The feared scandal of my birth-bastard child of a black woman-had already forced his resignation as sovereign. My sissyness and my sickliness were two sides of the same coin to my father. His life an echo of the antebellum South’s one drop rule: he is a mix of elements that don’t equate to manhood on the USS Matilda, half black/queer/thin/pale:

Smith exist as a colleague, teacher, and in some ways a mental soul-mate for Aster. The more bold among the Guard call me faggot when they are drunk or whispering. All people–all Q-deckers at least-are assumed women unless there’s a statement or obvious sign otherwise, such as the fashions they wear or the trade they choose. On Q deck, all children are referred to as girls. One queer character, Surgeon General Theo Smith, describes life on the ship as one of stark degradation:Ī queer. This novel is unapologetically queer and astutely rendered Solomn’s deft world-building creates an evocative portrait of a childhood bound-up in slavery, misogyny, and homophobia. Aster soon realizes that she, along with her slave compatriots, must rebel or face a fatally ominous future. The challenges faced by Aster, and her community are searingly visceral. Solomon’s work is the love child of other queer science fiction writers of color whose publications align the historical politics of colonization and the intergenerational mental and metaphysical damages caused by subjection.Īster, the novel’s black protagonist, is a brutalized passenger on the HSS Matilda, a large spaceship dedicated to moving the last remnants of humanity to a supposititious “Promised Land.” All the dark-skinned passengers on the ship are made to live under the strict and dehumanizing rule of the ship’s leaders, similar to black people living in the United States’ plantation-era South. River Solomon’s new speculative fiction novel illuminates a dark corner of our collective past and current reality: slavery’s psychological impact and cultural trauma as its own grueling and coded character. ‘An Unkindness of Ghosts’ by River Solomon

An unkindness of ghost