The Trump era-the modern GOP in America-is beyond satire. By showing the absurdity, you critique the original concept. In satire, you have to push things to the point of absurdity. The problem was living in a historical moment that is beyond satire. I started to realize that not talking about the invisible things was the biggest thing that was happening. Originally, I wanted to get to the moon and see what would happen. Where did the idea for New Roanoke come from? “You don’t want to be the one person who starts clapping a half a beat early,” he insists. While Invisible Things sounds an alarm about the human condition, he also jokes that it’s no good to be a prophet. Johnson-a professor and comic book author and television writer, as well as a novelist-has a deep passion for storytelling fused with serious, occasionally irreverent, social observations. A resistance party struggles with infighting and strives for purity. There, the crew’s leader aligns with the oppressor class. The ship is pulled to New Roanoke, an autocratic city on a moon of Jupiter populated by humans who believe they have been kidnapped by aliens and their descendants born in captivity. The opening scenes are told from the point of view of a Blindian sociologist studying the group dynamics of astronauts on a cryoship. It displaces readers from the familiar, traveling into the future to confront the absurdity of our politics.
Like Pym and Loving Day, Johnson’s earlier novels, Invisible Things is intellectually sharp, yet also tender. Errors in our code end up becoming exacerbated over time.” The way we deal with things like environmental catastrophe is not unique to that.
“The way we deal with race is not unique to race. I’m interested in the limitations we have as a species,” Mat Johnson says of his fifth novel, the astute allegory Invisible Things.
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