AK Press has a thematic series entitled “Emergent Strategies,” which began with a single title by the same name by adrienne maree brown, the author of Grievers that I just recently reviewed here. The publisher describes this series as:
Inspired by Octavia Butler’s explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, this book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a resolutely materialist “spirituality” based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us.
The latest title in this collection, Atoms Never Touch by multidisciplinary artist, poet, filmmaker, and professor micha cárdenas, takes these foundational concepts of activism and applies them through fiction to tell a story of relationships and autonomous agency.
Rea has struggled through her adult life to form lasting deep connections of love and family bonds. Some aspect of her neurophysics works differently than others. Just as she begins to get close to someone else, she finds her body or consciousness whisked through quantum realms into another reality, forcibly separating her without any control. But Rea hasn’t resigned herself to this perpetual fate, and retains the hope that she can use her intellect and scientific knowledge to understand this phenomenon and escape the pattern. This hope becomes reinvigorated and augmented when her paths cross with Cora, an activist hacker who believes Rea’s story of what occurs and vows to join in the quest to get Rea control so they can forge a life together.
An academic, latina trans woman, Rea serves as a recognizable proxy for the novel’s author. This permits cárdenas to easily place sociopolitical concerns of importance to her nonfiction into the fictional narrative of the various realities Rea finds herself within. Though featuring near-future tech, these realities will still be familiar to anyone living in or observing the political landscape of the United States and active discriminatory legislation against the trans community. And cárdenas grabs ahold of themes surrounding such politics: the sense of loss-of-control, of being forced into living/conforming to realities that stand in stark contrast to who/what you physically are are as a community and an individual. She takes these themes and folds them into the science fictional plot of being pulled between alternate realities without control, while simply trying to hold firm to the reality Rea actually desires, the connections she has built and wants to keep. To hold onto happiness.
The conceptual framework of Atoms Never Touch works well, and the progress and things learned by Rea (and Cora) along their journey together and separately fits well with the themes of the Emergent Strategies concept and Octavia Butler’s inspiration. An interesting argument the novel seems to make, and manifested in its title, is that connections between people don’t need to be based on physical contact in time and space in order to achieve shared purpose, love, or impact. Because purposes, love, and impacts live on beyond the actions of individuals or relationships through time and space through the form of generations, our ancestors and our offspring. The post-apocalyptic Grievers by adrienne maree brown built upon the same theme in a very different way. Here, micha cárdenas uses a different sub-genre of time/space-traveling romance to tackle the same idea, with some plot twists and surprises.
However, Atoms Never Touch exists at its heart as a novel of ideas, with only a skeletal framework of plot and narrowly focused development on a small portion of characters. The style of writing also reveals cárdenas’ academic strengths over those of fictional prose. Passages focused on the physics (or perhaps metaphysics) of reality-swapping existence give the novel a hard SF vibe. But character dialogue and descriptive passages come across much more roughly.
Readers sympathetic to the novel’s themes and the concepts of the Emergent Strategies series will likely appreciate this application of them to a fictional story, particularly if the reader likes stories about discovering loving relationship. However, the presentation of the ideas will likely come across as preachy and unconvincing to anyone else. A real highlight of Atoms Never Touch is in the trans female lesbian perspective of trying to find safety and joy in stabilized human connection built around love amid an ever-changing, yet seemingly eternally hostile world.
