This essay breaks the violence against lowdeckers by upperdeckers into three different but interconnected/dependant forms: physical assault and rape, indirect policing of bodies, and narratives of inferiority.

The treatment of lowdeckers on Matilda is analogous to slaves on American plantations-the guards, the Sovereignty, and upperdeckers act as white society and government-and can be explored under the same theoretical lens as the violence black Americans face and faced. The violence facing lowdeckers creates an embodied perspective-they locate trauma and dominance in the body which they futilely try to escape/control through (violent) transformations, and the upperdeckers lose sight of the humanity imbued in the lowdeckers’ bodies. The ability to externalize is central to the subjectivity of the lowdeckers in An Unkindness of Ghosts. Body horror enables a similar expression of the invisible/conceptual: through body horror internal trauma can be literalized and externalized onto the body. This literalizing effect is frequently enacted via the body, as when the Sovereignty literalizes the concept of objectification with a plan to electrocute and reanimate black corpses to form worker zombies. For example, the subjugation of black people in America at the hands of white systems and people is made visible in Matilda’s organizing decks by race: black people live in the low decks, where energy has been rationed by the Matilda’s all-white theocracy, the Sovereignty, so severely that the lowdeckers suffer hypothermia in the upper decks, which are populated by white people, energy is provided so freely that the upperdeckers can enjoy ice skating rinks.

Set aboard Matilda, a massive, self-sustaining spaceship where humanity resides three hundred years after a ruined Earth is abandoned in search of a new home, Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts uses the genre of science fiction to build a world that literalizes concepts and theories present in society.

An unkindness of ghosts characters