Extreme Fabulations

by Steven Shaviro

  We might say that Greg is resisting what Lee Edelman denounces as reproductive futurism: “the pervasive invocation of the Child as the emblem of futurity’s unquestioned value,” and the use of this figure to consolidate the “ritual reproduction” of the normative heterosexual order. This “coercive belief in the paramount value of futurity” is central to liberal society. In the logic of reproductive futurism, everything is always and only “for the sake of future generations”; the present is systematically deprecated in favor of the future. But this exalted future never actually arrives; rather, it is interminably deferred. Whatever we do for the sake of our children, those children themselves will end up having to do for the sake of their children. Caught in such an endless cycle, futurity never generates anything new or different. All we do is to “reproduce the past, through displacement, in the form of the future” (Edelman 2004).

  Though Greg is straight, his rejection of the mystique of childhood is not altogether different from Edelman’s queer refusal of normative futurity as figured in the ideal image of the Child. When Greg says that his “legacy” is his art, rather than his “genetic material” or bloodline, he is twisting the word legacy (which is breeder-code for family inheritance) to refer to the present instead of the future. Greg sees his art as something that matters, or makes a difference, here and now, rather than as something to be left to the appreciation of future generations. Work like his – processual and site-specific, and not designed to outlast the circumstances of its installation – has little to do with the classical Western ideal of “building a monument more lasting than bronze.” It is worth noting, as well, that Greg is proud of “supporting myself sort of decently” through making art. His career is an accomplishment in itself; he has no expectation of getting wealthy from it, or starting a dynasty:

  I’m not a king and I’m never going to be rich. I’m not going to leave behind much wealth for someone to inherit. It’s not like I’m building an empire.

  My comparison of Greg’s petulant complaints to Edelman’s radical polemic might seem hyperbolic. But in fact, “Message in a Bottle” is literally about its narrator’s confrontation with a futurity that comes to him embodied in the form of a child. Everything in the story ultimately turns upon Greg’s fraught relationship with his friends’ daughter Kamla. The girl is unusual, to say the least. Even at a very young age, when Babette and Sunil first adopt her, Kamla has an “outsized head” that looks “strangely adult.” Indeed, “the bones in her skull are fused” already, which is something that is only supposed to happen to us “once we’ve stopped growing.” Kamla’s otherwise child-sized body is barely able to support this head, leaving her “prone to painful whiplash injuries” – not to mention that she often finds herself being ridiculed by other children as a “bobble-head.” Kamla also “speaks in oddly complete sentences” for a child, saying things that are “too grown up” and too complex for her age. And it’s not just her words; “something about Kamla’s delivery” also “makes it easy to forget” that she’s a child.

  But there’s more. The rest of Kamla’s body, aside from her head, seems to develop very slowly. She looks far younger physically than her presumptive chronological age: “We figure she’s about eight,” Babette says, “but she’s not much bigger than a five-year-old.” Two years later, “at ten years old, people mistake her for six.” Eventually, Kamla is diagnosed with Delayed Growth Syndrome (DGS), a mysterious condition shared by other children around the world who came up for adoption at the same time as she did:

  It’s a brand new disorder. Researchers have no clue what’s causing it, or if the bodies of the kids with it will ever achieve full adulthood. Their brains, however, are way ahead of their bodies. All the kids who’ve tested positive for DGS are scarily smart.

  Kamla seems out of phase with her time; she doesn’t properly belong to the present moment. She is both too immature physically, and too mature mentally, for someone her ostensible age. She doesn’t conform to normative expectations about child development – or indeed, to our ideas about growth and transformation more generally. Kamla’s parents “send her for test after test” without learning anything new. Kamla “seems to be healthy … Physically, anyway.” But “her emotional state” remains puzzling. It is telling that Kamla cannot get along with other children her own apparent age; she gets “frustrated” and “angry” when she tries to play with them, and she complains that “I bloody hate being a kid.” Even worse, she tends “to smartmouth so much at school and in our neighbourhood that it’s become uncomfortable to live there anymore.” Kamla and her parents are repeatedly forced to move to escape the trouble.

  At one point, Greg tries to overcome his fear of children, and of Kamla in particular. He expresses the hope that,

  as I watch [Kamla] grow up, I get some idea of what Russ’s growing years will be like. In a way, she’s his advance guard.

  But he is quickly disabused of this illusion, the very next time he sees Kamla. This strange girl, with “her head wobbling as though her neck is a column of gelatin,” cannot provide a model for Russ, who is “a perfect specimen; all his bits are in proportion.” Greg admits to feeling “guiltily grateful that Russ, as far as we can tell, is normal.” It’s a bit disturbing to see Greg here retreating into an ableism – an uncritical valuing of whatever is developmentally “normal” – that he would otherwise almost certainly reject. It shows us just how unsettled he is.

  We might say that Kamla fails the test, or refuses the demands, of reproductive futurism. Rather than promising to carry on her adoptive parents’ “legacy,” Kamla threatens to undermine it. And rather than figuring what Edelman calls “an insistence on sameness that intends to restore an Imaginary past” (No Future), Kamla’s aberrant growth pattern – not to mention her all-around freakishness – disrupts this illusory continuity. With her perpetual anger and complaining, and her refusal or inability to fit in, Kamla seems to embody all our anxieties about difference, radical otherness, and massive social and technological change. As she herself finally puts it to Greg,

  Human beings, we’re becoming increasingly post-human … Things change so quickly. Total technological upheaval of society every five to eight years. Difficult to keep up, to connect amongst the generations. By the time your Russ is a teenager, you probably won’t understand his world at all.

  Greg has been complaining all along that children are weirdly different from “us” (the adults). But Kamla makes him realize that he cannot expect things to return to normal, even when Russ grows up and becomes a functional adult in his own right. Such would be the resolution offered by reproductive futurism. Instead, Greg is forced to admit that what “really scares me about kids” is not the creepy reproduction of white bourgeois order, but its opposite, the threat of radical, irreversible change:

  This brave new world that Cecilia and I are trying to make for our son? For the generations to follow us? We won’t know how to live in it.

  This is the point at which “Message in a Bottle” flips over into explicit science fiction, with its story of a future art exhibition. What finally happens is that Kamla explains everything to Greg, by giving him information about the future. She makes sense of all the anomalies of the story – if only Greg is willing to believe her. Science fiction writers are often criticized for their use of infodumps: long expository passages that explain the unfamiliar presuppositions of the world of the story. Such passages are often disparaged for telling instead of showing. Ideally, you are supposed to just drop readers into the world of the narrative, giving them enough clues to figure out for themselves how everything works. However, this is not always possible: you already need some understanding of a context, in order to infer other things about that context. Imagine a person from the European Middle Ages, trying to make sense of electricity and fossil fuels entirely through offhand references and contextual clues. Infodumping is often impossible to avoid, given that the whole point of science fiction is to present a world that d
iffers in significant respects from the reality that the reader takes for granted.

  Hopkinson brilliantly resolves this difficulty by making the infodump into an event within the story – indeed, it is the story’s dramatic climax. Kamla calls Greg at three in the morning, and he takes her for a ride and listens to her story, despite his justified fear of encountering cops who will “think I’m some degenerate Indian perv with a thing for little girls.” Kamla has to tell him the truth, because the story is “all over Twitter and YouTube already,” and in the tabloids as well. Instead of having the author or narrator give the reader information about a future state, Kamla reveals the future to Greg, and therefore indirectly to us. Since the story is set in the present, Greg is in the same position relative to what Kamla tells him, as science fiction readers in general are relative to any text’s depiction of a future world. “Message in a Bottle” can therefore be regarded as a meta-science-fiction story: it dramatizes the way that science fiction as a genre is based upon the estranging irruption of futurity into the present moment.

  Kamla explains to Greg that she is in fact an art curator from the future. She and the other “DGSers” have been sent to our present moment – which for them is the past – in order to collect artifacts that have not survived until their own time:

  Our national gallery is having a giant retrospective; tens of thousands of works of art from all over the world, and all over the world’s history. They sent us back to retrieve some of the pieces that had been destroyed.

  The differences between Kamla’s time and our own are so great that the DGSers “have all become anthropologists here in the past, as well as curators.” They find our early twenty-first century world strange, and generally feel that “your world stinks.” They have trouble relating to things they regard as “ancient tech,” like Greg’s “video monitors.” But it would seem that Kamla’s era has not only more powerful technology than we do, but also a more comprehensive and enlightened understanding of culture. These future people are apparently no longer Eurocentric. They do not privilege one particular period, one particular region of the world, and one particular race and gender over all the others – as we are all too often still prone to do, even though in theory we know better. At least in this regard, Greg is on the cutting edge. Kamla somewhat condescendingly tells him that “your installation had a certain antique brio to it, Greg. Really charming.” Though she also tells him that “in my world … what you do would be obsolete.”

  On the other hand, some aspects of Kamla’s future world seem to be very little changed from conditions that we are all too familiar with today. Kamla notes that “arts grants are hard to get in my world, too.” Apparently, neoliberal economics and neoliberal governmentality are still in place several hundred years in the future. Our descendants still haven’t attained a society based on abundance, instead of scarcity and austerity. This leads to reduced ambitions and diminished plans:

  They wanted to send us here and back as full adults, but do you have any idea what the freight costs would have been? The insurance? … The gallery had to scale the budget way back.

  So instead of sending the arts curators themselves back in time, the future national art gallery sends clones – genetically engineered “small people … children who [are]n’t children” – to go back in their place. All the DGSers are in fact far older than they appear; Kamla, who looks like she is six, and whose adoptive parents think she is about ten, is in fact 23 years old. Not only is she a genetic clone of the curator whose interests she represents; in addition, the curator’s actual memories have been “implanted” within her as well. But her chromosomes have been altered, given extra telomeres in order to “slow down aging.” As a result, Kamla says, “my body won’t start producing adult sex hormones for another 50 years. I won’t attain my full growth till I’m in my early hundreds.” She will physically bring her artifacts into the future by living through the entire span of several centuries from our time until then. It is

  expensive enough to send living biomaterial back; their grant wasn’t enough to pay for returning us to our time. So we’re going to grow our way there. Those of us that survive.

  “Message in a Bottle” doesn’t spare us any of the grotesque and horrific consequences of this deeply compromised technological strategy. Kamla and her cohort find themselves having to spend all their time and energy in strenuous forms of pretense: “Do you know what it’s like turning in schoolwork that’s at a grade-five level, when we all have PhD’s in our heads?” Their double consciousness on a sexual level is even worse:

  The weird thing is, even though this body isn’t interested in adult sex, I remember what it was like, remember enjoying it. It’s those implanted memories from my original.

  Some of the seeming-children from the future have an even harder time than Kamla does, because they get abused, just as actual children sometimes do; or they find themselves constrained as a result of “living in extremely conservative or extremely poor places”; or they fail to get adopted, and have to “make [their] own way as street kids.” In any case, these people from the future have no legal rights, because in appearance they are “never old enough to be granted adult freedoms.” Some of them have already died, Kamla says; and she and the rest will suffer other forms of coercive medicalized discipline: “they’re probably going to institutionalise me. All of us.” Such suffering, all for the sake of an art retrospective! “This fucking project better have been worth it,” Kamla says.

  All this is extraordinarily harsh. On first reading, it caught me entirely unawares. I had to go back and re-evaluate everything I had read up to that point. Kamla’s account of time travel makes sense of all of the story’s odd details – but at the price of making both Greg’s discomfort with children and his pride in his art seem less innocuous and more troubling than they did previously. Unsurprisingly, Greg himself has difficulty accepting Kamla’s story; after all, he does not know that he is caught in a science fiction narrative. He tries to tell himself that Kamla is “delusional … Barmy. Loony”; or that she is “as mad as a hatter”; or that she’s “been watching too many B-movies” for her own good. And yet, Greg is forced to admit that “a part of me still hopes that it’s all true.” It’s the only resolution that he (or we) can get.

  By radically revising itself with this climactic infodump, “Message in a Bottle” stages a confrontation between two different ideas about futurity. Greg is rightly irritated at the breeders who seek to replicate and perpetuate themselves in their offspring, by projecting – in the words of Jacques Derrida – “a future which is predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable” (Dick and Ziering 2002). Such is the vision of what Edelman calls reproductive futurism (Edelman 2004). It is also the vision of what Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism: “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (Fisher 2009).

  Although their theoretical starting points are quite different, both Edelman and Fisher diagnose the ways in which contemporary neoliberal society presents itself as inevitable and unsurpassable. Neoliberal culture projects a particular idea of the future – with its calculable risk, and incessant but superficial novelty – in order to avert the possibility of any deeper disruption. Breeders investing in their kids in all the ways that irk Greg, and bankers investing in exotic financial instruments created by hedge funds, are equally involved in colonizing the future, making it commensurable with the past and present, and thereby securing it as a continuing source of profit. This is the continuing logic that leads to future art galleries scaling back their plans, and employing grotesquely unpleasant means, in order to achieve their objectives while remaining within the limits of their budget.

  However, Kamla’s story also opens up the prospect of another sort of future: one that is – to quote Derrida again – “totally unexpected … totally unpredictable” (Dick and Ziering 2002). This is
the future in which “things change so quickly” that we of the present moment “won’t know how to live in it.” Someone like Kamla, who travels back in time from such a future, might well strike us as so alien as to preclude any possibility of our being able to understand her. If the regulated, controlled-in-advance futurity of reproductive futurism and speculative finance is commonly figured in the normative form of the Child, then this other sort of futurity might well be figured instead as the wrong sort of offspring – or what Derrida evokes as the “birth” of a “formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity” (Derrida 1978).

  Of course, this is Derrida’s language, and not Hopkinson’s. Kamla and her fellow DGSers are indeed quite disturbing, not only to Greg, but more generally to our entire society. That is why the best that these visitors from the future can hope for is to be institutionalized, and studied as medical anomalies. Still, it is only from a particularly narrow Eurocentric point of view – from the perspective of “a society,” as Derrida is careful to say, “from which I do not exclude myself” (Derrida 1978) – that any such difference must be seen as formless monstrosity, or that the only alternative to a programmed and normative future is the absolute negativity of “no future.” The stark alternative we find in Derrida and Edelman is something like the philosophical equivalent of H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmology, in which a flimsy veneer of white European order is our only bulwark against the chaotic horror of the inhuman Elder Gods. This makes for a woefully impoverished choice – even if it is to the credit of Derrida and Edelman that, as opposed to Lovecraft, they are more than willing to side with Dagon and Cthulhu.