Ohhh this one was
such fun.
The Membranes is a slim, mid-1990s, Taiwanese dystopian sci-fi novel. The premise: the hole over the ozone layer got bad enough that you can't live on the surface of the planet anymore, so humanity moved to the
ocean floor to escape the sun's harmful cosmic rays. By the year 2100, the ocean floor has been thoroughly colonized by every nation of the earth powerful enough to project their influence downward (yielding charmingly goofy phrases like "the New San Francisco Accord (signed in the new, underwater San Francisco)").
The story is not particularly interested in the
physics of how that works (not least because the answer is "lol it wouldn't;" think about the pressure at that depth and
the Titan implosion). Rather, it's more interested in the
cultural implications of this move to the sea floor—for instance, even with the ocean floor
mostly blocking the sun's rays, skin cancer rates are high & people's skin tends to degrade more rapidly, so "skin technicians" (a sort of hybrid dermatologist/masseuse/skin-artist) are highly trained and highly paid so they can keep people's skin looking young.
I called it a dystopian novel earlier, but that's not quite right. Ta-Wei isn't interested in doing a prolonged, incisive examination of the power structures in this society, and instead pulls a tight focus on a single character: Momo, a highly successful, 30-year-old skin technician who owns her own practice and lives alone in a nice apartment. At the story's opening, she receives a letter from her mom after twenty years of estrangement; the "action" of the novel is a couple skin technician sessions that play out while Momo's trying to decide whether or not to meet with her mom; the end happens when she makes a choice and plays it out. That's all. (And I loved that tight focus, that confidence!)
And I was just so completely fascinated by this Momo chick, and the slow, patient way the story reveals more and more about her. Here's a girl who never goes out, never takes a partner nor has any interest in one, yet has chosen such a tactile, intimate line of work. She's got some technology-aided voyeuristic tendencies—not necessarily in a sexual sense, in an
everything sense, in a content-to-experience-other-lives-secondhand way—that, as described, felt simultaneously so so alluring and so so claustrophobic. The slow reveal of the long-term consequences of a horrible set of surgeries she went through at a young age is satisfyingly well done, and also, there's some wonderfully unselfconsciously queer happenings, lots of unexpected eyebrow-raising chemistries between some interstitial characters—I loved it all.
I did find the ending a little... deflating? Without spoiling too much, it has that kind of rug-pull and-then-it-was-all-a-dream feel that I feel like smacks of... idk, a particularly tacky
Twilight Zone episode. It's not
totally out of nowhere, and I can see the buildup to it a
bit in hindsight... but I mostly found myself longing for what the novel would have
been, if Ta-Wei had kept to that tight, close focus on Momo, if, instead of zooming the camera out to a "damn wouldn't it be crazy if" kind of scenario, he'd let Momo's choice at the end stand on its own, and shown us what, if anything, changes about Momo afterwards.
But overall, what a romp. I'm glad I read it.
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