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By Olivia Erlanger

In 2001, I fell nearly seven metres into a crevasse and broke my back. The following year I was diagnosed with compound autoimmune disorders that took me out of school during large swathes of my early adolescence. In memory, that time was spent being shuttled between doctors’ offices, testing out alternative treatments, and generally feeling like shit. On top of it all, I suffered from garden-variety teen issues: social anxiety, dysmorphia and an all-encompassing obsession with, and terror of, the future.

The future and my ideas of it were shaped by my bedside reading. I read compulsively while at home sick, and loved stories of distant lands, different physics and alternative realities. I read almost any story that took me out from under the weight of the banal and very non-magical reality that is illness. Being sick changed how I navigated the world. Sci-fi fantasy literature (SFF) remains a favourite coping mechanism for when I’m feeling lost or stuck in the quotidian.

SFF requires that its readers project into a space where the laws dictating our world no longer apply, and therefore liberates the storyteller from the pressure of relying on facticity. “Fantastic realism” was coined by literary scholar Alison Waller to describe how SFF contests realism by showing things not “how they are,” but “how they are not”. By making the impossible possible, SFF acts as a pedagogical tool, raising the visibility of non-normative identities: highlighting what is seen as weak, odd or neurodivergent, and reframing these qualities as extraordinary, or even at times, supernatural.

During winter 2021, locked in my small Manhattan apartment during the Omicron surge, I came across a new SFF novel, Ryka Aoki’s Light from Uncommon Stars (2021). New York winters can feel oppressive, the sun barely peeking out from behind skyscrapers, the wind harshly stinging bare skin. Reading Aoki’s book – which features a supernatural demon, a doughnut-making alien family, a galactic war and artificial intelligence – immediately brought me back to the liberation I felt reading SFF during my adolescence. The story follows Katrina Nguyen, a trans-femme violin prodigy and runaway who finds safe haven with violin instructor Shizuka Satomi. Unbeknownst to Katrina, Satomi has made a deal with the devil for Katrina’s soul. She is initially resolved to fulfil her Faustian bargain, but by the end of the story would rather burn in hell than sacrifice Katrina.

As Aoki put it to me over Zoom last autumn, “In life there are many, many different ways to be a hero.” In a media landscape dominated by variations of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey narrative, Katrina is anything but. She is tormented both at home and in the world because of her gender identity, and flees the Bay Area for Los Angeles. Katrina is so fearful after a lifetime of abuse that she accepts maltreatment more readily than love. Under the tutelage of Satomi, and within the safety of her home, Katrina begins to blossom, finding not only a place where her gender identity is accepted (“It’s souls Satomi is after in the end, not boys or girls,” Aoki clarified), but also a place to define and refine her innate skills and talents. By developing a sense of self-love in the face of adversity and a passion for self-expression, Katrina saves herself. 

Teenagehood is equated with exploration and discovery, despite teenagers having limited agency and less experience. The concept of the “teenager”, however, is a relatively recent marketing construction; as children’s author Natalie Babbitt wrote in 1972: “It made its first appearance during the Second World War and was created partly by parents, partly by manufacturers, and partly by Frank Sinatra.” With this nascent category a cohesive sector for commercial extraction was created. Stories for television and films began to be produced to make profit from teenage allowances and free time. One genre that especially took hold was SFF, its emphasis on world-building ripe for this angsty age group. Today, SFF and young adult fiction (YA) can seem interchangeable, and oftentimes, SFF will feature a teenage protagonist or be told from a teenage perspective. However, to many practitioners of the genre, SFF need not be relegated to a specific audience. Indeed, it can be viewed as a pedagogical tool to contest the codes of adulthood by questioning them. Looking beyond the “teenager” as a marketing construction, the experience of adolescence is not bound by a diurnal turn: without an axis mundi of identity, there is malleability around selfhood itself.

Adolescence, like magic, is an experience of transformation; it is a state of constant change. Post-structuralist notions of identity suggest that at all stages of life, self-hood is plural, fluid and fragmented. In many ways we are constantly moving through what might be seen as states of adolescence. Aoki describes navigating her ageing mother’s cognitive decline: “My mother is, in a sense, an adolescent to her changed ability, and as her child, I am an adolescent in my experience of being a caretaker.” We oscillate throughout our lives cycling from fledgling, working towards some sense of mastery, and then beginning anew as experience and time bring us into narratives that we haven’t yet experienced for ourselves. Aoki believes that identity is less determined by age than it is experience: a fresh experience renders us at a new beginning and we must learn and reinvent our roles. Transforming adolescence into a lifelong experience would mean remaining in a state of continual becoming.

In addition to being the year of my fall, 2001 was also the year of my first kiss, and in some ways, the beginning of my art practice. While recovering, SFF literature was (and continues to be) a tool for learning about and actively reshaping a world that can so often feel static and unchangeable. It also provided me with the blueprint for building worlds of my own through artmaking. During this time, I made collages by cutting up old National Geographics, Vogue magazines and Better Homes & Gardens, mixing in images from my personal collection of Absolut Vodka and Got Milk? advertisements (I had binders full of them) to create images of creatures promoting made-up products. A favourite comes to mind: a polar bear with Charlize Theron’s legs in strappy black high heels pushing a lawnmower over a desert landscape. The headline screamed, “So Sexy! So Chic!” By attempting to make the known into something new, I too cycle through states of adolescence, frequently learning new materials, techniques and approaches to art-making. While there are more overt ways in which my predilection for SFF plays out in my practice – magical creatures, monstrous eyes and tongues, a play about enchanted objects – the genre really taught me how to think of reality as fluid, a space between what I can see and what is yet to exist. By building impossible architectures and shifting scale, I’m able to engage with SFF and make manifest my Wonderland-like fears of the future.

As Ursula Le Guin writes in her essay about SFF, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1986): “It is a strange realism, but it is a strange reality.” What I believe Le Guin meant – as do writers like Aoki who are defining contemporary SFF – is that the genre allows us to process the surreal intangibilities of our shared lived existence while inventing possible futures. Not that any literature, per se, can solve the problems of our current existence, but SFF can teach us how to cope better by shifting our perspectives. Aoki’s novel may read as fantastic in terms of its settings and conditions, yet the core narrative mirrors the multifariousness of life as much as (or even more so than) stories bound by notions of realism from the 19th and 20th centuries. What Light from Uncommon Stars and, more broadly, SFF does is to propose that there are alternate pathways for relating to one another. In this sense, as we encounter different stages of “adolescence”, we construct nebulous and neoteric constellations of community across cultures and realities that allow us to queer our futures and make space for increasingly complex corporealities. ◉