Three Giants, Talking While Hurtling Through Space

Space is where billionaires dream. Jeff Bezos thinks that we will soon move heavy industry and most humans off-planet onto massive revolving space stations, allowing the Earth to return to a pristine state. Elon Musk has famously argued that in order for humanity to survive all manner of calamities—asteroids, global warming, nuclear war—we must become an interplanetary species. He wants a million people settled on Mars by 2050. Larry Page has described this biosphere 'backup' as a 'philanthropical' act, and has invested in asteroid-mining ventures that will support it.
Whatever their motivations—charitable, scientific, certainly commercial—their imaginations have long been fueled by science fiction. In stories such as Isaac Asimov's Foundation series and Star Trek, the genre has positioned outer space as the frontier that humanity must cross in order to transcend earthbound dilemmas. Musk, Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg are all fans of Iain Banks's Culture series, which imagines a post-scarcity socialist utopia where all of our measly 21st-century problems have been solved by technological advancement. The arch-capitalists aren't deterred from pursuing it, though. They just want to have their hands on the controls.
But what if space fails to live up to its billing? The technology for extraplanetary stations large enough to accommodate extensive human life remains theoretical. Martian soil is toxic, the air unbreathable, the atmosphere so thin that anyone who spent even a short time on its surface would be hit with massive doses of radiation. And our prejudices and hierarchies will almost certainly follow us to the stars. If, as seems likely, these planets are first populated by private companies such as SpaceX, then off-planet settlers would be dependent on their corporate sponsors for food, air, and life-sustaining technology.
This skepticism has its own science-fiction tradition, in which space exploration follows the patterns of exploitation visible already on Earth. Ursula K. Le Guin's 1972 The Word for World Is Forest envisions space exploration as a recapitulation of earlier colonial conflicts. In Bong Joon Ho's most recent film, Mickey 17, a desperate space colonist volunteers himself to be cloned again and again, exchanging a lethal job for passage to another world. A similar cannon-fodder dynamic appears in Claire Denis' 2018 film, High Life, in which a group of criminals, sentenced to death on Earth, are enlisted in a suicide mission and directed straight into a black hole—space exploration as prison labor. And such fatal bargains are all over the work of the filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, who directed RoboCop and Starship Troopers, movies in which the bodies and souls of regular people are commandeered for the benefit of the powerful.
In Pip Adam's extraordinary, humane novel Audition, recently released in the United States, space is both the dystopian place where humanity's worst impulses flourish and a site of uncharted possibility where humans can become something entirely new. The story follows three giants who are hurtling through space. Once, they were all regular-size humans, but then, for unknown reasons, they began to grow until they were at least three times the size of other people. They were feared, and then hated, and then, in their strange way, envied. As a result, they were packed off into spaceships and shot away from Earth—heading, like High Life 's prisoners, for a black hole.
Their ship is designed according to a strange, symbiotic principle: It gets its power from the giants' speech, and the giants must speak so that they don't grow even more. Yet something has gone wrong. When the novel begins, Alba, Stanley, and Drew, the remaining crew of the Audition, are trapped throughout the ship—one crammed into a hallway, another wedged between the floor and ceiling of a basketball court. At one time, it seems, the giants had staged a sound strike, refusing to speak with one another or to the ship. Only too late did they realize that their silence made them grow much more rapidly than before, and now they barely fit aboard.
So the trio speak with one another from where they're stuck, their voices carrying through the pipes and the walls. Pages and pages of dialogue go nowhere and carry no real meaning. They speak in the plural, almost as a collective, like a sci-fi variation on Virginia Woolf's The Waves. 'We were giant on Earth, and it was terrifying—for everyone,' Alba says, but her thoughts could well be the group's. They describe many things as beautiful, many times, and repeat the meal schedule: Monday is 'vegan superfood buddha bowl day.' Tuesday is 'Greek roasted fish with vegetables.' Whenever they try to tell stories about their own pasts, the events sound awfully like the plots of mediocre rom-coms such as Never Been Kissed and the Jennifer Lopez vehicle Maid in Manhattan. Whenever they approach something like the truth, their words do not seem up to the task of describing it, and they continue speaking in a roundabout, inane manner. Alba believes that she is in space simply because it 'is the biggest room so there is no reason for me to go anywhere else.'
All this uninformative talk encourages the giants to attack themselves rather than whoever put them on the Audition. It becomes clear, although they are only intermittently aware of it, that before they took off, the giants were confined in an open-air stadium they call 'the classroom.' There, the giants gradually lost all sense of self. Their days were spent learning dull, repetitive tasks. Their life histories were replaced by those romantic-comedy plots. And they were made to think of themselves as essentially inferior. 'The best thing is to be stupid and we are stupid,' Alba says. 'It is a gift we needed to return to. It is better to be stupid and it is better to not try and work out things.' They repeat, to the point of absurdity, phrases such as I want to say and The story is. All those extra words filling the air don't just fuel the ship; they also prevent its inhabitants from realizing what has been taken from them.
Adam is showing how even language, the medium of the novel, can be polluted, corrupted, and transformed into a means of exploitation. Words turn from meaningful communication into pure, distracting noise. In a rare silent moment, the group reflects on how cheeseburgers sound: on the grill, as they're being put together, and especially in the mouth. This inspires another thought: that despite remembering the meal schedule, the giants have not eaten in a very long time, and, incarcerated in the ship, they might well starve to death. But their trained language distracts them. 'They really have nothing to complain about because really a bit of discomfort isn't so much,' their collective thought goes. 'Really. Like not so much.' They cannot be silent long enough to actually think, and they have been transformed into their own hall monitors.
They are heading toward the event horizon of a black hole, a natural phenomenon that the Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, in an epigraph, describes as 'the ultimate prison wall—one can get in but never get out.' Clearly, Adam is investigating what happens to the incarcerated, and as time passes, her main trio's confinement begins to look more purposeful than before. When, about halfway through the book, they pass through the event horizon, time distends, and realization floods through them all about how they knew one another before the classroom—even before becoming giants. They're marked and bonded by shared damage, violence, and shame; this might even, Adam implies, be the source of their growth. This realization reconfigures the entire book, recasting their ongoing dialogue and seemingly cordial relations as an interstellar jail—and the novel itself into an extended, especially cruel prison sentence.
Audition can be a caustic, biting book, full of insights into the many cages we construct for the unwanted. But the event horizon, which at first represents their permanent banishment, becomes a frontier of hope when they finally cross it. They find themselves in an endless space beyond, which imposes no limit and seems to shape itself around them and their needs. There, they encounter other life-forms, and are offered some kind of status as visitors. Life in this new world comes with its own struggles and demands and obligations, yet without the divisions and distinctions that trapped them within the ship. After so much speaking, they find themselves deciding on what to do next, then acting together, not as opponents confined within a closed system but as participants in something huge and fluid and vitalizing. 'They're all inside her and she's inside all of them,' Alba thinks, 'although maybe inside and outside are pointless at this stage.' Only through the achievement of some new, unheard-of association can they hope to be free of their past shame, and discover as-yet-unknown pleasures.
Like the billionaires and their sci-fi dream weavers, Adam is using outer space to imagine alternative forms of human relation. But with Audition, she wants to escape the gravitational trap of Earth's prejudices and hierarchies, its forms of ownership and exploitation. Rather than making space a lockup for the unworthy, or a new frontier upon which to exert our will, she searches for something far more expansive among the stars. We must move, she suggests, beyond the hard borders that separate, isolate, and constrain life on Earth today. Across the event horizon lies true possibility. But first we must find our way out of the cage.

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