What would happen if the Earth was to become uninhabitable tomorrow? If climate change wiped out entire ecosystems—with glaciers vanishing, seas swallowing cities, forests felled to wastelands, food becoming scarce, global conflict and nuclear war imminent—where would human civilization go, when all refuge is collapsing?
In An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon, the answer is to flee. And so, faced with the calamity of death three hundred years ago, the remnants of humanity flee on a spaceship titled the ‘Matilda’ which was to cruise around space destined to go to a promised land. Life on the Matilda is far from ideal—it is a deeply stratified social order based on race, where the spaceship is divided to different decks: a reimagination of the slavery system of antebellum South. The dark-skinned inhabitants who occupy the slums of the lower decks are used as manual labour in food production, sharecropping, and maintenance work, while the light-skinned elites inhabit the opulently furnished, resource-rich upper decks. At the helm of power is the Sovereign, Matilda’s absolute ruler, a cruel tyrant who wields violence, crushes any sign of protest, and preserves the ship’s oppressive order, much like the plantation master.