I first read Maureen McHugh via her collection of short stories, After the Apocalypse, which is highly recommended–the best stories are magnificent, the rest merely good. Nekropolis (2001) is the first novel of hers I have read (at about 250 pages, it could even be considered a long novella these days).
Set in a not-too-distant-future Morocco, Nekropolis is a story of two oppressed classes. The first are domestic workers who undergo a medical process called “jessing,” by which they become totally subservient to their masters and the second are an android race called the harni, a beautiful, sexually polymorphous, innocent machine-human hybrid.
Our heroine befriends a harni, a friendship that quickly becomes more than that and includes a possible remedy to being “jessed.”
And then … and then … and then Nekropolis changes gears entirely. And, without giving too much away, it shifts from an engaging work of speculative fiction with a nicely conceived North African setting to an exploration of what it means to be a refugee, of how possible it ever is to make a fresh start, of how the ties that bind us together in moments of struggle may loosen and fray once the destination is reached.
I loved the shift, and found Nekropolis to be a poignant, intelligent, nuanced book about identity and belonging and migration: themes that were resonant at the turn of the century when it was first published and remain so today. This is not a stunning, ground-breaking work, but that mantle is awful and heavy. It is literate and smart, and what it says is worth our attention.
#WhatIWishICouldDo
Let a story go where it needs to go. That takes courage and sensitivity and an attentive ear for the characters. It is scary as well: you risk your audience when you move away from established genre norms, and McHugh does so with confidence and grace.