To the earthbound writer, tired of our planet’s familiar settings and quotidian conflicts, outer space—sterile, deadly, uninhabited, endless—might possess a dark allure. It’s an empty stage. There’s nothing out there, so anything can be said to happen.
The danger is that you risk losing your readers (or just your critics) in the galaxy’s gravity-less reaches. Fiction, once rocketed into the void, undergoes a magnification. Metaphors can reach planetary proportions, earthly themes are extended and amplified ad astra, but plots can grow unruly and characters may find themselves dwarfed by the enormity of their setting.
Space may be the only place where Alba, Stanley and Drew feel small. The protagonists of New Zealander Pip Adam’s new-to-the-U.S. novel Audition (it was published in 2023 in the Antipodes) suffer from quite the opposite problem. They are giants, three times the size of an average human, hurtling through space aboard the ship Audition. Adam has written three novels set on Earth, each similarly blessed with unusual premises (I’m Working on a Building [2013] imagined the construction of an exact replica of the Burj Khalifa on the west coast of New Zealand). But Audition surpasses Adam’s previous work: it’s a weird, blunt, intensely-focused novel that reminded me of fellow Kiwi Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (1983) and Doris Lessing’s “space fiction” Canopus in Argus (1983). Like Lessing’s space fiction, Audition is occasionally ham-fisted in its efforts to convey that it is about something; but for the most part, Adam avoids the narrative sprawl and loony complexities common to novels set in outer space. It’s a novel that understands Ursula K. LeGuin’s dictum that science fiction is not really about the future, it’s about the present—it is not a predictive genre, but a descriptive one.
Alba, Stanley, and Drew are in a bit of a bind: The spaceship Audition “turns our noise into speed and steering . . . and air and gravity,” Alba explains. But if they fall silent, these three giants will keep growing—“grow and grow until your body explodes the ship.” Conversation is the key to their survival and the fuel on which their spacecraft’s novel means of propulsion relies. There are throwaway references to “Conversation running so low” and the fact that “Everything about the spacecraft Audition is designed to amplify any noise made in the spacecraft Audition,” but Adam is largely uninterested in the hard science that might explain this. What does interest her is the conversations her giants have and the stories they tell each other.
Luckily, Alba, Stanley, and Drew have a lot to talk about. Their memories are not very good. Audition’s first chapter is almost entirely dialogue, the trio talking over each other as they try to recall their histories and discover how they came to be “stilled and jammed up into corners and walls” aboard the Audition.
They weren’t always giants. Back on earth, they were “normal-sized” until, one day, they simply started growing. Worried about this sudden outbreak of gigantism among the populace, the government relocates Alba, Stanley, and Drew, along with 180 similarly afflicted souls, to an enormous stadium that they euphemistically term a “classroom.” Once there, “teachers” are charged with keeping the giants “pliant,” brainwashing them by replacing their memories with the plots of rom-coms like Maid in Manhattan and Pretty in Pink.
It’s all slightly absurd and pleasantly matter-of-fact. Adam offers no explanation for her character’s growth spurts and we know better than to ask for one. This is proper space fiction and Adam, as Doris Lessing put it, is using the genre “as a framework that enables me . . . to put questions, both to myself and to others; to explore ideas and sociological possibilities.”
As the good ship Audition flies further into space, the giants begin to recover their memories. Alba and Stanley first met in prison. “Nothing metaphorical or allegorical—just a regular prison.” Alba is serving time for having “beaten another woman within an inch of death”—a woman later revealed to be Drew. Unsurprisingly, the prison is a miserable place: Alba is routinely harassed and assaulted. Only her relationship with Stanley offers any reprieve; they allow each other “a moment of guard down” when they’re together.
Very quickly, we understand that what unites Alba, Stanley, and Drew is their shared position on the lowest rung of society. All they want is some room of their own—a little space, a little leverage, more than just a “moment” of guard down. Once they start growing, their wish is made satisfyingly literal. Summoned to court for a hearing, Alba notices that Drew is growing: “Alba couldn’t smile because it would break her veneer of remorse but she made a slight lift in her eyes so that Drew could see. They would take over the world. It was very clear now. They would have all the power. The judge would listen once she was gigantic.”
If it wasn’t clear, Audition is about space—who gets to occupy it?—and power—who wields it, and by what right? These are salient questions, but Adam does not seem confident in our ability to ask them of ourselves. As Audition draws to a close, Adam resorts to an unnecessary, distracting, Foucauldian tone, determined to hammer home her message.
Once the giants are carted off to their stadium “classroom,” Adam hastens to remind us that their new borstal is “of course another prison.” A few pages later, Drew reflects on their captivity: “‘We were too big to control physically. There was no room to kill us . . . Physical room,’ Drew says, to clarify. ‘Not ideological or political or cultural. There was no physical space. We were huge.’” Even when the Audition’s crew crash-land on a distant planet and find themselves making contact with “Earthling-shaped” aliens, Alba, by way of introduction, tells them: “‘We’re kind of desperate. Like, um, we’re the bottom,’ she puts her hand low to the ground, ‘like, as far as power goes.’” It’s a new spin on “We come in peace,” but it leaves one with the feeling of having had something explained to them that never needed it. The targets Adam is taking aim at—mass incarceration, the prison-industrial system, powerlessness—are obvious on every page of her novel.
It’s a pity, because while Adam’s themes are undeniably urgent, her overemphasis of them detracts from one of the chief pleasures of reading Audition—the thrill of immersing oneself in such an unusual novelist’s imagination. I kept thinking about the giants penned in their stadium-prison, sitting “beside the refrigerator, hiding behind the large crates, eating ice cream.” Or the teacher nearly flattened by an enormous t-shirt “that fell out of a gap in a roll bag, not quite zipped to its end.” If not with new ideas, fiction should present us with new images. For such a slim book, Audition is brimming with them.
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