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Henk's Reviews > The Membranes
The Membranes
by
by
The perspective of a wellness worker in 2100 starts of clunky but turns into a truly ambitious and gripping read, full of great ideas on not just the future, internet but on society as well
Safe under the purple sky of a waterproof and earthquake-proof membrane, deep beneath the ocean, people lived out their days like flowers in a greenhouse
Even the future is queer in The Membranes, a 1996 novel that incorporates effortless queerness and new kinds of relations besides the nuclear family through the eyes of a wellness worker in 2100. The emphasis Chi Ta-wei puts on that it is 2100 feels slightly clumsily at the start of the novel, but the undersea setting is original.
Momo her love for old fashioned e-mail and hate for video calls, plus love for online shopping and door delivery feels especially poignant in our COVID-19 times.
And her focus on data privacy, especially medical feels very of the current time as well.
Plus the idea that fashion companies make more by focussing on beauty products and skincare is very accurate and foreshadows actual strategic moves of these types of companies.
There are cyborg subhuman strata used for hard and menial work and organ donation (hello Never Let Me Go) and gladiatorial fights between nations in an essentially Bladerunner/Ghost in the Shell type of world. Even more interesting is how a major plot element of Klara and the Sun, also by Kazuo Ishiguro, is also present in this book, just involving a clone instead of an artificial friend.
Finally, predicting cloud computing and Citrix servers, was very impressive in 1996 as well.
The ozone layer failing and leading people to live under the seas feels rather quaint, antiquated, while the societal reverse discrimination based on skin color and the protection a black skin offers against UV-rays was quite daring if underdeveloped. And there are laserdiscs as a saviour for e-pubs and a means to beat Microsoft, hilarious looking back.
Questions of a practical nature popped up with me while reading, like how can we build underwater cities but not sun protection over cities above ground?
And what do we do with Switzerland and other landlocked nations? Wouldn’t the building of undersea cities not just be at the coasts given the costs?
At the start of the book there is a lot of tell, instead of show, while bold ideas are introduced in short succesion; like I can see that The Three-Body Problem, hallmark of contemporary Chinese science fiction, was kind of written in the same manner.
But keep hanging on if science fiction is not naturally your thing. For instance Chapter 6 is exceptionally strong and from this point forward the William Shakespeare references and Italo Calvino his If on a Winter's Night a Traveller comes back as well, making sense in the context of the novel.
Chapter 9 was also remarkable and gives both Truman show vibes and reminded me of the central part of The Neverending Story.
Overall this book is so much more surprising and daring than I imagined upfront or based on reading the first chapters. I loved how many of the tropes we now find normal in science fiction are foreshadowed and used so skilfully by the author, writing in 1995.
Highly recommend for anyone who likes their fiction ambitious and surprising!
Safe under the purple sky of a waterproof and earthquake-proof membrane, deep beneath the ocean, people lived out their days like flowers in a greenhouse
Even the future is queer in The Membranes, a 1996 novel that incorporates effortless queerness and new kinds of relations besides the nuclear family through the eyes of a wellness worker in 2100. The emphasis Chi Ta-wei puts on that it is 2100 feels slightly clumsily at the start of the novel, but the undersea setting is original.
Momo her love for old fashioned e-mail and hate for video calls, plus love for online shopping and door delivery feels especially poignant in our COVID-19 times.
And her focus on data privacy, especially medical feels very of the current time as well.
Plus the idea that fashion companies make more by focussing on beauty products and skincare is very accurate and foreshadows actual strategic moves of these types of companies.
There are cyborg subhuman strata used for hard and menial work and organ donation (hello Never Let Me Go) and gladiatorial fights between nations in an essentially Bladerunner/Ghost in the Shell type of world. Even more interesting is how a major plot element of Klara and the Sun, also by Kazuo Ishiguro, is also present in this book, just involving a clone instead of an artificial friend.
Finally, predicting cloud computing and Citrix servers, was very impressive in 1996 as well.
The ozone layer failing and leading people to live under the seas feels rather quaint, antiquated, while the societal reverse discrimination based on skin color and the protection a black skin offers against UV-rays was quite daring if underdeveloped. And there are laserdiscs as a saviour for e-pubs and a means to beat Microsoft, hilarious looking back.
Questions of a practical nature popped up with me while reading, like how can we build underwater cities but not sun protection over cities above ground?
And what do we do with Switzerland and other landlocked nations? Wouldn’t the building of undersea cities not just be at the coasts given the costs?
At the start of the book there is a lot of tell, instead of show, while bold ideas are introduced in short succesion; like I can see that The Three-Body Problem, hallmark of contemporary Chinese science fiction, was kind of written in the same manner.
But keep hanging on if science fiction is not naturally your thing. For instance Chapter 6 is exceptionally strong and from this point forward the William Shakespeare references and Italo Calvino his If on a Winter's Night a Traveller comes back as well, making sense in the context of the novel.
Chapter 9 was also remarkable and gives both Truman show vibes and reminded me of the central part of The Neverending Story.
Overall this book is so much more surprising and daring than I imagined upfront or based on reading the first chapters. I loved how many of the tropes we now find normal in science fiction are foreshadowed and used so skilfully by the author, writing in 1995.
Highly recommend for anyone who likes their fiction ambitious and surprising!
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