A long overdue review

I committed book-purchasing this Readercon, and the first book I sought out to purchase was Cadwell Turnbull's debut sci-fi novel The Lesson. I had skipped the book launch party at Trident a month or two because I had a planning meeting to go to and have been a bit steamed about it ever since (especially since the meeting derailed at the end, but that's another story). Although given what happened at Lyndsay Ely's book launch party at Trident my wallet is OK with me having skipped (I had three pints of stout and bought $200 worth of books on my way out the door). Anyway, I blew off the better part of a day of Readercon programming to read The Lesson on the guest patio, partly because it had finally stopped raining out and the hotel was freezing, but also partly because I wanted to read about aliens invading the U.S. Virgin Islands.

 

"Invaded" is, of course, a contentious term in this book; it brings up images of showing up with a uniformed military and planting your flag in a territory. But this is a modern book with a modern exploration of colonialism, and so the aliens instead show up, gift humanity a bunch of tech, declare their intention to coexist peacefully, exempt themselves from human governance and live under a parallel governance of their own even as they continue to hang out on human land, and proceed to "peacefully cohabit" approximately the way an abuser "peacefully cohabits" with their victim--i.e., with an insistence that they have the absolute right to do whatever the fuck they want, and immediately escalating anytime someone looks at them funny. 

 

The dynamic is familiar on multiple levels depending on where the reader has seen it: You'll recognize it if you know much about domestic violence; you'll recognize it if you know anything about neocolonialism and the U.S.'s functional exemption from world governance, our history of playing Team America World Police and toppling any government that we think might cause us minor inconveniences. You'll recognize it if you've been keeping an eye on any of the reactionary supremacist movements and their gleefully disingenuous reframing of literally fucking anything at all as a "mortal threat" that justifies lethal response. Obviously, it's familiar if you've paid any attention to police brutality. The common thread here is entitlement to total control. In some cases the overreactions are an attempt to establish it and other times they're a way to show off that they already have it, but the thinking is the same: Don't make me brutally murder you by failing to be 100% deferent to me!

 

The Ynaa (that's the name of the alien race) aren't, like, hard-wired to be genetically evil, or anything like that. They've just learned some shitty behavior that makes it unthinkable for them to act as anything other than an oppressor class. They know it's a learned behavior; they call it "the lesson," hence the title. They've learned the lesson; the humans just need to learn the lesson too and everything will be fine. 

 

(It will not be fine. This is not a sustainable way to live with anyone.)

 

There is exactly one (1) Ynaa who, having spent a few centuries doing recon on Earth before the rest of her species showed up, is unlearning the lesson. She goes by Mera, and she is the "ambassador" between the Ynaa and the humans. She's our only non-human viewpoint character, which is a relief, because overweeningly entitled people have the most boring thought processes ever so I wouldn't want to spend much time with any of the other Ynaa. 

 

Our other viewpoint characters, of which there are about half a dozen, are Virgin Island residents of various ages, who are attempting to balance life tiptoeing around a bunch of hyperviolent aliens around the other stuff that is still going on in their lives. One of the main characters is a late-middle-aged dude going through a sort of midlife crisis, which I guess is part of what makes this a "literary" science fiction novel. One of the other characters is his wife, who responds to his midlife crisis by becoming a lesbian, so I think she wins. My favorite viewpoint character was Lee, a queer high school student whose best friend Angela was accidentally murder-suicided by her abusive boyfriend on the same day that a Ynaa killed another youth in town. Which of these deaths was considered a tragic but normal isolated incident and quickly forgotten, and which one was considered an act of war and representative of an entire class of beings, is never explicitly compared, but it's obvious enough to throw an uncomfortable pall over much of the rest of the book's action, especially the Ynaa's decision to mostly target the island's men. 

 

If there is a main character, it is Derrick, Mera's secretary, who is pretty widely regarded as a species traitor by the rest of the island. Derrick is a good-hearted, curious dude with questionable practical judgment, as one can see from his choice of careers. 

 

I don't want to give too much in the way of spoilers, but let's just say that if you're looking for a happy ending, you missed the bit where it's about colonialism. Regimes may be overthrown, but colonial legacies don't disappear so easily. 

 

Considering I ate through this book in two days and that was nearly a month ago (and what a month it has been!), some of my initial thoughts have faded. I remember it has strong feminist themes and a lot of well-developed female characters, even though gender is not the main comparative lens we look at the Ynaa with. It really showcases how much people will do their best to keep living their lives even with all kinds of weird shit going on, and how it's more or less possible to do so right up until it isn't. It also covers some of the history of the US Virgin Islands, something that mainland USians are generally shielded from learning about. Overall, there's a lot going on in what's not a particularly long book.

 

I recommend it highly, even if you don't generally like first contact/alien invasion stories -- or perhaps especially if you don't like alien invasion stories; it depends on what you don't like about them.