Die Closer to Me

In the twenty-first century, there are no flying cars or telepods. We do, however, have state-sanctioned euthanasia and quadrupedal robots outfitted with high-caliber machine guns. By today’s standards, even the most sinister of fictitious dystopias seem rather trite. Since the future can never truly arrive, at least we can keep dreaming of what fresh hells tomorrow may deliver.

Is science fiction dead? Have we trekked and warred the stars to their fullest potential? Has the genre been sterilized and infantilized beyond redemption? Delaney’s still alive, so perhaps there’s hope. Indeed, a cadre of scholarly psychonauts have made the case that sci-fi, once relegated to the gutters of pulp (my personal favorite place to wallow), deserves capital R Respect.

And so an air of sophistication must be sprayed to combat fandom’s noxious fumes, a rebrand (retcon?) to cast “science fiction” as “speculative fiction.” Doesn’t that sound more grown up, more serious? Let’s not confuse spec-fic with its cousins slipstream and transrealism—a categorical multiverse!

The strangest paradox is that a supposedly forward-thinking genre has found itself stuck in a loop, regurgitating and eating its past glory, a robotic snake feasting upon its digital tail. From the sex-shocked, drugged-out counterculture new wave of the 60s and 70s to the dark cyberpunk noir of the 80s and 90s, science fiction has always been more a reflection of the present than a projection of the future. Perhaps our current state has grown so intolerable that the only suitable balm is nostalgia (make sci-fi great again!). Is this why we’re still aping Dune and imitating Blade Runner? We’ve reached the remake of a remake stage. We’re cloning the simulacrum, and the results are unexpectedly bland.

Given this vapid landscape, imagine my joy upon reading David Kuhnlein’s Die Closer to Me—proof that science fiction still has some blood left to spill (and Kuhnlein certainly spills plenty). An interwoven collection of shorts, these stories-as-novella transport us to the planet Süskind (a nod to the German writer Patrick Süskind, no doubt), where earth’s able-bodied ubermensch send their disabled kin. This off-world is thus the ultimate eugenical project—not only are those burdensome cripples out of sight, they’re out of this world. As a disabled writer myself, Kuhnlein’s acidic social commentary is not lost on me.

Earthlings yapped about how methylenedioxymethamphetamine reduced symptoms in a third of combat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and eliminated it in the rest, so they stopped selling it. Opium production, on a steady rise from the 2020s, supplied Bhikkhus on both planets. With consistently balmy buyers, the Engineer couldn’t imagine his progress slowing until every drop of blood from the disabled populace was sucked and studied.

But the denizens of Süskind are not content to simply waste away. They have built a society all their own, with unspoken rules, morals, pleasures, and dangers. Kuhnlein is careful to keep his world building in the background, so the architecture never threatens to overshadow the narrative. Better still, the narrative is often loose, tangential, mercurial.

The characters, including a bounty hunter with a superhuman sense of smell (another reverential literary nod; see Süskind’s opus Perfume), a militant monk named after Brendan Fraser, a demented mad scientist performing body horror experiments that would make Cronenberg blush, and a host of humanoid hybrids and broken, ailing bodies seeking salvation in drugs, pop culture, and eastern mysticism (not unlike several of my friends).

Though there is a plot, it is secondary—this ain’t no over-wrought, expositive space opera. Both humorous and horrific, the stories are sewn together in devious, obscure ways, as the characters’ arcs steadily orbit one another before unexpectedly (and ingeniously) colliding. What is on full display in Die Closer to Me is Kuhnlein’s magnificent prose, itself a kind of mutant creature, very much alive and assuming curious forms. Sentences coil and writhe, an extraterrestrial syntax that never fails to surprise by testing the limits of language itself—proof that more poets should write hard sci-fi.

Epileptic sound waves sigilized themselves inside the dogs’ brains, chemically satisfying devotional clutters of nerves, regressing transmissions through glands and muscles, tickling every hairy synapse.

Kuhnlein also brings a certain blue-collar quality to Süskind, as we follow construction workers, waitresses, and other working stiffs who would seem right at home in the retro-futurism of Ridley Scott’s Alien (with its rag-tag space-trucker protagonists). Building on the satirical send-up of ableism’s long shadow, there is a class consciousness at play. But even the so-called “commoners” on Süskind are more twisted than they first appear. Take the waitress Olivia who eats tip money, yet another critique of labor, commodification, and capital (I’ll say it again, science fiction reflects the present).

People rebranded currency with a value in and of itself. The billfold was a remnant of palms. Rich people didn’t tip, because they were too close to the top to stop. They wouldn’t be shaken awake before the wet dream was over.

A weird, wild, hallucinatory ride that demands re-reading, Die Closer to Me is the most exciting work of futurism I’ve read in years. With linguistic gymnastics and limitless imagination, Kuhnlein has written a modern sci-fi classic that stands alongside the best of PKD’s most whacked out schizo-odysseys. I heard a rumor there is a follow-up in the works, and I will gladly commune with Kuhnlein at his next literary event horizon, headlong into whatever black hole awaits.

Die Closer to Me is available from Marigold Independent.