About halfway through reading Skinship by James Reich I was reminded of a passage by Mark Fisher, from his book, Ghosts Of My Life:
The threat is no longer the deadly sweet seduction of nostalgia. The problem is not, any more, the longing to get to the past, but the inability to get out of it.
This was how the late Mark Fisher described the album Theoretical Pure Anterograde Amnesia by a musician known as The Caretaker but somehow it could just as easily describe the feelings I got from Reich’s newest science fiction novel from Anti-Oedipus Press.
Skinship tells the story of the last remnants of humanity and their escape from a ruined earth on an organic space vessel, the Charcot, headed toward an unknown future on a prospective planet in the Dragonhead Nebula. Applewhite, a synthetic being known as a tommy who also serves as the ships navigator, is the target of a conspiracy that threatens not only its life but also the lives of all that reside on the ship and their most valuable cargo: a genetic archive that could serve as humanity’s rebirth on their new home.
I could easily see Skinship placed in an old spinner rack next to Norman Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron or Michael Moorcock’s Behold The Man. It reads and feels vintage in its brief length and pulpy premise but deftly carries a contemporary story of economic and ecological perils that we teeter precariously toward in the here and now. That tone is only where the analgesic haze of hauntological nostalgia begins.
In Skinship, Reich doesn’t give his characters comfort in a nostalgic existence, he bridles them with it. Like their mandate to preserve and protect the legacy of humanity, it has become just another burden on their seemingly endless voyage. The Earth may have gone away but the past continues to haunt on.
Manufacturing the every need of the Charcot are the Makers, a secretive cabal that feels like an ominous evolution of our modern day media conglomerates. They wield their influence by molding the entire cultural environment of the ship out of otherwise long forgotten fads and fashions and further trapping everyone in an endless nostalgia loop. The inhabitants of the titular skinship live in districts designed to preserve a long forgotten past like a traveling mausoleum for the entire history of modern man. Even the automaton Applewhite spends much of his time sipping Manhattans, dressing in the suits of 1950’s businessmen, and meditates on movies like Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce on videocassette while sitting in Herman Miller chairs.
Like much of the best speculative fiction, Skinship juggles a lot of interesting ideas: the end of the world and our legacy in the universe, inventive body horror, innovative technologies, backdrops that are alien but also eerily familiar at the same time, all wrapped up in a pastiche of intrigue and mystery. James Reich handles them all masterfully, all while maintaining a melancholy that feels lived in and crafting characters of great depth and complexity. There are no wasted words, no nagging exposition, and no stereotypes to do the heavy lifting. There are no easy outs in the way Reich brandishes his language and the story always keeps you guessing what will unfold next.
I finished reading Skinship only a few days ago but it lingers with me still, just as our history plagues the Charcot and their solemn navigator Applewhite. Like them I have experienced an escape from a world of perpetual calamity that is not truly an escape from anything at all. Fortunately, James Reich has made it such a satisfying journey that the sense of foreboding that it has left behind doesn’t actually matter all that much.
Thank you to our friends at Anti-Oedipus Press for sending me a copy of this book to review. I highly recommend checking out some of their other amazing titles. Skinship is available directly from the publisher or on Amazon.
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