Salt Fish Girl Intersects Genres, Gender, And Culture

“This is a story about stink, after all, a story about rot, about how life grows out of the most fetid-smelling places”

Salt Fish Girl is no ordinary offering; in fact, it is very clearly cyberpunk, specifically biopunk. It’s also, in part, magical realism—as it interweaves mythological components. This intersectionality in terms of genre makes for a uniquely fascinating contribution to the cyberpunk sub-genre. 

“I was a sheltered child, living out my parents’ utopian dream as though it were reality. They did not show me the cracks. And out of loyalty and love for them, when I sensed the cracks, I refused to see them. But of course this unspoken pact could not last.”

Miranda grows up in a futuristic Canada that is dominated by corporations while struggling with being a minority. On top of her not being around people from her own culture, she also is born with a strange smell, reminiscent of “cat piss” that seems to wean as she gets older but results in an isolating and challenging childhood.

“I was a sheltered child, living out my parents’ utopian dream as though it were reality. They did not show me the cracks. And out of loyalty and love for them, when I sensed the cracks, I refused to see them. But of course this unspoken pact could not last.”

Paralleling Miranda’s story is one of Nu Wa, a creation story of a Chinese goddess who births humankind and eventually chooses to become one, born as Nu Wa. Similarly to Miranda, Nu Wa’s experience is one of poverty and classism that allows for her exploitation. These two stories elegantly depict complex systemic issues, such as stratification of class that transcends generations.

“When you own nothing, it’s hard to believe you have anything to lose. I can’t say what it was that made me follow the strange woman, except that it took more weakness than strength.”

Nu Wa and Miranda are both taken advantage of by people in a higher class, using their poverty to co-opt their intellectual property and personhood. For Miranda’s family to navigate society more easily, her father tries to trace the source of a rumor that Miranda’s smell is curable. Corporations are also mass-producing human clones as a source of cheap labor, it appears that biotechnologies, both sanctioned and unsanctioned by these corporations, is more pervasive than people are aware. As more and more people seem to be contracting something dubbed the “dreaming disease”—which appears to unlock generational memories—people are committing suicide and disappearing. And Miranda is beginning to remember some things herself.

“Why shed blood when people can be brought and sold so easily?”

The story is steeped with culture and the cultural issues that come along with them. From the different smell of other ethnicities cause ostracization to family dynamics and the very particular ways the corporations leverage the marginalization of the main characters. A fringe benefit of this authenticity is how the cyberpunk motifs resonate much more profoundly.

“What is the point of honour if it is always used against you?”

Existence As Rebellion In Orphan Black

Relevancy is not generally a problem for cyberpunk. While some aspects of it have aged and the undergrowth, when picked at, reveals notions rooted in old fears that have bruised ugly. Some of which, fans of the sub-genre tend to frame in static moments with the fugazi moment when it was decreed dead. The more relevant motifs aren’t to be contained, though.

Biopunk, for instance, resuscitates tired tropes in cyberpunk trappings and shows them in a new, more interesting light. Orphan Black ends up being, I’d argue, even more relevant than when it first aired, due to its expressly queer themes, characters, and politics. Right now, we believe human clones aren’t possible…but if they were…who would have the resources to create them, other than corporations?

In Orphan Black there are many, many clones dating back many, many years.

When Sarah witnesses a woman who looks exactly like her jump in front of a train, she assumes the identity of the dead woman. It’s an unconventional biopunk story. One that takes its time grounding itself before introducing the cyberpunk/biopunk tropes.

The megacorporation spying on them all to nefarious ends, seemingly with infinite resources being the biggest. In the shadow of this specter, the lives of Sarah and her clones are relevant because they parallel identity politic conversations today. With growing steam, the debate surrounding them is The issue right now. People are still trying to define what they even are and what the boundaries of the discussion are, compared to how people have thought voted in politics all along.

The clones struggle to survive despite the manipulations of those with more power than them, their bodies commodified in a world that doesn’t believe that their existence is possible. The show is fiercely punk. Each one of the clones’ original DNA is predetermined but their identities vary widely. Some are gay, some bisexual, some explicitly trans. The multitude of possibility is endless as the show progresses and feels subversive, transgressive, and creative. Often times in other visual media clones are depicted as the same people., used as a simulacra. Their likes and interests inextricably intertwined, unable to see where one ends and the other begins. While they tend to think like one another and look like one another. That notion is discarded, replaced with one far more inclusive and representative of intersectional lived experiences people have been voicing for some time.

As it progresses the plot gets a bit convoluted. But it never loses that fundamental aggressive rebelliousness and creativity around the expression of identity. Something the sub-genre has needed in order to feel like it is giving voice to the marginalized people who actually live in the fringes cyberpunk wants to be representative of. There is no sub-culture on display as a form of poverty tourism, for instance. Almost all of the characters are political statements in some way, and they resonate in a time when trans rights and social progress is being rolled back in the U.S.

The clones’ very existence as intersectional and varied identities are an act rebellion in of itself, bucking against many conservative notions around these identities. And this act of dissent is the most important to be facilitated in biopunk, and by extension cyberpunk, yet.

Chasing The Moment In The Butterfly Effect

“…the genes from the deep sea that had lit up those eyes in a blue glow, for the brief stretch of her youth, decided to switch off the lights.”

The Butterfly Effect initially spends its time showing you an extrapolated dystopic future reminiscent of Blade Runner. It is filthy, people are starving—scrounging and subsisting off moldy food in a dictatorship run by The Supreme Guide. We follow a character known only as “Captain Old.” He greets a mysterious visitor and takes a case trying to infiltrate and assassinate the dissidents in the abandoned metro.  Rather than replicants or androids of some kind, there are bioengineered humans, “dishbabies”, manufactured to fulfill a purpose but not artificial. Their eyes glow blue all the same. There’s a glossary of terms in the back of the book for all the foreign terminology used, a staple of cyberpunk fiction.

“Krava-4 was never sure what a ghost actually is. She had heard that bloodbabies contain a soul — which is like water in a cup.”

But here’s where it departs. Honestly, this Darkland was interesting enough that I’d have been fine reading about a biopunk spin on a Blade Runner world. Instead, as Captain Old ventures into the metro, the narrative jumps back in time. And then it does so again. And then again.

There’s the story of Kar, a P.I in Calcutta who is hired to get to the bottom of a mystery. It seems a group of tourists visited Seoul and haven’t returned. He flies to South Korea to discover what’s happened. We see the tourists’ perspective through the lens of man from Calcutta meeting a mysterious woman who takes over as their tour guide, the whole thing unraveling with romantic undertones.

“It was as if the trees were awake and someone had placed little tea lamps along the trail. Perhaps it was the moss on the gnarled tree trunks that glowed for some reason or it was the light of their eyes reflected by the night. Possibly it was the glow of stardust, a faint sidereal light, a hint that they were all children of the stars.”

In the U.K a scientist dedicates his life to trying to solve world hunger while discussing with his good friend the ethics of how the problem might be solved. A woman flees a prison in North Korea, attempting to find somewhere safe.

“Disease is also a gift. A gift which we could do without. It is the sap of life flowing through nature leaking or spilling out because of our disjointed living.”

Rather than lingering on this dystopia, The Butterfly Effects weaves these stories together to show you how this came to pass, rather than having the meat of the story be Captain Old’s case in the future. It’s a very interesting way to write a cyberpunk/biopunk novel, and it’s challenging. It’s intersectional with climate-fiction, or cli-fi, as well because much of the story takes place in present day. It stops this future moment and traces how Captain Old came to be situated in that time and space, building suspense regarding the multiple questions posed by this grim future.

Yet more of these are seeded throughout. By the end, it is incredibly satisfying to have all these disparate events wrapped together. The structure is similar to Cloud Atlas, in which the short stories break and crash into one another but culminate together. This does something similar as it collapses back to the future with a slight twist to this predictable formula.

“Through the glazed glass hotel window, the electric night was an ocean of light washing over the high rises, a city of desire that had claimed dominion over the night. Looking out reminded him also of the K-pop girls with their smooth faces and coloured hair, belting out their power-packed lines.”

What was more astounding was the level of detail found in these places. From Calcutta to Seoul to the U.K—the colloquialisms, the food—everything shows a focused lens that comes from research. The acknowledgments go into some of that. While some readers may not like the level of granularity, and indeed, sometimes it does drag because of it. But when the story pivots into consolidating all of the plot threads it is all the better for it.

‘Sometimes they are Red Admirals with their bright orange on black wings flapping about wantonly in my frontal lobe, or else they were swallowtails flitting from cerebellum to hippocampus or even a clutch of glowing spliced hesperiadae blushing playfully between my ears ...’