New Speculative Fiction About the Villainous Power of Universities

I feel privileged to witness the emergence of a type of fiction — not a genre, exactly, but an affect — that I might call, in the manner of a Spotify daylist, “queer millennial midlife multiversal crisis.” In it I would pile Isaac Fellman’s “The Two Doctors Górski,”Aimee Pokwatka’s “Self-Portrait With Nothing” and Jo Harkin’s “Tell Me an Ending”— all books that present selves and universes in a state of fracture, asking what if in a way that also demands why, though.

Universities figure powerfully in these books: As high-pressure places of self-fashioning, aspiration and competition, they promise knowledge to enlightenment seekers like the lure of an anglerfish before devouring all the potential they attract. Here are three books that make a killer triple bill touching on the nature of reality, multiversal selves and the university’s villainous power.

Sofia Samatar’s THE PRACTICE, THE HORIZON, AND THE CHAIN (Tordotcom, 127 pp., paperback, $18.99) is a far-future fable set on spaceships stratified into rigid social hierarchies, written with her usual sly and slicing grace. At the bottom, in the Hold, are laborers bound to one another by an enormous chain; in the middle, in the Ring, are people who are policed via blue anklets but can mostly forget about them; and at the top are people whose movements are completely unhampered, and whose whims shape the lives of the people beneath them.

Samatar’s protagonists have designations rather than names: the boy, the prophet, the professor. When the professor revives a scholarship program for extracting “gifted young people” from the Hold, the boy — an artist — is brought up to the Ring, to be equal parts educated by and exhibited to the faculty and other students. But what the boy and professor learn from each other changes them both, and could transform their worlds.

As both an unabashed fan of Samatar’s writing and a spiteful ex-academic, I am trash for this. Samatar’s work often interrogates pedagogy’s place in confronting or shoring up social iniquities; the question of whether teaching is a liberatory practice or an instrument for instilling orthodoxy animates her novels, short fiction and essays. “The Practice” is a small but perfectly formed addition to Samatar’s oeuvre, a thesis statement leading into her wider body of work.