The Resisters, by Gish Jen
Gish Jen’s latest novel, The Resisters, is what might happen if Margaret Atwood’s classic The Handmaid’s Tale met the beloved movie The Sandlot in a not-too-far-off alternative universe where AI rules supreme. A testament to the revolutionary power of the pick-up game, The Resisters explores the survival of a family under the eye of “Aunt Nettie,” a big-brotheresque artificial intelligence program who manages every aspect of life, political and domestic (basically, your Alexa-fueled nightmares come to life).
Eleanor, Grant, and Gwen compose the exceptional family in question, marked as dangerous “Unretrainables” in Aunt Nettie’s cyber eyes. Eleanor is a ferocious lawyer working against the inequities in AutoAmerica; Gwen is born with a golden arm, pitching teddy bears out of her crib with incredible speed and accuracy. Grant, whose point-of-view the novel is told from, was once a professor, though those were among the first professions to be replaced by bots in AutoAmerica. Together, the family creates an underground and illegal baseball league for “Surplus” families, those who Aunt Nettie has deemed essentially worthless, having replaced the majority of occupations. The Surplus are expected to consume what Aunt Nettie produces to justify their continued existence—activities perused primarily for pleasure (like recreational baseball) are counter-cultural and suspicious in AutoAmerica. Those lucky (and white) enough to be deemed “Netted” live on the high-ground of a flooded continent and escape much of Aunt Nettie’s surveillance, creating what one character describes as “a digital Jim Crow.”
Though Eleanor and Grant try to use technology against Aunt Nettie – using white noise machines to hush their conversation and hacking the microchips implanted in every Surplus to track their comings and goings—Gwen’s exceptional pitching does not go unnoticed, and soon she is being recruited to try-out for AutoAmerica’s official baseball team, revived to play the nation’s rival,“ChinRussia”. What follows is an ethical quandary—to what extent are we responsible for our families, to our talents? Is it a blessing to be exceptional in a culture that desires to use your exceptionality in service of itself? How selfish should we be made to feel if we hold our talents back from the world? “Your arm owns you,” Gwen’s coach says, after she debates giving up Aunt Nettie-approved baseball for good. “Whether you like it or not.”
One of the most unique aspects of this novel is the capacity of language and, in particular, app-speak to reveal inequities in a culture. “ShipEm’Back” refers to Aunt Nettie’s immigrant deportation policy, to be “PermaDermed” is to have your skin permanently bleached to match the “AngelFair”, and the app “How’dIDo” tracks a player’s progress down to the microsecond, calculating the probability of a player to defeat another, taking the human element of surprise out of the game. By condensing and infantilizing whole policies and practices into these cute little phrases, the terrible realities of social inequities like xenophobia and colorism are obscured, made an easier pill for the public to swallow. These terms spice Jen’s prose and sets apart the world she’s built as bizarre, yet increasingly familiar.
I read this book at the same time as Jenny Odell’s “How To Do Nothing,” a non-fiction title that explores what “resisting the attention economy” can look like when we stop expending our free time and talent on social-media machines that profit from our data and use. I found the paring delightfully auspicious. At first glance, “doing nothing” may seem like the worst of “Slacktivism.” However, both Jen and Odell take the power of resisting inequitable economies seriously. A pick-up game or unofficial, local league, with no officially-branded merchandise to sell and no corporate advertisements plastered on the sidelines, fails on a level to sell itself to an unjust economy, and exists primarily for the pleasure of it’s players and fans. This is what threatens Aunt Nettie in The Resisters – the “nothingness” of fun and pleasure, of sport for sports’ sake.
Sports have historically been a site where social justice and inequities meet, from the struggle to achieve equal pay for soccer players of all genders to Muhammad Ali’s influence over the Civil Rights Movement and criticism of the Vietnam War. Admittedly, this has often been the biggest site of interest of me when it comes to sports. Statistics and rules tend to pass through my brain without much of an impact. There is a healthy amount of ball-playing terminology in this novel, but how The Resisters captured my imagination was in the revolutionary possibilities of sport and the excitement of seeing a young up-and-coming athlete discover her talents and do something great. The Resisters is a fantastic read for baseball enthusiasts, dystopian fiction nerds, and those of us who simply miss eating a hotdog on a set of creaky bleachers.
Halee Kirkwood is a current Loft Mentor Series Fellow and received their MFA from Hamline University. Their writing has been published in Muzzle Magazine, Up The Staircase Quarterly, Pinwheel Poetry, and is forthcoming in Lunch Ticket and Smoke + Mold: A Journal of Trans & Two-Spirit Nature Writing. Kirkwood is a proud bookseller at Birchbark Books & Native Arts.