“That’s what people do, they get different together.” (Solitaire, 351)
Kelley Eskridge is not a prolific author, but she has nevertheless produced a body of work remarkable for its subtlety and depth. Eskdrige’s short stories are marvels of character-focused SF, where speculations are explored through the interactions of everyday people. They frequently centre queer characters and explore ideas around gender. Similarly, her lone novel Solitaire (2002), is an underrated and pioneering work of queer cyberpunk that thoughtfully explores the potential uses of VR technology for incarceration.
Eskridge is hardly unknown in the field of SF—her short stories “And Salome Danced,” “Dangerous Space,” and “Eye of the Storm” were all nominated for the Otherwise Award, and Solitaire was nominated for a Nebula as well as a Gaylactic Spectrum Award and an Endeavour Award. Eskridge has served on the Clarion West Writers Workshop board, and she runs an editing service with her spouse, the wonderful SFF author Nicola Griffith. But I can’t help feeling it’s a shame her work isn’t more widely known. Eskridge writes quiet, careful stories whose full emotional impact sneaks up on the reader. Only then do they reveal the hidden depths of trauma that power the story and give them their human heart.
Solitaire is a remarkable novel, particularly mature and assured for a debut. It bears comparison to her partner Griffith’s incredible Slow River (1995); indeed, it’s worth reading both novels together. Eskridge and Griffith invent a new type of cyberpunk, one that eschews the action and noir tropes frequently associated with the genre in favour of thoughtful explorations of the ethical dilemmas posed by cyberpunk-ish technology and mega-corporations operating on a global scale, all set in an entirely queer-normative world. Their focus on the interior lives of their human characters rather than gimmicky techno-fetishism makes both novels feel fresh and undated compared to much classic cyberpunk.
Solitaire tells the story of Jackal Segura, the Hope of Ko. The Hopes are special children, born in the first second of the new year of the new century and destined to play a special role in the new EarthGov. Jackal is even more unusual, as the only Hope representing Ko, a huge multi-national corporation ready to challenge the old nation states for a position of power in the new world government. Due to her privileged position, she is brought up with the best possible education and special training to help her excel in her future life. All of this changes in an instant when she is framed for a horrendous crime. Her Hope status is discovered to be fraudulent and all her power and privilege is stripped away, and she is forced to make a deal to protect those she cares about—she will become a Guinea pig for a new technology developed by Ko, whereby she’ll experience eight years of solitary confinement in virtual reality in only eight months real time. The novel follows Jackal as she endures her sentence, then explores how she puts her life back together following her release.
The novel acknowledges how, on the surface, time-accelerated VR prison sentences appear to solve many of the problems with the prison carceral system, whilst demonstrating how it fails to engage with the root causes of criminal behaviour and unflinchingly shows the horror and inhumanity of such a solitary confinement sentence. Over the course of her imprisonment, Jackal is driven near madness by her shadow self, and is forced to strip away all her connections to the outside world in order to survive. Thanks to her specialist training as the Hope of Ko, she is able to escape into a utopia of the mind. The other prisoners are not so lucky. Following her release, Jackal meets various other survivors of Solo, as they call it, in the bar Solitaire which gives the book its name. Many of them, like the talented but damaged Estar, are severely traumatised and disturbed by their experience. They are also shunned by the rest of society, save the obsessive fans who go to Solitaire to spot Solos and blog about them on the internet. As Jackal notes, “Solo isn’t just about being in VC [Virtual Confinement], is it? It’s about what comes after.”
Like many forms of retributive justice, Solo is more a punishment than a true attempt at rehabilitation, and the punishment extends to the Solos being unable to get jobs or reintegrate into society afterwards.
Carceral systems and the ways they shape people’s lives is a theme Eskridge also explores in her harrowing short story “Alien Jane,” though this story doesn’t focus on the direct punitive system of the prison, but rather on how asylum inmates can be stripped of their rights and dehumanised. The story is told from the point of view of Rita, a young woman who is being treated for severe mental illness, who befriends another patient called Jane who, alongside other mental health struggles, is unable to feel physical pain. Rita and Jane are treated by the supportive and caring Dr. Rousseau, until Jane’s unusual condition is brought to the attention of Dr. Novak, a highly respected neurologist who wants Jane for his research. The story explores how Jane’s status as an asylum inmate leads to her rights to refuse to participate in Dr. Novak’s sadistic and dehumanising research being stripped from her. The story is moving and deeply harrowing, exploring unflinchingly the historical horrors of the abuses of mental health patients by those charged with their care.
Solitaire presents a queer-normative world in which humanity is leaving the nuclear family behind. Jackal is in a loving and supportive relationship with her girlfriend Snow, and much of the novel follows their relationship and the lengths that Snow goes to, leaving the safety of Ko to track Jackal down after her release so she can be with her again. Jackal’s parental relationship is fraught, with her manipulative and unpleasant mother and her spineless father all too quick to abandon her when she is accused of a crime, in stark contrast to the unwavering love and support she receives from Snow.
But the world of Solitaire is leaving these old relationships behind anyway; in Ko, people form their own found families that become their primary support unit, with multiple individuals in sexual and non-sexual relationships called webs. Part of the horror and trauma of Jackal’s situation is that the crime she is accused of kills off everyone in her web apart from Snow, tearing away her closest human interactions before she is placed in virtual solitary confinement. And one of the first things that Jackal finds herself doing on her release is forging a new web with her fellow Solos and the other outcasts who frequent Solitaire. These connections are an integral part of what makes us human, and the sheer inhumanity of solitary confinement is the stripping away of those bonds.
Queer-normative found families recur in Eskridge’s short stories as well. It is a strand that runs through her collection Dangerous Space, which explores the unusual found families that occur in touring bands, theatres, and soldiers. We can see this particularly in the Mars and Lucky stories, where characters with the same names, prominently Mars and Lucky, recur in otherwise unconnected stories, sometimes in different genres, in wildly different contexts but still intimately connected to each other in complex and surprising ways. “Eye of the Storm” tells of the formation of a polycule in a Fantasy world, when four travellers, including Mars and Lucky, meet on the road on their way to Lemon City to audition to join the city guard and wind up forming an intense erotic bond with each other, built around their unique approach to hand-to-hand combat.
Similarly, the story “Dangerous Space” explores life on the road for the indie band Noir, who are on the verge of breaking into the mainstream, and the intense interpersonal bonds that exist between the band members, their tour manager and their sound engineers. These relationships are complicated when Mars, this time the band’s sound engineer, and Duncan Black, Noir’s charismatic but destructive lead singer, fall hopelessly in love with each other, against the advice of Lucky, Mars’ best friend and the band’s stoic manager.
The most radical refraction of Mars and Lucky comes in “And Salome Danced,” possibly Eskridge’s most well-known story. This time Mars is the director of a theatre troupe, and Lucky is his loyal assistant. The hermetically sealed world of the theatre troupe is disrupted when Joe/Jo auditions for both the parts of John the Baptist and Salome in their upcoming play. In the other stories they feature in, Mars and Lucky are openly bisexual and often polyamorous. In “And Salome Danced,” they are both closeted straights, whose worldview is shattered by Jo’s convincing and deeply sexual performances of male and female genders. “Gender’s not important,” Mars insists when he and Lucky realise that Jo has auditioned for both parts, and this is a sentiment his other iterations understand implicitly, but for the Mars in “And Salome Danced,” the revelation that gender is indeed performative, and the extent to which this plays on his desires, is potent enough to shake his entire perspective. Eskridge’s powerfully erotic dissection of the tangles of gender and desire and how these play into our sexuality, by comparison to the other stories, effectively demonstrate the freeing effect of a queer-normative perspective, where people can explore their sexuality uncoupled from rigid gender expectations.
Eskridge’s relatively slim body of work is genre fiction of remarkable quality. Her sensitivity and subtlety allow her to tackle dark and disturbing themes and topics, but this is balanced out by humanity and optimism. As we see with Jackal’s virtual imprisonment in Solitaire, facing and surviving the darkness inside oneself can open up the door to fantastical utopias. Eskridge’s stories do not deny the difficulties and traumas that exist in reality, but she leads her characters and her readers through them so that they can emerge wiser and more at peace with themselves on the other side. The remarkable quality of her single novel and her short stories mark her out as a unique and important voice in speculative fiction, and much as I might wish that Eskridge would publish more frequently, I would argue that her legacy is already secure.
Jonathan Thornton has written for the websites The Fantasy Hive, Fantasy Faction, and Gingernuts of Horror. He works with mosquitoes and is working on a PhD on the portrayal of insects in speculative fiction.
