Friday Imaginary Review: Franc Muntcrow “Ooegenesis”
Franc Muntcrow, Ooegenesis (Ambadjustiguous Press 2021), pp141 £11
Muntcrow’s reputation has been built upon his/her (for, still, nobody has been able to determine whether Franc is short for Francis, Francesca, or perhaps some other gender-neutral moniker) ecological fiction. In 2015’s Arbor And Peace, humanity, its lifespans massively expanded by technology, slows its expertiential being-in-the-world to one where months pass like days — since each person now lives many thousands of years . In doing this humanity comes to understand that trees are the dominant sentience lifeform on earth, a fact previously occluded by homo sapiens mayfly-flitting existence. The World The Bees Made (2019) is an ambitious if flawed history of existence from an apiarian point of view: human play a minor part in this novel, first as mysterious benefactors of the world’s key species, insofar as they help bees build and maintain their hives, then increasingly malevolent enemies, honey-stealers, chemical-poisoners, until the bees rise up and purge the world of their monkey contaminants. But his/her latest represents something of a new direction.
Muntcrow’s new novel, or novella, is a fable about female reproductive autonomy; but it doesn’t go in the direction we might, from Muntcrow’s previous writing, expect. The setting is a colonised solar system in a post-scarcity future. Freed from the material constraints of competing for resources to supply subsistence needs, humanity has become focused on more abstruse, abstract quantities. Where our present-day geopolitical logic is territorial, future humanity is conceptual. Anyone, anywhere (in Muntcrow’s future: on Earth, Mars, or the many space settlements called ‘scoop homes’ that simulate gravity by alternately accelerating and, having flipped about, decelerating on a constant solar orbit) — any human being is assured of long life, good nutrition and health, and access to all the knowledge and culture of our shared heritage. Smart AIs, brilliant but soulless, oversee infrastructure, steer spacecraft and act as intermediaries whenever the relations between separate human communities grow fractious.
This state of affairs is, we are assured, not a utopia, not because utopia is beyond the practical capacities of this imagined future, but because people don’t really want such a state of affairs. We don’t, of course, wish to live in misery and degradation, but there is a twist in our soul that calls us to sorrow, even to tragedy: a desire for a certain amount of existential tartness to augment the existential sweetness of untrammelled wish-fulfilment. This is, in other words, an understanding that the obstacles to happiness are not only necessary to the realisation of happiness — that we need to be hungry properly to enjoy delicious food, and so on — but that, in their own sublimely minor-key way, such obstacles are a kind of happiness themselves. What’s radical in Muntcrow’s version of this (we can be honest, common enough) insight is that s/he roots it in the collective rather than the individual. His/her future solar system is divided into tens of thousands of separated human communities each of which, freed from the material constraint, have grown into exaggerated and fantastic variety, like Galapagos goldfinches.
The story starts in Gilead, a community named not for its Biblical so much as its Atwoodian associations. Many of Muntcrow’s future communities take their founding principles from literature and film: there are several Middle Earths — Middles Earth, perhaps the plural should be — wuxia and ancient Greek nations, idealised African worlds, nations based on Disney and Cervantes and Jane Austen. The strange thing, or so Muntcrow styles it, is the extent to which these worlds manifest a great level of imaginative impoverishment. The same basical visions of how life and world might be, are repeated over and again. The premise of the novel, really, is how thin the reach is for human beings making their storyworlds, how derivative, how stale.
Gilead, a scoop-home seven kilometers wide, in solar orbit somewhere between Earth and Venus, is a sort of cod-Puritan New England. The social logic of the place is predicated not just on the restrictive control of women, but more specifically on the control of female reproductive biology. The rationale is religious, something true in many thousands of other communities (there are as many secular and atheist communities, of course). Gilead takes a radical line on human life as potentiality, not merely something that begins with birth. Not only do the Gileadians consider a fertilised egg a full human being, they consider unfertilized eggs the same way.
As a bare matter of human physiology, a female baby is born with 2 million immature eggs inside her ovaries. On average she will retain 300,000 of these by the time she has her first period. Some more austere Gileadians take the first of these numbers as the crucial one, and lament the genocide of potential life occasioned — unintentionally, for sure, but carried nonetheless, like original sin — over the first dozen-or-so years of a girl’s life. To these sects all women are haunted by these deaths, followed through all their days by a huge crowd of ghosts, a blizzard of actualised spiritual mortality. But most of the communities who exist in Gilead take the latter number as theologically canonical, for once a woman becomes fertile choice, the ‘free will’ so important to Christian conceptions of human existence, comes into play. Of course, no woman could ‘choose’ to give birth to 300,000 children (although Muntcrow hints that some Giliadeans are working to develop technologies that might make this possible). So where the shortfall is concerned there is a ritual. Each woman must write the story of each of their eggs. They must speculatively extrapolate the life these beings might have lived.
This is treated as a sacred responsibility, and cannot be shirked, although different women take it differently. For some it is a chore, to be quitted as soon as possible. They write out brief, sentence-length biographies that say, as it might be, ‘he lived a virtuous and religious life and died into the community of God’, ‘she lived a virtuous and religious life and died into the community of God’. But for others, this task becomes that which structures their life. They might live normal lives in which composing these myriad stories runs alongside marrying, raising children and going to church. Or they might centre the writing more fully: many women retire to writing retreats with other women to concentrate more fully on the work.
In other words Muntcrow takes a set-up of the kind we might consider ripe for Atwoodian satirical attack, in order to turn it another way. Life in this orbiting Gilead is, in many ways, pinched and restrictive. You or I might not enjoy living there, not least because the girls and women who are born into it have no choice — it is not impossible to leave and start life in another community, but such emigration is very hard to arrange and few Gileadians pursue it. It’s in this respect a carceral vsision. But at the same time there is, in Muntcrow’s telling, something rather appealing to a bookish personality in these writing communities: all your needs, material, emotional (and, though more discretely, sexual) are taken care of. All you have to do is write.
The story develops a parallel plot in which a number of other System communities, convinced that the women of Gilead are enslaved and oppressed, plan a military intervention to ‘liberate’ them. In this AI-steered high-tech future, and considering the plan involves breaching the integrity of a sealed space-station community hurtling with alternate one-g acceleration and one-g deceleration around the sun, this is no easy matter. War-games are simulated, and in most of these the Gilead scoop-home is destroyed and hundreds of thousand die. Is this risk still worth undertaking? For the middle third of the novel this will-they won’t-they tension moves the story along. It works because Muntcrow does just enough to recruit us to a sense that these are indeed helpless victims. But the twist in the story is that, although these women freedoms are severely truncated, they are not unhappy about it. Rather than digging into this, potentially reactionary, point, Muntcrow suddenly hops a century forward in her story.
This (spoilers: beware) is the pay-off in her tale. It turns out that post-scarcity humanity is post every scarcity except one, and that one is — stories. The myriad future communities can live, and love, eat, drink and be merry, raise kids or not, explore, invent, play sports and worship God or gods, all to their heart’s content; but all these things become meaningless without stories to irrigate them. Heart’s content, it transpires, requires not good food and good passtimes, or not only these things. More fundamentally it requires good stories. The obstacle to full human flourishing in a fully colonised solar system with ten thousand separate worldlets and societies is the paucity of existing stories, produced, often in a merry-go-round of pastiche and plagiary, by historic humanity trapped on the one planet Earth. This short novel ends upbeat, on opening possibilities, because the women of Gilead have dedicated themselves to the creations of hundreds of thousands of new stories. These pollinate the whole system, providing sometimes entertainment and distraction, sometimes the object of study and discussion, but occasionally the premises for whole new ways of being-in-the-world, meaning-architecture, the open space into which humanity can breathe and live a new set of futures.
Is this story reactionary, politically speaking? It is hard to judge. The portrait of a diasporic humanity, supplied by futuristic tech with all material exigencies and yet stale, exhausted, dying, is well done. But that its rebirth should be effected by women denied their fullest autonomy, and compelled by their accident of birth into nunneries of story-making: well, that’s a strange, if not an impossible, pill to swallow. The ‘ova’ of the novella’s title prove to be stories, not eggs; the seeds by which humans can fully come into their humanity. And the genesis is a ‘let their be light’ of a distinctive narrtative kind.
