The future Earth of Syr Hayati Beker’s What a Fish Looks Like is a complete environmental disaster. It’s an ecosystem in collapse, and the small community that gathers in and around a queer bar called Paradise has the option to stay and make the best of an increasingly ill-suited ecology, or to leave Earth on a spaceship in search of a different home.
Is there one right way to navigate apocalypse? It’s a question that’s becoming ever more relevant as we careen into our own (possibly) dystopian future. Is there a right way? Can there ever be?
This is the fundamental question of Beker’s novella, and if the question is a relatively straightforward one then the execution is not. What a Fish Looks Like is fragments strung together, a book of fairy tales that’s also a medium for two characters, Seb and Jay, to communicate about their fraught relationship, scribbling notes to each other between stories which, as the book goes on, are increasingly experimental and stylistic. If I’m perfectly honest, that experimentation doesn’t always appeal to me. The more stylistically adventurous the stories become—and I’m thinking here of the Little Red Riding Hood and the Snow Queen stories primarily—the less effectively emotive I find them. In this book, however, that varied response may well be the point. More on that later.
The title story of the collection is by far my favourite. “What a Fish Looks Like,” inspired by “Beauty and the Beast,” could equally be called “Beauty from the Beast.” The blend of science fiction and magical realism, in service of exploring the connection between the human and the nonhuman, allows a mix of wonder and grief to permeate the text. The central idea of the story is that in this limited, species-poor future—a future in which so much of the marvel that is biological diversity is gone from the world—those species can be placed in a sort of suspended animation.
This is arguably already possible, of course. Places like San Diego’s Frozen Zoo collect and store genetic material from a wide range of species in order to preserve them. As its website states, “The Frozen Zoo is genetic insurance: by banking biomaterials, we secure genetic diversity and enable a future where disappearing species are recovered, ecosystems are restored, and breakthroughs are made possible.” This already feels like a science fictional future, but “What a Fish Looks Like” takes this even further, with nonhuman DNA of extinct species being stored in individual human bodies until such a time as that species can be resurrected—an outcome unlikely to be within the host body’s lifetime.
This process, known as ghosting, is entirely voluntary. The protagonist of the story is asked, on her intake form, if she has a request for a specific species. She does not, but after the procedure is completed she is informed that she houses the genetic material of the recently extinct polar bear. This delights me, because I love polar bears. I’m absolutely fascinated by them, and my one question of this story is “Why had no one picked this species earlier?!”
In what is likely no surprise at all to any speculative reader, the protagonist slowly begins to take on the behaviour of the polar bear. Her dietary preferences change, which becomes a challenge when she starts a relationship with a man who has taken on the DNA of a harp seal—a species commonly eaten by the bear. Some of the changes are even physical, with a patch of fur appearing on the inside of her thigh.
This isn’t the first time this year I’ve read of such a thing. In The Flat Woman by Vanessa Saunders, which I reviewed for Strange Horizons a few months back, I noted how the main character of that novella also took on animal characteristics periodically—I’m thinking here, especially, of the patch of cow hair that appeared on her body. I’m sensing a trend, is what I’m saying, and I find it particularly fascinating how more and more speculative fiction tends towards transgression with regards to species boundaries—particularly when the site of the transgression is the human body.
I don’t want to get too theoretical here, but while much of “What a Fish Looks Like” is a metaphor for human relationships, it is also a considered choice, on the part of the protagonist, to become a biological refugia. That strikes me as deeply compelling, related as it is to the idea of refuge. Where might we find refuge in an apocalypse? Must we always leave to locate one? Who or what might we share that refuge with?
Implicit in these questions is the certainty that refuge will be needed. Part of that inevitability is only seen in retrospect. In the story “Playlist 4Merx In Times of Sea Levels Rising,” a student is washed out to sea when on a field trip to the beach. He dies. (Or at least, his body is never recovered, so death is assumed.) It was a rogue wave that caught and dragged him out to sea, but Jeremy’s teacher, Max, is shattered. She returns over and over to the beach, trying to connect with the mer-creature, the Merx, that lives there. Max is trying to find a way to undo what’s been done, because the guilt is eating her alive. (Note that last phrase: it will come up again soon).
Guilt is understandable: Max was the teacher; the field trip was her idea. She is responsible. She didn’t teach her students enough about the ocean. Maybe if they’d discussed rogue waves then knowledge would have made them immune, protected Jeremy from disaster. But that is responsibility in miniature, the mere responsibility of an individual. There is also what the community has made of the ocean. In this ecological horror of a future, the ocean is filled with plastic, with rubbish, and the warming waters come with increasing dangers. “Tidal Surge: A sudden ocean rise caused by climate change,” Max reads on her phone. A student writes to a local newspaper about climate change and rogue waves. Icebergs melting, rising waters, floods, drownings. The implication is clear: Human activity has made the ocean more dangerous. There’s a collective responsibility for Jeremy’s fate as well, a social choice to make the ocean deadlier than it otherwise might be.
And in that ocean, the Merx. Stories of them, always hungry. “You ate him. Didn’t you. Didn’t you?” Max screams, to the ocean, to the Merx. To herself, eaten alive, as I say, by guilt. Jeremy was swallowed, in the end, by a series of choices, both individual and collective. There is no going back. Once we create the conditions, the outcomes are inevitable. No matter the guilt, no matter the regret, there are some things that can’t be fixed.
Perhaps we want them that way.
In “Antigone, But With Spiders,” a community theatre group attempts to put on a play as a distraction for, or resistance on behalf of, a city being destroyed by out of control seasonal firestorms. There’s a lot that could be said about reflection in this story, about characters and actors and settings and relationships mirroring each other, but there’s also a reflection of another sort: “Now the world is on fire and no one can breathe. Everyone feels guilty because everyone can point to a time when they wanted this, or something like this."
It's true. We do want it.
There’s something so appealing about dystopian landscapes, about post-apocalyptic stories. Perhaps it’s the idea that survival is possible, that we are strong enough (or that we might be). Perhaps it’s the lack of choices, the idea that finally, finally, we don’t have to compromise. Life is terrible and you can do terrible things in the name of survival because that’s the way it is, that’s what everyone does. And yes, it’s romanticising disaster, it’s imagining heroics and excusing horrors—but it’s also the world we’re choosing, every day, to create. We do want this, and we show that we want it, this point of no return, by living in a way that ensures that there’ll be no return.
On the other hand, perhaps apocalypse is that one last opportunity to come together, when there’s no possible way of avoiding it anymore. Jay’s observations underline this in a scribbled note to Seb: “Funny community, always so mad at each other until there’s an apocalypse.” When there’s a fire to get people out of, when there’s sickness and not enough clean water, then priorities rearrange themselves pretty quickly. When it’s cooperate or die, most people choose to live.
Sometimes they choose to live in ways that don’t always prioritise their own well-being. The artist protagonist of “Five is the Other Shade of Red” finds themselves in a different world— an alternate universe, perhaps, where water is clean and can be drunk from a tap, where climate change doesn’t exist, where the sky isn’t orange from wildfires. In comparison to their own, the world is idyllic. Many of their friends are there, or versions of them at least. Yet all they want is to go back.
This is a speculative commonplace, albeit rather more beautifully written than usual. We’ve all read versions of this story. Dozens of versions, most likely: There’s no place like home, even if home is sometimes shit. (Even if home is, in this world, most definitely shit.) There’s something both terribly optimistic and terribly horrifying about this. Community, of course, is the reason for return. Relationships, love. That’s the upside, the reason that makes us feel better about ourselves.
Maybe we’re just too used to the shitty life and are papering over our acceptance of it with assumed nobility. Take the chance for another life, another world, or live in this one, in which the vines are strangling everything and the ecology is shot: That’s the fundamental conflict in this novella. Accept what is, no matter how impoverished it might be, or leave it behind in the hope that something else is better. Jay and Seb, one of whom chooses to stay on Earth and the other to depart on the spaceship, are on opposite sides of this equation, and their ongoing conversation throughout the book—a conversation that can be both frustrated and hurtful—was never going to have a happy ending. Not a singular happy ending, anyway. In a letter to Seb, Jay writes, “The apocalypse is like you—never a single ending: the oceans rising, the rearranging, the big wave, the one with the vines, the one with the fallings birds, the one with a million tiny fights about nothing.”
I don’t think anyone reading this book will suffer at any point from the delusion that Seb and Jay will come to share a decision: stay or go together. Their yearnings are too different, and agreement just isn’t possible. Reconciliation is, however: The ability to love someone, and to watch them navigate apocalypse and build their own refuge in a way that is so fundamentally different to your own, has value. Not everyone can or should be made to leave Earth. Not everyone is excited by Red Riding Hood and the Snow Queens and how they see the world. They don’t have to be.
We are used, when reading dystopias, to giving a lot of attention to different pathways to cruelty. Usually, someone strong gets in power and builds a system which crushes dissent. The most interesting thing about What A Fish Looks Like is that this doesn’t happen here. For all the dissension, for all the incomprehension and the hurt—because there is hurt and grief and loss—there’s very little focus on cruelty. People are trying to live in different ways, using different stories and different methods of storytelling—and that is, I think, where the resilience is. The hope as well, because this is a fundamentally hopeful book. People try to be generous. They try to be loving. They host polar bears in their own bodies and make art and build bars and break people out of ice-cream vans when they’re trapped inside them, because apocalypse is never about a single way of doing things. It’s never one-fairy-tale-fits-all.
It's about surviving it together, whether you’re apart from your loved ones or not.