The makeup dude had a hard time of it. Here, I think he used one of those house painter brushes with synthetic fibers, rather than an artist’s brush made from hairs pulled from her own head. Pity, that.
Aniara (2018) is a reminder that humanity is not a rational animal, but an animal capable of rationality when there’s reason for it. The Aniara is a Swedish interplanetary passenger liner of the future, shuttling between an environmentally degraded Earth and the arid, barely-ready-for-mankind Mars. Among the thousands of passengers and hundreds of crew, we follow Isagel, an entertainment officer, who is responsible for operating and caring for the Mimarobe, a telepathic entertainment system that rationalizes what it reads from its clients and relays it back to them, turning their dreams into something they can almost touch.
But those dreams start becoming nightmares when Aniara is struck by space debris early on her latest voyage from Earth to Mars. Her out of control propulsion system takes her off-course; her damaged fuel is lost; and her communications system is gone. Pressure begins to build on all aboard as Aniara drifts further and further away from the home of humanity. The crew can at least be busy, but the passengers, ah, they are a problem. In fact, they are too big a problem, and soon their nightmares give the Mimarobe, sentient or not, some real troubles.
And when Mimarobe burns out, not only are the passengers half way to panic, it leaves Isagel out of a job, as well as out of favor – she had warned the Captain of the problem, and he had not supplied her with help. Who gets the blame? Not the Captain, who appears to be entering his own cozy psychosis.
Aniara, the story, consequently becomes an exploration of the various ways people explore irrationality, from violence to religious manias, from empty careers to empty gestures, from the construction and deconstruction of power structures to the sad depressions that grip non-narcissists when they perceive their lives to have no future, no relevance, and no purpose. There are starts and stops, as momentary hopes erupt and then fade away, but they seem to be lessons that are not learned, but mere fragrances on the wind of life. Fragrances from the burned out corpses of hopes.
But, in this story, rationality isn’t a way of life, it’s a tool. And it’s seen as a tool that is no longer useful when there’s no chance of rejoining humanity. In a way, this story is the observation that it’s hard for the involuntarily separated to retain their rationality, which may be an echo of those criminals, semi-criminals, and merely criminally unfortunate who were shipped from England to Australia in the late 18th century, who reportedly indulged in days of mass irrationality – perhaps in mourning at their permanent loss, in almost all cases, of their homeland and families.
The people of the Aniara could have concentrated on turning their ship into a colony ship, but they do not: their intimate desire of stasis, for their old life, emblematic in the very popular Mimarobe, is their fatal flaw. Its eventual malfunction foreshadows their ultimate, dismal fate. Not as individuals, but as a society.
And perhaps that’s a story for today.
