Ruthanna Emrys's Journal

Posted by A. Bristow-Smith

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/zoi-by-jane-mondrup/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=59321

In the near(ish) future, a series of objects begin entering the solar system. They arrive one at a time, wait, and depart, but they are always, eventually, followed by another. They are a mystery; they are a sign of extra-terrestrial life; and they hold the promise of unlocking interstellar travel, if they can be understood. They are the titular zoi.

An obvious point of comparison is Arthur C. Clarke's classic Rendezvous with Rama (1973): Both novels center on the exploration of mysterious extra-solar entities with potentially massive ramifications for humanity. This, I suspect, is intentional. But Zoi takes this similar premise in a very different direction, and the comparison with Rama serves as much through contrast as by parallel, highlighting Zoi’s altogether more ambiguous understanding of humanity’s place in the universe.

Because the zoi are not massive, monolithic O’Neill cylinders with neat, human-habitable worlds on their inner surfaces. The zoi are living entities, similar—and entirely dissimilar—to giant, space-borne amoebae, replete with “organelles,” “cytosol fluid,” and “transparent membrane[s]” (p. 2). While they don’t respond to machines or conventional human means of communication—the investigation of the first zoi involves “a number of unmanned probes” but the zoi “never react[s] to their presence” (p. 15)—they do respond to humans. The first time an astronaut touches a zoi, the otherwise impenetrable surface “suck[s] inwards, leaving a cavity fit for the size of a human body” (p. 33), and the zoi subsequently repeats this when anyone draws near. When a later astronaut removes her glove inside a zoi and “[comes] into contact with the [interior] fluid,” the “liquid around them [is] punctured by bubbles which [grow] and [merge] into larger pockets of air” (pp. 63-64). These bubbles eventually form rooms filled with breathable atmosphere. In addition to being biological, the zoi demonstrate an active hospitality that makes them both more and less alien than Rama’s empty cylinder.

And, despite the grand implications of the premise, the focus of Zoi is both physically and emotionally intimate. It is the story of Amira, the novel’s narrator, told through two interwoven strands of narrative. In the present, she and three crewmates (Kiah, Evardo, and Linn) are inside a zoi as it departs the solar system. This is by choice, but it is a one-way trip: They have no control over the destination. They have all dedicated their lives to studying the zoi, and this is the final, ultimate dedication. But that doesn’t mean it will be easy. In the past, we learn of Amira’s life-long obsession with the zoi, starting with the arrival of the first when she was just a five-year-old “captivated by the sight of the shining lump between the stars” (p. 12), and growing into an unwavering drive to one day visit and study them, “no matter how long [that path] turned out to be” (p. 35). From the start of the novel, the reader knows she has succeeded, though not without sacrifice. The question of whether Amira knew what she was committing to—and if it was worth it—comes to the fore through this contrast between past and present.

The struggle, both psychological and biological, to adapt to spending the rest of their lives within the zoi affects each crewmate differently. For Amira, the reality is a far cry from the childhood dreams of discovery and friendship that led her to sacrifice so much in pursuit of her work. She reacts with fear and anger towards Kiah, with whom she was once close, due to the other’s “quick and efficient adaptation to the environment” (p. 9), and clings to Linn—eventually literally—whose body struggles to adapt, and whose “immune defense system seems to be especially hostile to the external influence” of the zoi (p. 7). Despite claiming to “have entered this with [her] eyes open” (p. 44), Amira is plainly uncomfortable with the implications of her choice: acceptance and adaptation to the zoi.

The crewmembers learn that while the zoi has altered itself to fit them, they in turn are being altered to fit it, and Amira laments the “blind, childish faith [she] used to have in the zois” (p. 54), and she and the others are gripped by mood swings and sickness, impulses and aversions, “powerful urge[s] to do specific things, and to avoid others” (p. 71). She is left struggling to determine which feelings are true and which false, which desires she must accept and which to fight. (Anyone who has experienced severe anxiety might sympathize.) The consequence is an experience of extreme—and eventually quite literal—self-alienation.

A more conventional narrative might question the zoi’s sinister motives, or focus entirely on the horror of an alien influence eroding our selfhood, autonomy, and bodily integrity. Yet Zoi suggests that the truth is more complicated. After all, if five-year-old Amira is naïve in her easy anthropomorphizing of a friendly zoi, “hurt because we never came up to see it” (p. 10), the adult Amira has gone to the opposite extreme in barely acknowledging the zoi’s status as a living being. She claims that the “zois aren’t sentient in any human sense of the word, but they react to stimuli with something resembling purposeful behavior” (p. 36)—unable to acknowledge even limited potential for agency without weighing it down with qualifiers. Moreover, the team are there to learn how to make the zoi produce human-model technology—“it should be possible to fabricate both components and entirely new devices out of materials synthesized from zoi substances” (pp. 21-22)—and to use it as a means of interstellar travel, for “the fulfilment of a dream […] for all of humanity” (p. 58). Amira arrives aboard as an archetypal explorer, ready to analyze and categorize and make the zoi useful—and she thereby reduces it to an object.

Her approach is very much in line with that of the mid-century sci-fi explorer seen in texts like Rendezvous with Rama. For all its vast scale and mystery, Rama is largely a passive backdrop on which humans act. Though the environment might be dangerous, it has no intent, and its dangers occur on a level directly tangible to human senses: the organic-robotic biots, the weather, the landscape. The great cylinder of Rama raises questions: Who built this, where are they, what are they like? But it fundamentally presupposes the existence of intelligent, tool-using, megastructure-building aliens that operate much like humans, albeit with far more advanced technology—“advanced” here presupposing technological development as a path of linear progress that humans might journey down. The line between explorer and explored is clear. There are active, intelligent beings, and there is the environment around them: a source of raw material to be shaped and used.

Zoi highlights the fundamental problem of positioning ourselves as external to the world we inhabit and privileging the incredibly narrow band of human perception and communication over the vastly larger and smaller scales on which the universe operates. The zoi that Amira inhabits may not speak or think like a human, but from the off it is clear it can distinguish between living beings and their tools, that it is learning about and responding to human biology. Though she knows of the hormone-altering effect, and chooses to stay, Amira is not prepared for the reciprocity this entails. She is horrified when Kiah points out that “air-filled spaces aren’t natural for the zoi” and that “they could be harmful to it in the long run” (p. 44). While assuming the conditions amenable to her are a given, she is deeply discomforted by any suggestion of human accommodation to the zoi’s needs. Again, it is significant that she comes into conflict with Kiah, who adapts easily, but embraces Linn, who struggles on a fundamental, biological level. Moreover, Kiah’s original task, as psychologist, was “studying the zoi from a psychological and communicative perspective” (p. 36), a role acknowledging its capacity for reciprocal exchange. By contrast, Linn’s intended role as the biotech expert was to find ways to use the zoi to produce human technology: the zoi as exploitable object/environment.

Why should it surprise us that a biological entity might communicate on the level of hormonal alterations or cellular interactions, a far more universal language even on our own planet, rather than human speech? Why are human attempts to adapt the zoi to our needs any less or more horrifying than the inverse? Can we really separate ourselves so easily from the biological environments in which we exist, and without which the human body cannot survive? These are the kinds of questions Zoi raises.

It does this while operating on a relatively intimate scale. The zoi are large but not vast, their interior comprising a handful of rooms. Aboard are only four characters, including Amira, and contact with those remaining on Earth is limited—the novel opens on a message from Earth, with which it is no longer possible to have real-time communication. The focus here is on the relationships and tensions between Amira and the others. But even in the sections on Earth, the focus remains constrained. Most of Amira’s life is covered in a small span of text, and the story is largely that of two key relationships. The first is Amira’s friendship with her uncle, Karim, an idealist who encourages her dreams of reaching the zoi. The second is Amira’s relationship with Natan, her lover, partner, and friend—a relationship that, from the very first page, we know Amira ultimately chooses to leave behind, allowing Natan to pursue his dreams of family life and Amira to commit herself entirely to study of the zoi. There are indications of a wider world, then—one with changed sexual/familial norms, social structures, and environmental conditions—but broad worldbuilding isn’t the focus here.

Combined with the sometimes-sparse descriptive prose—see, for example, “I move through the entrance and continue down the passageways, towards the room designed for disposing of bodily waste” (p. 20)—the small setting and cast can lend the novel the air of a stage-play, the centrality of the narrator’s subjective experience notwithstanding. It is always clear what is happening and where, and the writing keeps up the pace, with even exposition whipping by. There is no lingering on visceral detail or, for that matter, linguistic flourish. Though the novel is deeply engaged with concepts from biology, this is not diamond-hard SF with Peter Watts-style hyper-technicality (nor is it half so bleak). The zoi’s impenetrable surface, its rapid adaptation to human needs, and its ability to travel between the stars are all left as simple fact. Concept and character are king.

The novel keeps the pages turning without the need for gun-battles, the mystery of what will happen next pulls the reader along (it only gets weirder), and the character drama is compelling without ever straying into the melodramatic. These are people in an inconceivably stressful situation, but they are also intelligent adults doing their best, and, whatever her flaws, Amira is ultimately sympathetic. Her dread and panic are all too relatable, trapped within an alien being by her own choice and grappling with existential questions as her body and mind change around her, her lifelong dream now revealed a nightmare.

Though biologists and hard SF fans might find it lacks the level of technical detail they’d like, anyone interested in SF that focuses on authentic reactions to encounters with the alien will find Zoi worth a read. It manages a novel take on the age-old premise of first contact. Here is a story of scientific exploration and personal transformation, emphasizing the sometimes-unsettling implications of our biological nature, our interdependence with environments and organisms we all too often fail not consider, and the compromises that even friendly contact with an alien lifeform would entail.

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/zoi-by-jane-mondrup/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=59321