Bi Book Club: Barbary Station

By Siobhan Ball

March 28, 2021

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Barbary Station is a story of love, pirates, and murderous AI's set in a high-tech late-capitalist dystopia featuring a diverse cast and interesting questions about morality, society, and the nature of artificial intelligence. It's both a fun, riveting read and a book with serious points to make.

Adda and Iridian are engineers in love, fresh out of university, and ready to start a life together. Unfortunately for them, the hyper-capitalist nightmare they live in means that all but the absolute wealthiest are shit out of luck. Even with their good, sought-after degrees, they're unlikely to be able to live together on the same planet for decades, as they are sent to work all over the solar system to pay off their debts. Luckily for them, there's another option, a life of piracy out in the depths of space, picking over the belongings of those members of the 1% foolish enough to venture past the well-defended shipping lanes of the inner solar system. All they have to do is make it to Barbary Station, a haven for pirates and refugees, where Adda's little brother Pel is waiting for them with an invite to join his crew.

Of course, when they arrive, nothing is as they were promised. Far from having conveyed his Captain's invitation, Pel was under strict orders not to bring them there and with good reason. The station is under the control of a murderous AI that not only keeps people from leaving but regularly tries to exterminate its inhabitants. Fortunately, Adda is a specialist in AI technology, one of the reasons Pel brought her there, and immediately gets to work growing psychoactive mushrooms and setting up a virtual reality tent — tools that will let her interface with and eventually win over or defeat the mind controlling their environment. There's a brilliant life waiting for Adda, Iridian, and Pel out there, just so long as she gets to the AI before it gets them first.

Stearns pulls no punches in this book. People die, often unfairly, and the stark cruelty of extreme late-stage capitalism and its military-industrial complex is on full display. Adda and Pel lost their mother to it at an early age, Iridian is a veteran abandoned by the state that promised to take care of her, and the station's cargo bay is filled with refugees fleeing the brutal suppression of an independence movement, dependent on the generosity of strangers for survival. Piracy, drug cartels, and slavery are only as illegal as convenient at any given time and place, and the system itself is so fundamentally broken that living outside of it is the best and only option for many.

Something Stearns handles well is trauma, both long-term and acute. The pirates and refugees have adapted to living in an ongoing, highly dangerous situation, with a mix of gallows humor, hedonism, and close-knit personal ties. Adda is an anxious over-thinker who feels responsible for everyone, but especially Pel, thanks to the death of their mother when they were children, hours after asking her to watch out for him that day. Pel's trauma, meanwhile, is sharp and fresh, having passed through indentured servitude in what amounts to a high-tech meth lab, to sexual slavery at the hands of a violent woman before he reached the pirates. His perpetual motion, forced cheerfulness, and the work he puts into befriending everyone while appearing as non-threatening as possible are all common traits in survivors seeking safety and trying to avoid thinking about their own pain. The sensitivity with which Stearns approaches writing Pel and his trauma, and the recognition that not only can men be abused by women but that it's neither funny nor pathetic, was especially refreshing as these things are so often fetishized or played for laughs.

Pel is the primary bi character in this novel, and frankly, he's a delight. A casual flirt, his bisexuality is depicted fluidly and naturally, but without any judgment or insinuation that he's untrustworthy or inherently unfaithful because of it. Chaotic and impulsive, he's also sweet-natured and loyal, and the only person harmed by his poor decision-making is himself. While he did lie to Adda and Iridian about the situation on the station, there were reasons he couldn't tell them the truth over a transmission, and if they had known what was really going on, they'd only have headed out there faster. All of which Pel knew about them before making his call.

A scifi scene with a machine in the center being lit with electricity and a figure approaching it
Bigstock/grandfailure

The representation in this book is far from perfect, however. The Captain, a bi, non-binary person of color, is a walking cluster of harmful stereotypes. Duplicitous, callous, and exploitative, even their gender ambiguity is made a part of their inscrutable and untrustworthy nature. It doesn't feel intentional. It's clear from the way Stearns writes that they're meant to be a combination of morally ambiguous and appealing, but the end result is still deeply uncomfortable — especially as there are no other nonbinary characters to act as a foil. Similarly, the fact that Pel's abuser was a woman with facial hair and the only such woman in the book has unfortunate implications given the way both trans women and cis women with facial hair are viewed. Stearns is clearly trying with trans representation but absolutely falls short.

Despite its problems, Barbary Station is an engaging and enjoyable novel, and its normalization of both queerness and specifically bisexuality is something we could all use more of.

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