here are not many characters in Nekropolis, but they seem thousands. Nekropolis is an SF novel about the people who have no faces in most SF novels, and are therefore innumerable—the people whose deaths feed the engines of world-change in SF stories about making it all new. They are the mothers with dying children, the dark-skinned servitors who hide their eyes from owners like us, the grunts, the discards, the serfs, the farmers, the cousin who turns to whoring, the little shopkeepers, the picturesque starvers who jam mean streets around the corner from the world: all those who sweat with fear when the world comes round the corner.
Unlike the protagonists of almost any SF novel, but exactly like the "extras" who populate the Third World, the protagonists of Maureen F. McHugh's fourth novel do not live in the present tense of history. As a title, Nekropolis implies many things about death and belatedness, but its central message may be straightforward: that although the past is a nekropolis, change is yet another death. The key word here is, perhaps, prison.
McHugh is vague about the exact time of her near-future tale, almost certainly because her several protagonists, through whose successive voices the story is told, are themselves as ignorant of the cutting edge of "progress" as an Indian peasant in 2001 talking to his aunt in England on a mobile phone. It does not matter what year Nekropolis is set in because the precise year of the tale—precision here being a First World concept, a necessary monitoring device if your world's main business is to produce the future—does not interest its cast.
The setting is urban Morocco, part of the North Atlantic Alliance. No trade or diplomatic relations are permitted with the modern world—Europe and the Americas—though a good deal of smuggling of hi-tech devices is covertly encouraged. AI devices proliferate, as do virtual reality environments for the rich, and cardphones: the kind of Cargo Polynesians were reputed to long for in the 19th century. As in our own time, the streetwise of the Third World trade in Cargo, but live in the shambolic nekropolis of the very same traditional world they were born into, and feed on. Nekropolis is a tale of the fed upon. It is also a tale of survival.
But one thing should be made clear. Although I think I've fairly described the background of Nekropolis, that background is almost entirely implicit; without a single polemical outcry, McHugh tells her story as if we had no excuse not understanding, without being told, the point of its world-historical location.
Living with us in a feral future
Hariba begins. She is a 25-year-old virgin who has been jessed—a mind-altering process, illegal in the First World, which renders the person so treated inherently loyal to her employer. She works for a rich restaurant owner whose wife comes to hate her. But before she is evicted from his house, she becomes involved with another servant or slave, a harni named Akhmim, an AI-driven humanoid whose nature commands of him a tied responsiveness to the hollow aloneness of the human condition.
Harni, who are raised in commensal litters, find it a constant torture to be away from their kind; but humans, into whose abyssal hollowedness they rise like yeast, give them some sense of function. After eviction from her master's house, and enforcing bonding/bondage to a new mistress, Hariba runs away from the law, returns to Nekropolis, the part of her home city where the dead were buried long ago, and where the invisibles of the new world continue to live, immured in the fettering complexities of a world they do not quite have enough energy to emigrate from. Akhmim is now narrating. His bondage to Hariba—which is very similar to jessing—makes it impossible for him not to attempt to fill her. He wishes to have sex with her, because sex is "as close as humans ever seem to come to the merging of 'I' and 'other'—the momentary forgetfulness of separation, which isn't the same."
But the bondage of her culture (McHugh utters no feminist arguments, but her portrait of the appalling nekropolis of constraint that women are bonded to, in her dream version of Morocco, needs no bush) keeps Hariba from sex. And the abrogation of her jessing is making her almost fatally ill. Further sections of the story, told through her mother's and her best friend's voices, tie the two protagonists more and more tightly into the necrosis of the given, until it seems they will die. How they do not in fact die, and the costs of their escape to Spain, constitute the main action, quickly told, of Nekropolis. In Spain, Hariba and Akhmim become evolue, which is of course another death, another Nekropolis to inhabit. But they are surfacing, for what it's worth, they are coming to the surface of the present tense of the world.
AI creatures like Akhmim are called chimera in Spain; he has further climbs to make, but will do so with his fellows, for his bondage to Hariba has now lessened, and they separate after fucking at last. Hariba will become an accountant. To do so, she must cut her hair. "The smooth coil of black hair"—once cut—is topologically identical to the city she has left, the family she has abandoned, the virginity she has finally "surrendered" to Akhmim, all the betrayals of not dying.
Now she lives in the future, with us. Bon voyage.
It is a breathtaking book, whose melancholy is unrinsable, but exhilarated in its telling. The spareness of McHugh's prose, for she seems never to waste a word, fills from within like a homo sapiens filled with Akhmim, until it all seems pregnant. Nekropolis rings like crystal, a precarious sound in a police world. But nothing can be sole or whole without being rent. Nekropolis is a book about the cost of living.
