PHOENIX CAFE by Gwyneth Jones (BOOK REVIEW)
“It’s simply that I’m trying to understand them this time, instead of looting. I want to feel their pain, their whole culture of grief and fear.”
“Be reasonable, Catherine. You’ve got to be reasonable in trade, even when you’re dealing with a cussed old sod like the Almighty. We’re pirates, we came here to rob these people. We’re criminals. God is not on our side. What did you expect? A happy ending?”
Phoenix Café (1997) is the final volume in Gwyneth Jones’ Aleutian trilogy. Set two hundred years after North Wind (1994) and three hundred years after the Aleutians originally landing in White Queen (1991), Phoenix Café explores the final years of the Aleutian colonisation of Earth, examining how the contact between the Aleutians and the humans has changed both peoples irrevocably. At the end of North Wind, despite Bella and Sid’s best efforts, the rediscovered Buonarotti device ends up in the hands of the Aleutians. Clavel, the Aleutian who initiated first contact and whose rape of human journalist Johnny Guglioli precipitated the events leading to the anti-alien extremist group White Queen attempting to sabotage the Aleutian ship, dies demonstrating that Buonarotti’s FTL drive is safe for Aleutians to use, but the genius scientist’s recorded notes warn that humans cannot use the device without experiencing psychosis, due to the different ways that humans and Aleutians perceive the world. In the intervening years between Clavel’s death and the start of Phoenix Café, humans and Aleutians have been collaborating on finessing the Buonarotti device, so that the Aleutians can use it to travel back to their home planet, leaving the device with the humans so they can work on altering it for human use so humanity can also travel the cosmos. The work is now finally nearing completion, and both humans and Aleutians are thinking about the day when the aliens will finally go home. In the meantime, the Gender Wars have raged on, with humanity dividing into the rival factions of the wealth-hoarding Traditionalists and the more progressive Reformists.
Phoenix Café largely focuses on the perspective of Catherine. Whilst Bella in North Wind was an Aleutian grown from cells taken from Johnny Guglioli shortly before his execution, Catherine is Clavel the Aleutian reborn and reengineered as a human woman. The lived experience of being a human finally helps Catherine understand humanity, and the various horrendous misunderstandings and misinterpretations that have coloured human/Aleutian interaction from the start, in a way that Clavel as an Aleutian never could. As Sid says in North Wind, “race is bullshit and culture is everything,” and it is Catherine’s interactions with her human friends that she makes while living in a transformed Paris that teach her the most about humanity. She meets Misha Connelly, the charismatic human son of a Traditionalist game keeper, and an individual who is as damaged by the fallout from the Aleutian/human conflict as she is. Misha and Catherine enter into an abusive relationship, and Misha inducts her into the Phoenix Café, where a group of like-minded young human intellectuals, a mixture of men, women and halfcastes, Traditionalists and Reformers, are planning a renaissance of human culture once the aliens are gone. Misha and his friends quickly figure out Catherine’s identity as a human/Aleutian hybrid, and she is brought into their world of creative subterfuge and VR gaming. However, the Phoenix Café revolutionaries have a far more audacious plan in mind than Catherine can ever guess.
If North Wind used the hybrid figure of Bella to explore how deeply the humans misunderstood the Aleutians, then Phoenix Café uses the inverse hybrid of Catherine to explore how deeply the Aleutians have misunderstood humanity. Catherine is shaped by the guilt that she feels for raping Johnny and how the White Queen sabotage has shaped human/Aleutian relationships for the worse, and part of her reincarnating herself as a human woman is to punish herself, something that is exacerbated by her abusive relationship with Misha. The Aleutians, for all that they may have meant no real harm to humanity beyond the tricksterism involved in turning a quick profit, have exacerbated the strains in human society leading to all out war. Catherine’s incarnation as human also helps her understand that any contact between two peoples goes both ways – the Aleutians have been profoundly changed by their contact with humanity as much as humanity has.
The toxic effects of the Gender Wars are a prime example of how human society has been disrupted by the Aleutians. Over the three hundred years of Aleutian occupation, the conflict has mutated beyond women and people of the third world demanding better treatment on the women’s side, and the men’s side of the first world entrenched wealthy patriarchy holding on to their wealth. Jones explores how policing the boundaries of traditional gender values can ossify into outright fascism. The Traditionalists are desperately trying to preserve their old world wealth, while their fear and hatred of women, Aleutians, halfcastes and anyone Other has led to them maintaining themselves through clones of the patriarchal line, relegating their women to being genetically engineered sex toys. The Reformists in contrast are an assemblage of people – men, women, disgruntled engineered sex toys, halfcastes, and gender nonbinary, who are struggling against the Traditionalist oppression. The Aleutians themselves point out how humanity frequently uses sexual violence as a tool of conquest, which again throws Clavel’s rape of Johnny in another light:
“We’ve always found their obsession with sex grotesque. That’s how we felt before the War broke out, when we thought of it as identical with their lying down. Which it isn’t. It’s the engine of territorial expansion, which has become their engine of destruction.”
This violent, possessive side of patriarchy and colonialism has reached its zenith in the fascist mindset of the Traditionalists, which culminates with their deranged plot to use Aleutian superweapons to wipe out their enemies, a move so profoundly stupid and destructive it baffles both Aleutians and humans alike.
As Sid predicted at the end of North Wind, it is VR gaming that changes humanity enough that they too can use the Buonarotti device to reach the stars. VR gaming places the user in a neurotic relationship with reality, one that is closer to the Aleutian understanding of a connected WorldSelf in which we operate as part of a larger ecosystem. The revolutionaries of the Phoenix Café understand this profoundly, that they are living in a postmodern, post-real world in which reality itself is up for grabs, in which humanity can be redesigned in a way that is less destructive than the previous patriarchal system of ownership. In this way, the Aleutian trilogy ends with humanity finally getting one over the Aleutians, not because of human exceptionalism, but rather because they see the end of the Aleutian era as an opportunity to embrace new posthuman ways of being.