Science Fiction with a Purpose

I've read science fiction since I was a small child, from the Anytime Rings to Runaway Robot to Prey and other more recent works like Mur Lafferty's 6 Wakes. There's one common thread that runs through science fiction - a sense of morality. Every imagination of the future is an analysis of today's world, because what we as authors do is take what we know, and imagine what it could become.

That's why I began to write. Models and Citizens, at its core, is about oppression. Most dystopian fiction is in some way, but this book was based on United States history and the big what-if. What if slavery happened in the future? From that, the next natural question was "what would it look like?", followed by "have we really changed so much that we wouldn't allow it?".

So I set out with Harper in tow to see how she, a recent college graduate with no opinion on anything but her own future, would fare in a world where slavery was a fundamental part of life. I was both disappointed and enheartened by her decisions throughout the novel. From her struggle to hold onto her imagined future before Ordell entered and shook things up, to her eventual and unintentional activism.

If you look closely, her decisions are all driven by personal goals, and not by any larger good. Even as she criticizes herself for molding her life to others' whims, she remains at the wheel (in the end, in a very literal way).

There's a reason the novel ends the way that it does. Not trying to give too much away, it's because Harper, like so many of the rest of us, has hit her limit with the stressors that come with social awareness. She progressively comes to realize the amount of work and sacrifice it takes to live in a just society, and makes her decision at the end based on that realization of what is expected of her and what her life has become.

So though the novel is very entertaining, and is on its face about clones, there's a lot happening in the subtext that I wanted to shine a light on in case you missed it.

Happy reading!