The key to Lauren Beukes’ fiction can be found in the non-fiction short pieces at the back end of her new collection, Slipping: Stories, Essays and Other Writing. Beukes’ background is in journalism, and these shorts – some of them little more than brief gut-shots – she takes the reader where her profession took her, into places that are dangerous or forgotten or abandoned by the powers that be, often at the same time. And once there, she zeroes in on that notion of observation, of reporting – on the sheer necessity of the portrayals in the media of incidents and places, in order to get the public to pay some attention and not to ignore, or to swallow easy pre-fab narratives that bear little to no relation to the truth.
And that, then, is why the action of the stories presented in Slipping often feels incidental – it’s because it is. What matters – and Beukes’ decision to sequence the non-fiction after the fiction in the book allows for stunning moments of after-the-fact realization – is the perception of events. Riots are less important than the way they’re spun, and how they affect individuals’ Q ratings. The actions of royalty aren’t as important as feeding the media beast that follows one particular princess around getting what they want – headlines. A kaiju-sized threat gets taken down, not by a giant robot with a chainsword and blasters, but by bad reviews. This, Beukes is telling us again and again, is where the power is in the 21st century, in the eyes of the beholders. The actual events are less important than how they’re spun and how many people they’re spun to.
Perhaps no story illustrates it as clearly as the first full-length piece in the collection, the title story of the collection. In it, a young girl who’s been turned into a medical miracle after a terrible accident races against other marvels saved through alternate means. In a more conventional narrative, the race itself would be all, Pearl’s determination to win and the obstacles she overcame, whether they be the superior tech of her opponents or troubling memories from her past. But Beukes says the hell with that, and makes the race the least important thing that’s going on. Because it’s not really a race, it’s a showcase for the various medical technologies that the runners are demoing. And of course the runners themselves are packaged as part of the marketing effort of those technologies, and the outcome of the race doesn’t actually matter, and as for the runners like Pearl and her theoretical rivals, well, at the end of the day, they’re left with the realization that they’ve been a very small part of a very big machine.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that for readers whose idea of a science fiction story starts and ends with the action of the plot, then Slipping might offer some confusing surprises. Time and again Beukes cozies up to old-school tropes, only to spin away to observe the chaos from a position that is more knowing, if not exactly safe. But that, I suspect, is the point.
(Tachyon, 2016)
