Living in the Necrocene, and being somewhat cognisant of environmental change as it happens around me, has its disadvantages. There’s a constant, low-level preoccupation with death: of species, of ecosystems, of potential futures. This tends to be reinforced by my choice of reading material. As a speculative writer myself, and one who often focuses on climate and environmental fiction, I read as widely as possible in this genre—mostly, if I’m honest, to see how other people are coping. Other writers, anyway. The way we collectively explore the age of death, and the ways in which we try to navigate it, to construct some sort of blueprint out of imagination and prose… I find it fascinating.
It helps that every so often I come across a book like Hatch. Written by Jenny Irish, Hatch is a collection of prose poems that interweave several different, but loosely interconnected strands of one speculative future. That future, like the book itself, is a product of the Necrocene: it engages with extinction and the means that scientists develop to record and mitigate species loss. It does this through a focus on birth and reproduction—an approach which might otherwise seem hopeful, but which in Hatch is shot through with the realisation of historical, contemporary, and (inevitably) future failure.
Nicholas Culpeper, who wrote the seventeenth century Directory for Midwives, is a repeated reference. He turns up in several poems, representative of the historical trend in midwifery that took the responsibility for safeguarding women in labour from female midwives and gave it instead to male doctors. This had, Irish points out in poems such as “Motivation and Intention” (p. 32), “Historically, the English Have Strong Opinions About the French” (p. 37), and “Progress” (p. 50), mixed results. Demography shapes outcome, as is illustrated again in “Shame” (p. 28), which records the significant disparity in infant mortality between Black and white newborns when treated by white doctors.
The horror of these historically compromised births prefigures, within the text, a new connection between birth and the Necrocene in the form of births gone terribly wrong. “The Sport of Kings” shows the eventual extinction of horses by describing one especially monstrous birth, with the expulsion, from the mother, of an “enormous foal, fully furred, but soft as water-saturated soap, giving way under the hands that tried to collect it” (p. 9). The imagery here is one of rot, of mould and ongoing decomposition, the newborn flesh both unreliable and incapable of keeping shape. The poem is honestly repulsive, albeit in the best and most affecting way. It’s an illustration of corruption, of slow and spreading extinction, and as the collection develops, readers discover (in “Potent” p. 45) that the probable cause of these dreadful births is “a mutating permafrost pandemic—ancient diseases released from the vanishing ice.”
This rebirth of old species of death has terrible consequences.
All sorts of species begin to fail. What’s common becomes unnoticeable, however—“The end of the bluebottle fly wasn’t recorded for years” (“Goodbye, Fly” p. 13)—and part of that unremarkable, ongoing loss is the realisation that it is unremarkable simply because we don’t want to look. Goodness knows I often don’t. Especially as there seems to be so much of it, and more to come. The poem in Hatch that I find most chilling is “Toodle-oo, Kangaroo,” which describes the death of the last crawfish while a university researcher is monitoring transplanted kangaroo embryos. The crawfish extinction is nothing more than mild distraction, even as the last member of that species dies in front of her. “With a powerful push from her toes, the intern glided her wheeled stool across the lab, adding an extinction report to the to-do list on the whiteboard near the door” (p. 20).
The bleakness of that image! An entire species gone, and it sparks nothing but bare acknowledgement because the loss has become so commonplace that it has ceased to matter. That’s the future I least want to be part of.
Engaging with loss is difficult. It’s work, and often that work is hard and unpleasant. It requires self-examination. Often that work, and the self-reflection it requires, is actively rejected. The poem “Relearning,” for instance, notes that the response from some to this new, necrotic world is “a ban on teaching children under the age of twelve about permafrost pandemics, water scarcity, and horses” (p. 66).
If we don’t look, it’s not happening. A childish response, yes, but one all too sadly familiar.
Admittedly, the work of engaging with loss can be entirely motivated by self-interest, as it is with the grief of the woman in “The Intern Trains the New Intern” who discovers that, in common with crawfish and bluebottles and horses and other newly extinct or declining species, reproduction is beyond her: “the world is dying, and it has been, and she knows that she will never be a mum, she will not, not ever, and she excuses herself to the loo to cry alone” (p. 33). Self-interest may be an imperfect sort of motivator, but on a narrative level, particularly within the science fiction genre, it can result in fascinating invention.
If what we think of as normal human reproduction becomes somehow unattainable, then technological innovation is one potential substitute. Among the most science-fictional of all the strands making up Hatch is the presence of a gargantuan metal womb—mobile, self-aware, and capable of housing “a hundred tiny and terrified heartbeats” (“The USS Narwhal” p. 1). This is industrialisation at scale, and the metal womb is essentially a factory farm for human beings. Individuals aren’t exactly being disgorged on conveyor belts, but there’s a certain robotic tinge there that’s inescapable, perhaps, for any genre reader. The idea of the human body as something which can be constructed, which can be replicated, has more than a whiff of programming about it. We don’t like to think of ourselves as products, but Hatch has taken care to illustrate the ways in which humans think of the world around them as just that: as an exploitable, consumable resource. Sooner or later, the collection implicitly argues, that perception will be turned back on us.
The most compelling thing about the metal womb, however, isn’t her productive capacity. Yes, that undertone of industrialised reproduction is disturbing, but it’s also not terribly unusual in dystopian narratives. What makes Hatch’s depiction of the trope so interesting, and so original, is the active awareness of the womb, which is, despite its technological origin, always gendered as female. She is sentient, even sapient—a factory that is aware of both responsibility and limitation, a factory with a sincere emotion of care towards its products. Lacking eyes, the metal womb is still capable of dreaming—in “The Question About Electric Sheep” (p. 2) it dreams of capturing fireflies above a meadow, and capturing them in jars. It may be, as “Squatters’ Rights” (p. 4) argues, a transient image somehow transferred from the minds of those that the metal womb is gestating. Given that the womb is also presented, through multiple images—of submarines, of ancient Egyptian vibrators—as containing multitudes, however, the firefly dream may also be a metaphor for the self, and the womb’s careful handling of the jar a means of exploring her own capacities.
Which can sound rather abstract, except the womb has gone rogue: her actions inexplicable to the human minds that exist outside her metal shell. She wanders through the pages of Hatch, hiding in different ecologies—in amongst a swamp with crocodiles, for instance—and in general not doing what is expected of her.
I had to rewrite that last sentence, replacing pronouns, and not for the first time in this review: it seems the association of womb with female, in my mind, limited as that association may be, gets subconsciously drowned out by the association of technology with neutrality. Perhaps it is the spectre of the factory, hanging over. I would always refer to a factory as “it.” Certainly, looking at some of the political rhetoric coming out of the far right lately, that choice is something to examine. The apparent determination of some to limit women’s reproductive healthcare in favour of enforcing their productive capacity has more than a whiff of exploitation about it. Who wants to be treated as more factory than human? Not me. Not anyone I know, either. It’s dehumanising… and yet here is the metal womb, nonhuman, a moving thinking machine for human reproduction, and the text gives her gender.
I’m not entirely sure why. I’m not sure, either, that there needs to be an answer. It’s one of those interesting narrative choices that ends up, perhaps, being more than usually dependent on the reader and their own cultural perceptions. Hatch is, admittedly, a collection that requires things of the reader. The connections between the different poems are often both loose and sympathetic; readers will find themselves required to approach the whole from a multitude of different perspectives.
I happen to like books that do this. They’re the books that most often make me think. And I admit: while the metal womb may be the most central of all the poetic strands here, it’s also the most interesting. That’s largely because it’s so flexible in its approach to genre. The womb can be read as a science fiction staple—the artificial intelligence gone rogue, the nonhuman creation looking to define her own existence when compared to her creators—but there’s no denying that she is also a carrier of some monstrous seeds. The humans inside the metal womb are “wailing in the dark,” having pulled themselves free of their placentas and existing, untethered, inside the metal dark (“In Quarters” p. 7). Trapped in the womb, unable to escape, the new humans turn to cannibalism, gorging themselves on biological mothers who have attempted reproduction within the metal womb and died in childbirth (“Adaptation” p. 61).
It’s a horrifying image, but lest we forget: birth is horrifying, or at least it is in Hatch. If there is one poem here that rivals “The Sport of Kings” and its dreadful foal for sheer wincing revulsion, it’s “Some Facts About Human Birth,” which reminds readers that the most natural option, when it comes to labour, can also be terrifying. I give you the poem’s least technological remedy to a placenta that ends up fused to the uterine wall and needing to be removed: the doctor or midwife inserts their arm into the mother’s body and “might change their hold on the tissue from gripping to ripping and then begin working fleshy fistfuls free, sweeping their hand back and forth like a knife in a jar of peanut butter, hunting for the last smear” (p. 26).
If I never wanted children before, I really don’t want them now. And if I had to have them, the factory is looking pretty bloody good, I can tell you. The other factory. The one that isn’t me. The technological surrogate. And what are the ethics of that, when the surrogate, that metal womb, has developed thoughts and feelings and desires of her own? Lest we forget, Hatch consistently argues that the choice to exploit living things, to treat land and womb as a production line, is a choice consistent with death. With the Necrocene, in fact. And that metal womb, harbouring death within itself as it explores new ways of being alive, is—and I use the phrase deliberately—a product of its time.
A fascinating product, to be sure. Horrific and illuminating in equal parts; the poems are fireflies in a jar. Perhaps we should look a little closer.
Omitted from calculations, all manner of plausible certainty,
this rock of burden bleeding the way oxen do when driven home. Here,
a projection of growth, exponential: a hot bird touches a hot stone. Now, a graph:
a hot bird touches a hot stone in a hot palm. Next slide: a hot bird touches a hot stone
in the hot palm of a prophet of profit (good one, Dan!) orange horizon
of hot meaning touches a hot bird touches a hot stone, scaled to market
—blood on the wheel and dusk, now. Away to their model homes and sliding doors that lock.
The charts say what they say, It’s in the bag.
The men leave the room; the desk chairs spinning like slow planets, You killed it in there, man.
ii. Land
Some places the water comes spitting out the faucet clear as brown.
The rivers are dead; bloat and murk. Brooks that once babbled all day lay silent under blankets of algae. The men around are dark from roofing in spring. One leans against a wall
opening a clay brick in his hands. Another points to the busy writhing in the black socket of a cow and says, Look—a dead ringer for somethin alive. A third reaches for the ground without thinking,
overcome by a sudden memory of something called a dandelion that sent wishes into the land.
iii. Scape
But this radioactive swamp was my father’s, and his father’s father’s. Our hurting mud is all God’s,
Do not throw my clothes out into the yard of space—where other rock can I go
that doesn’t groan under the weight of such need unbearable? Where snow does what snow does
and there is no gold to find at the end of an oil slick rainbow.
Show me a porch that doesn’t look out on a circle of grief, show me an Earth
whose people bathe her skin in rivers, and wrap her body in long grass.
Show me the room where the decision was made and the papers drawn up; show me a child
who isn’t dead in the alley behind it, eyes cloudy with the first dream ever dreamt
the same dream that awoke the first man to the sputtering embers of the first night,
the same dream that unsettled him with a hope he couldn’t name as he looked to the many stars.
Aureliano Segundo ask[ed the Arabs] with his usual informality what mysterious resources they had relied upon so as not to have gone awash in the storm . . . one after the other, from door to door, they returned a crafty smile and a dreamy look, and without any previous consultation they all gave the answer:
“Swimming.”
—Gabriel Garcia Marques, One Hundred Years of Solitude
