EMPATHY by Hoa Pham (BOOK REVIEW)
“We have always been we. Then they forced us to become you and I.”
“What is free will? Do we honestly have free will when we live in a society influenced by others? Empathy just amplifies what is there.”
Empathy (2022) is an exciting and incisive work of near-future speculative fiction from Australian-Veitnamese author Hoa Pham. It is one of the first books published by Gold SF, an imprint of Goldsmiths Press that specialises in feminist speculative fiction, filling the gap left by the great Women’s Press SF series. If Empathy is anything to go by, Gold SF are living up to that ambitious goal with aplomb. Pham expertly explores the horrifying implications of biomedical research shackled to corporate money and sheered of any ethical considerations, by showing us the everyday lived realities of her characters who inhabit this world. Involving a powerful perception altering drug and clandestine research on human clones, Empathy questions the extent to which any of us have free will, especially in an era in which mass surveillance combines with corporate and government interests. The novel has hints of J. G. Ballard, George Orwell and Philip K. Dick, whilst retaining Pham’s own original voice and perspective. It is seductively and immediately written, all its paranoia contained under the surface, in a way that gets under the reader’s skin and stays there.
My is a young woman of Vietnamese descent living in Berlin, a university student who spends her time partying with her friends when she’s not working part time at a pho restaurant while her mother cleans offices at the CHESS chemical factory. My meets the handsome and mysterious Truong, who introduces her to the new street drug that everyone’s talking about – empathy. It makes the users feel what those around them are feeling, and has taken off in Berlin as the hippest new party drug. At first My is enthralled by its seductive power and glorious high, but when she comes down, she begins having difficulty determining what is real. This extends beyond her romantic feelings towards Truong, and to the nature of reality itself. Truong thinks CHESS is experimenting with a new, more powerful strain of empathy, and asks My to perform industrial espionage for him. This subtle act of deception is the start of My’s world unravelling. Is Truong working for the Vietnamese government, is her mother secretly an ex-Stasi agent? Or does empathy have nastier side-effects than its pushers and manufacturers admit?
Meanwhile in Hanoi, Vuong is one of five clones, or multiples, created by researchers at CHESS so they have an identical set for biomedical research purposes. The clones were separated as children, now at the age of 25, Geraldine is dying of cancer in Australia, Lian has murdered her foster father after being made to eat meat, and Giang and Khanh were brought up as twins in New Zealand, while Vuong works in CHESS’s research department under the watchful eye of her handler Evelyn. When the twins are brought back together, the strength of their connection surpasses their wildest imagination, as does the complex web of bureaucracy and deceit that CHESS has used to manipulate and control them. The multiples go on the run, escaping to Berlin, where they hook up with My and discover that CHESS has used the research on them to create empathy, and may have even more sinister intentions.
Empathy paints a detailed world of a believable near-future society shaped by the forces of corporate interests allied to unethical biomedical research, surveillance and fake news. Pham does this without exposition, by showing us the lived reality of her characters. The novel is told from the viewpoints of My and Vuong, cleverly comparing and contrasting the limited freedom My has as a citizen of modern Berlin with Vuong’s explicitly curtailed and monitored existence under the control of CHESS. Is CHESS planning to flood the streets with empathy in order to make the population more malleable and easier to control? In a world wracked by the violence of regular neo-Nazi street riots and anti-science demonstrations, it’s not hard to see this as a seductive option. Isn’t empathy, the respect for others and the ability to see things from their point of view, a good thing anyway? Does it matter if it’s artificially induced? Pham’s great trick in this novel is to make CHESS’s perspective seem almost reasonable. The characters don’t feel like they’re living in a dystopia. However the clue is in the name – CHESS sees individual humans as pawns on a board to achieve their own particular aims, and have no scruples about who gets hurt or damaged in the process. Vuong and her fellow multiples are expensive assets, cared for because of the research interests they represent, rather than because they should be afforded human rights. Similarly, the consent of the citizens of Berlin and Hanoi where CHESS are rolling out their empathy experiment are simply pieces to be manipulated to achieve an end. Pham reminds us pertinently that the means never justifies the end, that one cannot use good intentions to excuse abuse of human rights in favour of corporate interests. This is hammered home particularly effectively in the novel’s surprising final act.
Across its intensely character-focused narrative, Empathy engages with big ideas at the same time as telling a moving queer love story of two characters trapped by their circumstances wrenching some kind of love and freedom from the forces that control them. The humanity of Pham’s characters shines through, particularly in the slow-burn romance between My and Vuong. Though the systemic forces of capitalism and the myriad tentacles of CHESS prove unescapable, Pham offers hope that despite the horrors of the systems we are trapped in, people can find love and meaning in their lives. Love may not be able to topple corporate empires, but it might just allow us to imagine worlds we can live in.