Book Review: Skinship by James Reich

 

Skinship by James Reich

192 pages, Paperback

Published by Anti-Oedipus Press

 Expected publication December 15, 2024

 

Some books and authors challenge me to write about without using hyperbole. James Reich is an author who I respect both personally and professionally. As a reader I have yet to read a novel by JR that didn’t impress me, honestly, they have blown me away. I worry that I will come off sounding like his mother telling you how fantastic he is.  I mean every word and it is not spoken lightly. 

James Reich is an author who defies most standard genre conventions. While he doesn’t have the literary reputation of Brian Evenson or Margaret Atwood, James Reich is writing some of the best Science Fiction in the underground indie movement. Skinship is a classic generation ship well written enough to hook those snobs who think they are above genre if they give it a chance. 

 I am beyond excited that James Reich has entered into the realm of writing a Generation Ship novel, a staple subgenre of the canon. From Heinlein’s Universe in the 40s to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora in this century there are many classic examples. It is still a modern staple even getting mainstream saccharine movies like Passengers. In recent novels, the approaches have been diverse. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora (which I consider to be a masterpiece) takes the hard science approach and River Solomon’s Unkindness of Ghosts is a surreal metaphorical fantasy. Skinship is about halfway between those two modern styles in that it borders on surrealism but doesn’t go fully into metaphor. The length of the novel and ideas seem to fit thematically with one of my other favorite 21^st-century generation ship novels The Freezeframe Revolution by Peter Watts.

Reich doing this is nothing new to me. In 2019 Reich wrote a similar work of genius with the underrated “The Song My Enemies Sing.” challenged the entire genre of Science Fiction and the many modern realistic depictions of Mars by setting his novel on the red plant preserved in the amber of the science fictional imagination. Creating a novel both modern and retro. In 2017 the short but powerful novel Soft Invasions mixed meta-old timey Hollywood with counterfactual Japanese bombing air raids of California, UFO abductions, and the battle of the Midway. In 140 short pages of elegantly surreal prose James Reich gets wibbley wobbly with space-time and reality and creates a one-of-a-kind reading experience. It is perfect for anyone looking for something that gets on the level of weird.

Now Skinship packs an epic journey into 188 pages, the atmosphere of the novel feels a bit like the 70s Silent Running if it had been re-written and directed by a young well funded David Cronenberg. The point of view character is Applewhite the First Navigator, who is several generations into being engineered to replace his clones and pilot the ship. The Skinship left the dying long ago and the novel opens as they have reached a crossroads. Two planets are in reach and the factions are in conflict. If that is enough to sell you on this book which is still in the pre-order phase you can avoid spoilers in the rest of this review and come back if you want to go in totally cold.

Let's get into this book…

The book opens with subtle but powerful world-building for both the ship and the dying Earth that highlights the strength of Reich’s prose.

“Now, the tommy studied the skinship hanging above it. This was the last vessel that would leave the hyperstation that cast its shadow on the dead planet. Entangled and the conspiracy of machinery that attended it, an Aurora of blue light shifted along the skin ship's massive tubular hull, suffusing the dermis with a strange energy. Calmly, the tommy observed the swarms of robots with their welders and sealants. The vessel was already miles long, a leviathan suspended in space. Whether the skinship’s dominant form was organic or mechanical, but Tommy could not have said.”

The skinship is technological sure, and it is also biological throughout the novel the nature of the is revealed and hinted at. The ship is a genetically living ark, giving the ship itself a gooey body horror feeling. The ship is often a character in the generation ship tale, but often through AI pilots but there is a subtle subtext here of the ship being soft and as fragile as skin. The novel hints at this on the first page, but it doesn’t knock you over the head.

As for the earth while the tommy is still at the dockland they look from the ship to earth and the contrast is beautifully expressed.

“On earth, great dunes of ash shrugged towards stiff oceans, glaciers of acid foregathered, glittering as they wiped the cities from the surface of the world. London dissolved. Berlin perished. Sydney earned. Abjua drowned. Poison washed over the tundra. It wove through red forests, sinister and final. The oceans were possessed by slicks of noxious algae clinging to the gyres of plastic, forming artificial islands of trash. Staring down through the mesh of the gantry between its feet the tommy watched the sublime and red relentless white curved of accretion and erosion, a deathly brine overcoming the final thin green tint of the land. Some of the dying must have been watching the sky and the hulk of dockland, black against the sun, or illuminated in the night.”

The interior of the ship lives in a zone of classical SF imagination with autotrams and the like. The ship got bigger as the journey continued with civilization and a style.

“The printers had fashioned the interior, and now it was a series of nostalgic districts, vertebrae along the spine where the railways of the autotrams ran. There was a concourse beneath the navigation bridge that was like an airport tournament terminal with boutiques and restaurants. There were more like this throughout the ship.”

 

Life on the Skinship is populated by a growing culture as you would expect. We see this through the eyes of many interesting characters. The Archivist, and the First Navigator play traditional roles, but they are effectively written.  Applewhite the first navigator is like a classic PKD character born without a traditional relationship to reality or understanding for his creation. Sure Applewhite is the First Navigator, he pilots the ship like many Applewhites printed before him. As he is born into the job There is a conspiracy to kill and replace him.

“You understand,” he had said, crouching beside her, “that all of this will come to nothing if Applewhite remains First Navigator? You heard the rumors that he's hysteric, a neurotic, I'm sure.”

They believe they are saving the ship and want to take it to a planet named Snapdragon, while Applewhite maintains the original plan to go to the planet Wormwood. part of the deal when the three skinships left the passenagers were promised to be reconstituted on a new world, saved like biological data in the skinship. The conflict of course threatens all of it.

“The Skinships did not abduct. They were sanctuaries, made by humanity and its automatons, for humanity. Now she surrendered to the violence of space, like plain dead in a river current, drifting heavy with pollen and dreams under a bright sun, the heat on her face the sky blue and clean..”

The role the generation ship novel plays in the genre is to create micro-cultures that are divorced from the clear destruction we are heading toward. There is almost never a happy ending or a perfect new planet we call home. James Reich is focused on the traumatic damage this dying world left on the people clinging to an island of biology in the vast lifelessness of space. This is highlighted in the 20^th-century design of the interior of the ship.

“The skinship had its roots, as it were, or its cellular origins in the greatest and hardest of all centuries. If -- as the dermis moved out from the dockland, extending into space towards the destination -- it had taken the 20th century with it, it had done so because Monamy had accepted that the 20th century had been the last century not overwhelmed with helplessness and mediocrity. This he shared with the printers. Ohh, yes, he recalled it had been terrible, but it had been the last century of beauty, the last where there had been hope of avoiding environmental collapse, in the last century of art and nature.”

I found this powerful. If this were a film I would say they designed the interior this way to save money on designing an alien environment.  But Reich has the unlimited budget of his imagination and still he turned the 20^th century design into a powerfully expressed message. I don’t know if that is the mission statement of the novel, but it could serve as one. The printers detached from any natural ecology represent an artificial future.

“Smiling contentedly, Katazome envisioned Snapdragon as a planet overgrown with white plastic, the inhabitants of the skin ship drowning, reaching from the wax-like figurines from Dante, trapped in the apocalypse of artifice.”

Skinship is the best new novel, I read this year. It is a deep ecological novel that combines genuine body horror with beautifully written prose. A story that mines the trauma everyone with open eyes should feel when facing a warming dying ecosystem. It deserves a place in the great canon of Generation novels. Pre-order Skinship now.