Kelli: Hello and welcome to an extremely belated edition of Queer Girl Book Club! This month (or last month? Or maybe the month before that, who is to say?) we read The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer by Janelle Monae. The collection is an expansion of the Afrofuturistic universe Monae initially explored in their 2018 studio album, Dirty Computer, and features five stories written alongside five different collaborators: Alaya Dawn Johnson, Danny Lore, Eve L. Ewing, Yohanca Delgado, and Sheree Renée Thomas.

So, the obvious place to start is with Janelle Monae, right? How familiar are you with their work, and were you a fan of Dirty Computer? Bonus Q: have you watched any of the “emotion picture” released alongside the album?

(Note: Janelle Monae uses they/them and she/her pronouns. For the purposes of this article, we’ll be using they/them)

Emily: So… I’m familiar with Janelle Monae’s popular songs. I don’t think I’ve sat down and listened to Dirty Computer all the way through. I’m probably more familiar with their acting work and their fashion choices than I am with their music. But I’m not totally unaware of what Dirty Computer was about. I guess it’s probably safe to say I have not really watched much of the “emotion picture.” So I’m not a good Janelle Monae fan, I guess is what I’m saying. What about you?

Kelli: Unlike you, I am a really good Janelle Monae fan. Lol, jk. IDK if there is such thing as a “good fan” but there was a period several years ago where I went through their discography and got really into them, particularly the album The Electric Lady, so I was super primed when Dirty Computer came out and I listened to it on repeat for weeks. I did not ever sit down and watch the full “emotion picture,” though I saw a decent bit of it just through watching individual music videos as they came out. For anyone who hasn’t listened to the album, I genuinely cannot recommend it highly enough. And now that I’ve read this collection, I definitely want to sit down and watch through the visual album as well, because I feel like there might be some fun easter eggs.

That said, I guess we can talk about the collection a bit as a whole before we dive into any particular stories. How did you feel about the world building in The Memory Librarian?

Emily: Overall, this book reminded me of a lot of the sci-fi books and stories that I enjoy. Not so much in terms of writing style or themes but in terms of world-building. It reminded me a lot of things like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and movies like Gattaca, but like… way more Black and queer, obviously, which is what sci-fi really needs. I feel like my issue with a lot of sci-fi/fantasy is I get a little lost in the world building and feel like I can’t grasp onto the plot or the characters. But then on the other hand, if there’s zero world building, the world of the story obviously doesn’t seem real. This one, I think, hit that right note in between for me. 

With that being said, I think the main issue for me with short story collections is that naturally I’m going to connect with some stories more than others. And sometimes when I’m really into one of the short stories and then it ends, I feel a little bit of whiplash when I’m then forced to immerse myself in an entirely different story. But that’s just going to be a problem for me with any short story collection.

But enough about me! What did you think about the world building? And how do you feel about sci-fi short story collections? Does the genre work as well in short stories? Is it more challenging to connect to the world and characters through short stories?

Kelli: I liked the world building too, and I agree with you that it hits the sweet spot between too little and too much. It was fairly easy to picture the world Monae and their co-authors created, but they didn’t get too much into the weeds with it, which I appreciated. I also liked the little foreword at the beginning that set the mood and explained briefly what we were getting into. 

To be honest, I think this is the only sci-fi short story collection I’ve ever read. I am struggling to think of another, and the closest is something like Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, but that’s more horror than sci-fi. I guess that’s the only genre fiction short story collection I’ve read, lol. I think a lot of the short stories I’ve read have been like, things people sent to me or stories that were published individually rather than in actual collections. I own like 20 short story books and I’m always like “I’ll get to that eventually” and I never pick them up.

Now that I have established by ability to answer questions about short story collections with authority: yes, I think sci-fi has the potential to work in this format, especially when it’s something like this where all of the stories take place within the same universe and we see some of the same elements coming up in different ways (like the Timebox, for example, which features heavily in two stories). I do think it can be harder to connect to characters, and I think some of these stories were easier for me to connect to because they were more character-driven than plot-driven. 

Emily: I agree. I think overall the reason this short story collection worked better for me than some sci-fi short story collections I’ve read in the past is that this is all in the same world and so there is some continuity happening here. I didn’t feel like my brain had to completely reestablish everything from scratch every time a new story started. But I also agree that the stories that worked better for me were the more character-driven ones. I think in general, when I’m reading about a sci-fi world, I’m going to gravitate to character over plot because character—in any setting—is going to feel more grounded in reality. Plot in a sci-fi setting can get wild. 

Kelli: You mentioned that this book is extremely Black and queer, and you’re right that the genre is in desperate need of both of those things. I feel like this book is such a ‘fuck you’ to the idea that science fiction is for like… white cis men only. Were there particular moments that really stood out to you or handled something genre-related in a way that a straight white book definitely would not?

Emily: Okay, well, I think every single story deals with the intersection of gender, race, and sexuality in some way so really we could pick out any one of these stories and talk about how it’s using the sci-fi genre to explore what it means to be queer, a woman or nonbinary, and Black and just trying to exist in our world. But I guess we’ve both discussed how one of our favorite stories in the collection was “Timebox,” written with Eve L. Ewing, in which a couple discovers a box of sorts that enables them to have extra time. And in finding this extra time, the characters are forced to grapple with inequity and how time is valued differently depending on who you are. This issue intersects with issues of class as well. Because naturally, people with more money will have more time at their disposal. But I think Monae and Ewing are most interested in how people of color are inherently gifted with less time than white people because of a history of oppression.

The reason I wanted to bring this up specifically first is because we’ve already kind of discussed this “off-blog” (i.e. we texted about it) and you actually pulled a quote for me from this story where they discuss this: “If we carefully regard the works of art that we consider seminal in the history of the world—works of painting, literature, dance, sculpture; all the beautiful things wrought by human hands and imagination—it is clear that what united them is time. Time purchased with hoarded and illegitimate wealth, time wrung from the muscles of Black bodies, time wrenched through a vicious alchemy from the violent arms of colonialism. Friends, we exist in a perpetual state of time debt, wherein only those who have benefited from this thieving achieve the privilege of what we so blithely call genius. Comrades, what would it mean if what was once stolen could now be repaid?”

This is the issue with discussing short story collections. I could spend a whole blog just talking about this one story, because this doesn’t even get into the fact that the couple in question is also queer. And I guess since this is QGBC (™) we gotta discuss that as well.  

Kelli: For sure. I loved this story and the way it explores the value of time and the disparity of time in a way I haven’t really thought about before as a white person, even though reading about it was very much an “oh, duh” moment for me, lol. I think that pull quote sums up a lot of what the story is exploring in terms of the concept itself, which is fascinating in its own right, but where the story really reaches another level for me is when the interpersonal dynamics come into play. 

Raven, who is our point-of-view character in this story, is the one to discover the Timebox, and the first thing she thinks about upon this discovery is how she can use it to make her own life easier. Her partner, Akilah, is immediately like, “we should be sharing this resource with our community, think of everything this can help us accomplish as a collective, how could you be so selfish, this is bigger than us,” etc. But Akilah comes from money and Raven doesn’t, and their dynamic is emblematic of a larger issue at play between people who are privileged enough to think about moral obligations and ethical implications and people who are genuinely just trying to survive. 

Since we’re talking about queerness, I think we should discuss the concept of a “dirty computer,” which is an element that runs through most of these stories. This is the term that this new society, New Dawn, comes up with for people who do not fit inside their standards for what is considered normal or “clean.” There is a focus on queerness here, particularly erasure of queerness. Most of the queer characters in this book are either hiding their queerness or have gone to great lengths to escape from society and its expectations of them. 

This all felt really fucking real with all of the shit that’s been going on in our country lately (and always tbh), with the attacks on the rights of queer people and our bodily autonomy. None of what was going on here felt like an impossibility for our future, which is such a bummer when you think about all the progress we’ve made in terms of representation and acceptance of queer people over the last couple of decades. We live in a world right now where a book like The Memory Librarian can make it onto the New York Times bestseller list, yet we also live in a world where we can genuinely imagine a future where this kind of thing won’t get published at all. 

I don’t know that this is even a question, but I guess I’m just wondering if you were having similar doomsday thoughts while reading this. Lol.

Emily: Oh, yes, I just live in a world of doomsday thoughts nowadays. 

But on that note, I think this is 100% why it’s so important to focus on queer, marginalized voices in sci-fi. Just speaking of current events, I know a lot of people have been posting images from The Handmaid’s Tale to signify, obviously, that what’s going on in our government is taking us disturbingly close to the world of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale. But as I read more and more sci-fi/dystopian from queer voices and authors of color, the more I realize that The Handmaid’s Tale is really limited in its scope and flawed in that it centralizes the cis white woman experience. It doesn’t take into account the fact that many, many Black, queer, and other marginalized people have been facing oppression like this for centuries. For them, dystopia isn’t a speculative “what-if” future world. It’s happening now, and it’s happened in the past. 

Kelli: For sure! This is something I’ve been thinking about even in the past couple of days with so many white cis women posting this 4th of July that they are officially NOT celebrating now that our country has taken away our reproductive freedoms. Like… sure, that’s true, but also, if this is genuinely the first year you’ve felt weird about celebrating America’s “freedom,” you haven’t been paying attention — or you only care about it now that you’re the one being directly impacted.

Emily: I feel like I may be rambling… but my point is that we need speculative fiction like this because speculative fiction from an exclusively white feminist perspective is just not getting the whole point. It’s missing intersectionality. And unfortunately books like The Handmaid’s Tale are still a lot of people’s only reference point.

I guess on the plus side, as you said, this book has been selling well. And Monae is including a lot of other voices in speculative fiction. Which is cool. These authors are big names, but Janelle Monae is likely helping these authors reach a looooot of new readers.

Kelli: I was lucky enough to see Monae in person on The Memory Librarian book tour in conversation with Danny Lore and Sheree Renée Thomas, and the impression I got was that this was absolutely part of Monae’s goal in writing with so many different queer writers of color on these stories. Those two authors in particular — Lore and Thomas — were Monae’s collaborators on the two stories in the collection that prominently featured nonbinary main characters using they/them pronouns. I just wanted to make note of this, because up to this point in my life, I haven’t read very much adult fiction featuring characters with these pronouns, and I think it’s really exciting to see this kind of inclusivity not just in sci-fi but in adult fiction in general. In the past we’ve discussed how YA has really been on the forefront when it comes to queerness in fiction, but to see an adult book with so many nonbinary characters hitting the bestseller list really warms my little heart.

Emily: I agree! Should we talk about “The Memory Librarian” since it is the title story of this collection? I think this one makes sense as the title of the collection because it is the longest story in the book, but also it establishes a looooot of world-building elements that remain significant in the rest of the collection. Some of the stuff established in the first story we’ve discussed already, like the New Dawn society and the standards of that society. 

This story also introduces a drug called “Nevermind,” which does basically what you would assume it does based on what it’s called. It erases memories that might be deemed as a threat to this new world order. Obviously memory is a big part of what this whole collection is playing with (hence the name), but it seems especially important in this first story, especially how memory relates to identity. I don’t know that I’m really asking a question but… do you have any thoughts on that? LOL

Kelli: Yes, totally. Our main character in “The Memory Librarian” is Seshet, a woman who has essentially given up her sense of identity to serve New Dawn as a keeper of memories. In order to do this, she has to be an empty vessel herself, and she has had all of her own memories removed. As is true of many of the characters in this collection, Seshet is Black and queer, and there are obvious parallels to our real world in the way Seshet is forced to give up her own memories, bad and good, to make space for the experiences of everyone else in this society. Black and queer people have had their histories erased since the beginning of time, and it makes a sad kind of sense that this practice would continue into what is a supposedly highly-advanced vision of the future.

Like you said, this story is the longest in the collection, and because of that it gets to do a lot — it’s part mystery, part romance, part character study. It feels like something that could definitely be adapted for the screen, and I will say that during the tour event, Monae revealed that they are currently having conversations about adapting some of these stories for the screen and expanding the Dirty Computer universe even further. I personally think this would work great as a Black Mirror-style mini series… fingers crossed! 

So, what did you end up rating this? Short story collections are hard because if I could I’d rate each story individually, but you end up having to kind of average it out.

Emily: Yes, I feel like short story collections always end up having middling ratings for me because I end up averaging out my feelings about all of the stories. I’ve heard some people argue that that’s not “fair” and that’s not the best way to rate short stories. But it’s the way I rate short stories. On that note, I gave this three stars. Overall, I’m glad I read it, but some stories were better than others for me. 

Kelli: Yes, same. There are some stories I would’ve given five stars to and others I’d give like… two stars, lol — not even because they’re bad, but because of what we discussed with plot vs character. So a three seems fair, right? Whatever the rating, I’m also glad we read it, and I’m excited to see how this universe expands across media in the future.

What are we reading next time?

Emily: I’m really excited to announce that our next Queer Girl Book Club book will be Patricia Wants to Cuddle by Samantha Allen, which I think is going to be right up our alley because it’s horror comedy and it’s about a Bachelor-esque show called “The Catch.” Oh, and it’s queer as hell, of course. Two words: lesbian sasquatch. If none of this intrigues you, I don’t know what to tell you. Either way, come back at the beginning of September if you’re at all interested in this book or just reading us talk about books cause we’ll be here.