January 1, 2022
Claiming Hurston/Wright and John Dos Passos honors, plus a United States Artist James Baldwin Fellowship, Johnson crafts the imaginatively allegorical tale of a spaceship captained by vainglorious capitalist Bob, who's circumnavigating the Jovian moon Europa with a mostly fawning crew. The exceptions are Dwayne and Nelani, but they're the ones to make the big discovery: a domed city mirroring U.S. habitations and peopled by generations of UFO abductees. Who's in control here?
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February 28, 2022
Johnson (Loving Day) delivers an alien abduction satire that reads like Gulliver’s Travels by way of The Truman Show. It opens with sociologist Nalini grimly analyzing her bro-y fellow astronauts on the SS Delany, a cryoship headed for Jupiter. A Black woman, she’s “coincidentally” assigned as assistant to the only Black man on the crew, and the two are relentlessly othered. Surveying Europa, the pair observe what appears, impossibly, to be a domed human city. Thus far, the story feels straightforward, but then the perspective switches to Chase, chauffeur to an aging billionaire. He’s convinced his wife is an alien abductee, and his conviction proves his gateway to learning that the Delany crew has been kidnapped to the domed city—and Chase’s boss is funding their rescue. The political stew the would-be rescuers drop into, and the intersecting factions that arise around them, become scaffolding for Johnson’s commentary on class, partisanship, capitalism, and things that go unsaid—“invisible things.” All too soon, Nalini’s sharp observations of the Jovian city’s culture blur into academic bloviation, and long-winded caricature becomes the book’s defining feature. Johnson is too intentional a writer for that to be accidental, but purposefulness does not equate to an enjoyable reading experience. It’s sharp, but it lacks heart. Agent: Gloria Loomis, Watkins/Loomis Agency.
May 1, 2022
Kidnapped astronauts find themselves in a mysterious city on one of Jupiter's moons. Sociologist Nalini Jackson landed a gig that many of her colleagues would envy: She's undertaking "an intensive field study of social dynamics" on a NASA cryoship orbiting Jupiter. The problem, she soon realizes, is that she doesn't like people all that much, especially most of the overgrown frat-boy types who are her shipmates. Things get worse when their ship is suddenly taken by mysterious forces to Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, and they find themselves in New Roanoke, "an American city of at least a million. On a freaking moon, 444 million miles away, for chrissakes. In a bubble. City streets. Expressways. Parks." They're made to attend an orientation, where a supervisor tells them, "You can either let it drive you crazy for the rest of your life--and it can--or you can just go with the flow and make the most of this. Do like the locals do: Accept it and live your life. You got no choice; this is your home now." The ship's mission leader, Bob Seaford, takes this advice and gets involved in the community's ruling party, while Nalini's friend Dwayne Causwell goes the other way, plotting to escape the city with a ragtag group of dissidents. Meanwhile, a crew consisting of a NASA admiral, a businessman, and his dopey assistant embark on a voyage to rescue the kidnapped astronauts, who find themselves dealing with "invisible things," mysterious gravitational forces that the people of New Roanoke refuse to discuss. There's a lot going on in this book, and the results are mixed. As a satire of American politics and class issues, it's a little too obvious and clumsy. But as a science-fiction novel, it's saved by Johnson's charismatic writing and sense of humor. ("So we missed sentient life--so what?" Nalini tells Dwayne early in the book. "Have you ever met sentient life? A lot of them are assholes.") The book doesn't quite live up to its high ambitions, and it's far from Johnson's best work, but it's still unquestionably entertaining. Clumsy in parts but, overall, a lot of fun.
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May 15, 2022
A science mission to explore Jupiter discovers something unexpected on the moon Europa and disappears. A chauffeur in Arizona who believes his wife was abducted by aliens gets wrapped up in a covert rescue mission. This sounds like a setup for a standard alien-encounter story; instead, Johnson (Pym, 2011) uses the premise to examine many of the immediate problems facing our society today: intolerance, unearned privilege, religious fundamentalism, corrupt politics, and mass obliviousness. There's nothing subtle about this work, and some might find it too on the nose, but there is power in addressing these issues so unflinchingly. His writing style is fairly cerebral, which mutes some of the emotional impact, and that's the point: Johnson has an argument to make, and the story humanizes it enough for it to really hit home. His characters are vivid and compelling, and even the villains retain their full measure of humanity, with motivations that make sense. The ending veers unexpectedly into the fantastical while offering a welcome measure of hope.
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