didn’t mean getting rid of toxic relationships, but thinking about how my views on these issues made me frame it in the narrative. Most writing reflects deeply held values of the author.
There’s so much about the world that I don’t know, don’t understand. I’m in the midst of a growth phrase, always learning (and unlearning). I don’t think this is uncommon, but a project as big as a novel gives a tangible record of someone’s thought processes over a year or more. No doubt if I started the book today, it’d be better, not just because I’ve grown as a writer, but because I’ve grown as a person.
Claire Vaye Watkins earned her MFA from the Ohio State University, where she was a Presidential Fellow. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, Tin House, Freeman’s, the Paris Review, Story Quaterly, New American Stories, Best of the West, The New Republic, the New York Times, and many others. A recipient of fellowships from the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, Claire was also one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35.” She is the author of Gold Fame Citrus and Battleborn. A Guggenheim Fellow, she has been a professor at Bucknell University and Princeton, and is currently an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. She is also the co-director, with Derek Palacio, of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada. Claire is a founding member of The Rumpus Advisory Board. More from this author →
Rivers Solomon is a dyke, a Trekkie, a wannabe cyborg queen, a trash princex, a communist, a butch, a femme, a feminist, a she-beast, a rootworker, a mother, a daughter, a diabetic, and a refugee of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. They write about life in the margins, where they are firmly at home.
Rivers' debut novel, AN UNKINDNESS OF GHOSTS—pitched as "a science fiction meditation on trans-generational trauma, race, and identity"—is forthcoming from Akashic Books. Like much of Rivers' work, the book blends speculative and literary elements. Genre, like gender, is a social construct, but when pressed, Rivers considers their work in the tradition of afrofuturism.
Though currently based in Cambridge, UK, where they live with their family, Rivers is originally from the United States. There, they received their BA in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity from Stanford University in California and an MFA in Fiction Writing from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. They grew up in California, Indiana, Texas, and New York but spent much of their childhood wishing the mothership might come save them. Their literary influences include Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Ray Bradbury, Jean Toomer, Doris Lessing, and countless more.
Solomon, Rivers: AN UNKINDNESS OF GHOSTS
Kirkus Reviews. (Sept. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Solomon, Rivers AN UNKINDNESS OF GHOSTS Akashic (Adult Fiction) $15.95 10, 3 ISBN: 978-1-61775-588-0
The HSS Matilda is a massive spaceship that has carried a small contingent of humanity for many years away from a destroyed Earth and toward a hazy vision of a promised land. Over generations, the ship's decks have become harshly segregated by race and prosperity, and the corrupt leadership of the upper decks has imposed increasingly cruel rules, restrictions, and forced labor on the darker-skinned residents of the lower decks. Aster is an angry and strange young woman of the lower decks who struggles with deeply rooted anger and sadness but also provides medical care to her shipmates with great skill and compassion. When the ship's sovereign falls ill and Aster's friend and mentor, the Surgeon General Theo Smith--a member of the leadership class--asks for her help with his treatment, Aster finds herself thrown into the investigation of a personal mystery that is deeply entwined with the fate of the ship. A seemingly inexplicable link between the sovereign's illness and her mother's suicide 25 years earlier sends Aster on a dangerous search for answers that threatens to upend her understanding of herself, fuel an uprising, and open up the never imagined possibility of escape. Solomon's characters are solid and easily likable, even when their more abrasive qualities and lack of self-reflection add exasperating misunderstandings to the plot. The HSS Matilda is a well-crafted world, and while the tyrannical regime of its leadership feels like a familiar dystopic trope, the diversity of the people who inhabit it--their various sexual and gender identities, physical abilities, and psychological burdens--is refreshingly visible and vital even as they face brutal discrimination for their differences. An entertaining novel that does not neglect the vitality of its story while probing society's assumptions.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Solomon, Rivers: AN UNKINDNESS OF GHOSTS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502192202/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4307c8e7. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502192202
An Unkindness of Ghosts
Publishers Weekly. 264.33 (Aug. 14, 2017): p53+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* An Unkindness of Ghosts
Rivers Solomon. Akashic, $15.95 trade paper (340p) ISBN 978-1-61775-588-0
Solomon debuts with a raw distillation of slavery, feudalism, prison, and religion that kicks like rotgut moonshine. On the generational starship Matilda, which will take hundreds of years to reach its destination despite traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light, a tech-ignorant white supremacy cult called the Sovereignty runs on the labor and intimidation of a black enslaved class. This is worldbuilding by poetry; hard science fiction fans may look in vain for some of the elements they expect from a generation ship story, as the narrative instead relies on many layers of metaphor. Aster Grey, orphaned from birth and raised in slavery on deck Q, teaches herself medicine and much more. She discovers that notes handed down by her mother are encoded and may map the Sovereignty's fatal weakness, but as the notes become shuffled, divided, damaged, and destroyed, it's unclear whether Aster can ever fully decode them. Neuroatypical Aster is literal and unsparing as she examines her precarious life and flawed environment; she accepts the horrors of objective reality but struggles passionately with the allusions and evasions of human interaction. Solomon packs so many conflicts--chiefly concerning race, gender, and faith, but also patriarchy, education, mental illness, abortion, and more--into a relatively brief space that the story momentarily strains here and there to contain everything. The overall achievement, however, is stu nning. Agent: Laura Zats, Red Sofa Literary. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"An Unkindness of Ghosts." Publishers Weekly, 14 Aug. 2017, p. 53+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501717104/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=34ae2533. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501717104
An Unkindness of Ghosts
Anna Mickelsen
Booklist. 113.22 (Aug. 1, 2017): p46.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
An Unkindness of Ghosts. By Rivers Solomon. Oct. 2017. 340p. Akashic, paper, $15.99 (9781617755880).
Some 300 years ago, the remnants of humanity fled a dying planet on the spaceship Matilda. The ship-bound colony, led by a group of brutal zealots, is divided along racial lines, with those of darker skin performing the majority of the labor under a ruthless police state. Aster is the Surgeons assistant, daughter of a missing mother, distinct from her cohort due to her intelligence and atypical behavior. She has spent her life in the margins, surviving the vicious existence common to lower-deck life and fostering her rage. When Aster discovers a connection between the death of Matilda's ruler and the presumed suicide of her mother 25 years earlier, she begins to see a greater pattern that might lead to liberation. In this debut, Solomon uses the generation ship as a setting to explore race, disability, family, sexuality, and the way humans are haunted by the ghosts of the past. The book is told primarily from Aster's point of view, and we also get glimpses from the characters closest to her. Infused with the spirit of Octavia Butler and loaded with meaning for the present day, An Unkindness of Ghosts will appeal to a wide variety of readers. Solomon's impassioned, speculative, literary book is sorely needed on library shelves.--Anna Mickelsen
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Mickelsen, Anna. "An Unkindness of Ghosts." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2017, p. 46. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501718854/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f6b3c42d. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501718854
An Unkindness of Ghosts
Internet Bookwatch. (Dec. 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
An Unkindness of Ghosts
Rivers Solomon
Akashic Books
232 Third Street, #A115, Brooklyn, NY 11215
www .akashi cbooks.com
9781617755880, $15.95, PB, 340pp, www.amazon.com
Aster has little to offer folks in the way of rebuttal when they call her ogre and freak. She's used to the names; she only wishes there was more truth to them. If she were truly a monster, she'd be powerful enough to tear down the walls around her until nothing remains of her world. Aster lives in the lowdeck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South. For generations, Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way, the ship's leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions and deep indignities on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster. Embroiled in a grudge with a brutal overseer, Aster learns there may be a way to improve her lot--if she's willing to sow the seeds of civil war. A truly extraordinary and compelling read from cover to cover, "An Unkindness of Ghosts" showcases author Rivers Somon's impressive flair for originality and master of the science fiction genre. A simply riveting read from cover to cover, "An Unkindness of Ghosts" is a 'must' for the personal reading lists of dedicated science fiction fans and will prove to be an enduringly popular addition to community library Science Fiction collections. It should be noted that "An Unkindness of Ghosts" is also available in a digital book format (Kindle, $9.99) and as a complete and unabridged audio book (Blackstone Audio, 9781538474990, $34.95, CD).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"An Unkindness of Ghosts." Internet Bookwatch, Dec. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A523689008/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=653fbe1f. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A523689008
AN UNKINDNESS OF GHOSTS
Rivers Solomon
Akashic Books (Oct 3, 2017)
Softcover $15.95 (340pp)
978-1-61775-588-0
An Unkindness of Ghosts launches the career of a brilliantly gifted and important new writer in science fiction.
With An Unkindness of Ghosts, Rivers Solomon inarguably shows themselves to be a literary child of genre leader Octavia E. Butler.
On Matilda, a generation starship presided over by a brutal authoritarian hierarchy, Aster does what she can to subvert the ruling powers’ hold over her and her chosen family. But an early encounter with the man who will soon take the seat of power on the ship makes her a target.
In her search for her mother, Aster uncovers far more than she ever suspected to about the ship and its purpose. Her rebellious spirit fuels her search for the truth, leading her to an act she’d long envisioned—and another she’d never dared to dream was possible.
Solomon’s language is musical, heavy with both literal and figurative meaning, yet also clear and concise. There are no wasted words here. These characteristics also describe Aster; despite her difficulty with understanding social cues, she uses her mimicry abilities to pass as “normal” when she needs to achieve a goal. She understands that the world of the Matilda wasn’t built for her.
Giselle, Aster’s close friend and sometimes lover, is the emotional core of the novel, where Aster is its brain. Their relationship melds them into the voice of the downtrodden on the ship, the low-deckers who are forced into slavery for the ease and enjoyment of the upper-deck residents. As Giselle’s actions cause more suffering for her personally, Aster begins to follow her lead and let emotion guide her as well.
The narrative is infused with folklore and a scattering of dialect, and it has a density and richness that demands careful reading. It is not a fast read in the usual sense of something fun and frothy; the pacing feels deliberate and necessary to how events unfold, and is completely natural to the story.
Suffused with the past, the present, and the future of human experiences in its events, An Unkindness of Ghosts launches the career of a brilliantly gifted and important new writer in science fiction.
Reviewed by J. G. Stinson
September/October 2017