Review: “Emergency Skin” by N.K. Jemisin
I've been wanting to tell you about this one for months!
Today I’m writing about someone else’s writing. “Emergency Skin” is a science fiction short story by one of our greatest living sci-fi and fantasy writers, N.K. Jemisin. If you haven’t heard of it or of her, you’re in for a treat.
What does some science fiction story have to do with estrangement? To get there, I need to tell you the plot of “Emergency Skin” first. It’s a fun plot, so stay with me.
The plot
An unnamed soldier who lives on a far-flung planet is tasked with a dangerous journey to Earth to collect some cells1 that the people on his planet need to survive. The soldier is technically a human—or maybe technically not, because he, like all the other lower-class people on his planet, has a synthetic body. He’s basically a walking bag of goo. If he can get back to his home planet with the cells his planet needs, the rulers of his home planet have promised to give him skin. Skin is a privilege reserved only for the most elite people on his planet, descendants of the colony’s Founders. Skin would make him elite, like them.
So, he gets in his one-person spaceship and hightails it to Earth with an AI implanted in his brain. The AI is part-Google, part-conscience. In the AI’s own words, it is “consensus intelligence encapsulating the ideals and blessed rationality of our Founders.”2
In the pre-flight briefing, the AI tells the soldier to expect Earth to be “a graveyard world,” since, when the Founders fled Earth to form their new colony, the oceans were acidic and barren, “its atmosphere a choking mix of carbon dioxide and methane.”
The AI tells the soldier: “Look at the names whenever you find them on buildings or debris. You’ll see the forebears of our Founder clans—all the great men who spent the last decades of that planet’s life amassing the resources and technology necessary to save the best of mankind.”
Once the soldier arrives, though, instead of a dead planet, he finds an Earth where the worst effects of pollution have reversed. Forests grow and rivers flow. Plants, animals, and humans are thriving.
Eventually, the soldier in the synthetic body makes contact with the earthlings, and they start talking. The earthling starts to explain how it’s possible for the planet to be doing so well when the Founders had left death and destruction in their wake.
“We realized old boundaries weren’t meant to keep the undesirable out, but to hoard resources within. And the hoarders were the core of the problem. … To save the world, people had to think differently.”
“Interesting,” notes the AI. “This world changed—improved—almost immediately after the Leaving.”
In other words, when the Musks and Bezoses of Earth finally managed both to destroy the world to the point of uninhabitability and also to hoard enough wealth and resources to build a ship which could take them to a new world, they left. (That’s “the Leaving.”) They achieved their-big-boy-billionaire dreams. They were free.
But, in Jemisin’s imagination, what this means is that the people who remained behind were also free—to develop a new set of systems.
The Earthling tells the solider: “Is it really so puzzling that this was all it took? Six billion people working toward a goal together is much more effective than a few dozen scrabbling for themselves.”
(From the.ethical.dilemma)
I first read this story in 2019 when it was published by… Amazon (sobs silently). I read it once and it's been lodged in my brain ever since. It wasn’t quite my Roman Empire, but I thought of it often. What would happen if the very bad people would just… go away?
After I started the Estranged Substack, I realized that this question didn’t just stay with me because of what it is asking about the way our world is set up.
I realized I also read “Emergency Skin” as an allegory for estrangement.
In “Emergency Skin,” it’s not that life on Earth has become perfect after the bad people go away, nor that the people who stayed on Earth after “The Leaving” are perfect people. They’re still human; there’s still conflict. The difference is that without the humans who insist on prioritizing competition, drama, and pain, the remaining humans have built a new set of systems that prioritize cooperation over competition and peace over drama.
This is getting at some essential component of being estranged in adulthood from relatives who cannot seem to cross a threshold from (self-)destructive ways into a way of relating that is good for everyone.
Of course, unlike in the story, the relatives we estrange from don’t just “disappear” from the Earth. The story’s just an allegory.
But, they do disappear from our little piece of Earth. We no longer alternate between fighting them and begging them to listen. We no longer relate in the way they insist on. Instead of spending energy explaining ourselves or protecting ourselves from the fallout of spending time with them, we are free to use that energy to build something else from the ground up.
In the wake of estrangement, the person who has chosen cutoff is free to rebuild with a community who values what they value: cooperation or competition, peace over drama, relating over rigid authoritarianism. The list could go on. It’s not that their new community never disagrees again. But the commitment to accountability and repair is different.
On the macro level, will these f***ers ever just leave? I don’t think so: it’s called “fiction” for a reason. But, on the micro/personal level, estrangement can be a way to enact a small piece of this fantasy for ourselves.
Thanks for reading. You still have to get “Emergency Skin” from Amazon as far as I know. Sorry. It’s $2 and you can read it on your phone. If you know of a non-Amazon way to get it, let me know!
The story is very cleverly constructed because the AI is also the story’s narrator. Important to the story but not important to this essay.