WWAC’s coverage of the 2022 Hugo Awards continues with reviews of the last two Best Novelette finalists: “O2 Arena” by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and “L’Esprit de L’Escalier” by Catherynne M. Valente…
“O2 Arena” by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki
It is the year 2030, and the people of Nigeria are required to purchase O2 credits to access the masks and generators necessary for clean, filtered air. As the story’s main character puts it: “You had to pay to breathe. Since the global warming crisis had affected phytoplankton and hampered the production of breathable air, our lives were our own to maintain at the requisite cost.”
The protagonist is an unnamed student, recently accepted into a Law Academy that is a monument to social inequality: lecturers inform students of their privilege yet also tell them that they have no rights, while corruption and sexual predation run rampant. The Nigerian students are segregated from their wealthier counterparts who come from America and China, the latter enjoying access to more expensive O2 masks: “It didn’t help that the Chinese government, in partnership with the CAT—Chinese American Tobacco—had donated a stash of high-quality masks for them and took care of O2 regulation in most of our institutions, in exchange for certain economic and political concessions.”
The story’s lead has no such luxuries, however, and the only way for him to pay his way through the course is via the so-called O2 Arena – a means of money-making which, he informs us, has “replaced selling your kidneys and internet fraud” as an illicit get-rich-quick scheme. The arena is the location of pit-fights, highly illegal but sponsored by the rich and powerful as a form of streaming entertainment. Those who win can claim a lifetime’s supply of air. Those who lose are burdened with foul air and foul stigma – if, of course, they survive.
The sheer injustice at the heart of the story’s society (which is not so far removed from its real-world model: the author specifically opens with a dedication to “beautiful young Nigerians who had to and are still labouring under the yoke of disability and various health maladies in a broken system with poor to no healthcare”) is personified by the character of Ovoke.
For the protagonist, one of the few positive aspects of the Law Academy is sharing classes with Ovoke, a longtime friend who loves him like a brother. But Ovoke has cancer. While she could, conceivably, have her life saved by the removal of her ovaries, she fears that this would leave her unable to have children and therefore, in the eyes of society, “a broken woman–a woman who wasn’t a woman.” The remaining treatment available to her is one that costs money – money that can be earned only if the protagonist succeeds in the O2 arena. In a moment of bitter, biting satire, a hashtag campaign supporting this mission – #SaveVoke – is backed by the arena’s owners as a promotional gimmick.
The deathmatch-dystopia must surely lay claim to being one of today’s most prominent science fiction themes. Between being commodified into a stream of Hunger Games knockoffs to receiving a smash-hit return to its satirical roots in Squid Game, the subgenre has shown both its popularity and its resilience. With “O2 Arena” we have an addition to the corpus that – from its incorporation of such themes as climate change and mask-wearing to its existence as a work of Afrofuturism – feels quintessentially now.
“O2 Arena” was written by Nigerian author Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and holds the distinction of being the first African short story to win a Nebula Award. At the same time, however, it debuted in US-based Apex Magazine and sometimes gives a feeling of self-awareness that its international readership might miss certain culturally-specific details. This is clearest when the first-person narrator spells out the story’s social commentary:
Before the Crises, they had sold death in the form of cigarettes when life was in abundance to those who didn’t care about life. But after the thinning of the air and the severe climate changes that had made the earth near uninhabitable, the industrial conglomerate had switched. Now the merchants of death sold life and oxygen because death was in abundance, and life was the commodity in demand. You had to pay to breathe. O2 credit was life. And your deficits, your debits, were in CO2. They sold to the highest bidders: the government who purchased and subsidized it for their workers, and for the rich. So there was short supply for the rest.
That said, at other points “O2 Arena” is unafraid to acknowledge that it is a specifically Nigerian dystopia. When the protagonist returns to the mainland, the story touches upon his history of involvement with cults – that is, university-based gangs:
Outside, I slipped my mask back on and inhaled deeply. Air was life. For this, I was content to be a “Ju man,” a slur for people who didn’t belong to cults in the university. Or for those who, like me, belonged merely as honorary members for protection, social and other nonviolent reasons, paying dues and not engaging in any of the requisite violent activities that gained one respect and prestige as a cultist. I had joined to be left alone. There was no middle ground in a community like this: you were either the oppressed or the oppressor.
The plot of “O2 Arena” is the bare framework for a journey through the cultural setting, one that explores various forms of oppression with nuance. It would have been easy to present cancer-stricken Ovoke as a passive figure of pity, but she is instead depicted as a fighter: “When I saw her fight, I called her fearsome, horrifying, a raging animal in a world too delicate to cage her. When others saw her fight, they called her ‘brave.’” This trait, of course, is not in itself enough to save her when society’s deck is stacked against her.
The story also acknowledges homophobia, establishing that – as with the Nigeria of today – homosexuality is illegal, and even warrants the death penalty in the country’s north. But it also portrays homophobia as something that affects only those at the bottom of the class ladder: the lecturer Dr. Umezi is a sexual predator who pursues both boys and girls alike, his power and privilege affording him a free pass. A short-form study of how inequality in class is inseparable from other forms of prejudice, “O2 Arena” is both densely-packed and convincing.
As for the central image of the pit-fighting arena, suffice to say that the story reaches a visceral climax and a strong conclusion. “O2 Arena” manages to avoid both over-optimism and outright despair, instead achieving something that is a commendable feat for a dystopian tale: it gives the impression that there are more stories, equally rewarding, to be told beyond the final paragraph.
“L’Esprit de L’Escalier” by Catherynne M. Valente
In this story, Catherynne M. Valente retells the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, beginning her narrative with Eurydice having been retrieved from the underworld by Orpheus. The twist is that this version of the story takes place in modern-day New York: Orpheus is a singer who performs “live at the Apollo” while Eurydice lounges around in a torn Morrissey t-shirt, their time together as an it-couple having faded. The general feeling of day-to-day mundanity with which Valente injects the myth is summed up by this passage:
Eurydice’s father and his dirtbag friends don’t call ahead. They don’t bake, they don’t help with chores, they don’t come bearing takeout, and they definitely don’t do baths. They just turn up. Once or twice a year. Orpheus rounds the bannister today to find the boys all smoking around his living room, feet up on the coffee table, a random girl asleep on the piano bench, empties stacked into green-and-brown hecatombs on every surface. He recognizes the labels.
This flavour of modernised myth seems to be presently in vogue – “L’Esprit de L’Escalier” is reminiscent of the webcomic Lore Olympus, also up for a Hugo this year – and Valente goes all-in with creating a pantheon of deities who range from the downbeat to the douchy. Pan hides his horns under a fedora; Charon tries to talk Orpheus into spending some time away from Eurydice to go jet-skiing; Hecate pops around with three-scoop ice cream cones; and Apollo is described as “a man mostly his haircut, perpetually stuck halfway between Robert Plant and David Cassidy”.
In the middle of all this, Eurydice – who Orpheus expected to enjoy a quick recovery from her ordeal, “like in the soaps” – finds her body steadily decaying. Her skin peels from her palms, leaving trails of sludge; her jawbone falls loose and needs to be popped back in again; and if she does not keep moving, then she will begin to suffer from rigor mortis. In a good example of the symbolic applicability of myth, Eurydice’s condition can be read as a portrait of various states from depression to drug addiction, yet the emotions she feels are somehow both broad and specific:
She spins and dyes yarn to sell at the farmers market on Saturdays. She writes out the names of the colorways on little grey cards and ties them to the skeins with scraps of ribbon. Die Like Nobody’s Watching. Live, Laugh, Languish. Whatever Doesn’t Kill You Is a Tremendous Disappointment. Thanks, I’m Cured. L’Espirit d’Escalier.
It took Eurydice a year to be able to write again. And when she did, though her lettering came elegant and careful, it wasn’t hers. It wasn’t anyone else’s, either. It was just new.
But no matter what she writes on the cards, whatever color she pours into her big glass dyeing bowls, the skeins all come out the same shade of black, and no one buys them.
“L’Esprit de L’Escalier” is very much a character-led rather than plot-led piece. Perhaps this goes without saying: surely the whole point of retelling an ancient narrative, particularly when the end result is as heavily modernised as this, is to get inside the minds of characters we might otherwise see as abstract archetypes? But Valente’s piece is nonetheless notable in how it resists forcing its plot along.
The story is divided into twelve “steps” – quick vignettes in the lives of Orpheus and Eurydice – which tend to be similar in tone and content. They typically focus on Orpheus’ struggles with his musical career, Eurydice’s struggles to hold herself together, and the lack of a functional relationship between the two. The main distinctions between these vignettes are provided by the various other mythical figures who drop by to meet the troubled couple. Whether the latest visitor is Eurydice’s less-than-responsible father Apollo, or the boulder-rolling Sisyphus (on parole from Hades and accompanied by his emotional-support Cerberus) each one brings their own perspective on the situation.
Then, just as the story is starting to feel static, all of the moving parts suddenly come together. Orpheus, who initially regards Eurydice as being ungrateful towards him, comes to accept that perhaps it is time for their relationship to end and performs the requisite soul-searching to allow the break-up. And so, a coming-of-age narrative that has been occurring in the background throughout “L’Esprit de L’Escalier” reaches its conclusion, while an age-old myth justifies its update.
