A review by expendablemudge
Benjamin 2073 by Rjurik Davidson

4.0

Back in the Rehab Department Office, I forced myself...to look at Grimley. You’d have thought with a name like that, he’d have stayed out of bureaucracy, but maybe the name had imprinted some deep unconscious drive within him. Bureaucrats. Once we called them politicians, but now politics has dissolved into everyone. Without corporations, we aren’t obsessed with growth rates and profit any longer. We all make the policies—“economic democracy,” it was called in the beginning. Now it’s just called “the policies,” usually accompanied by a yawn. We elect those people boring enough to do the admin for our views. They were deliberately and ironically called “bureaucrats,” to remind them of just what they were. It didn’t seem to make much difference. They still fucked up the work of anyone like me trying to actually fulfil a vision.

What should we do with people who don't fit? The ones who don't, can't, certainly won't, see the world in the hues most find so comforting? It's like the entire species has red/green/blue light sensors and the misfits have sixteen different ones like mantis shrimp. Ellie, the first-person narrator of this genius-gone-wild tale, sees thylacines in the wilds of Tasmania where most people see the beauties of renewed nature. (It's fiction, so in 2073, Humanity has killed corporations, smashed political systems that reward planetary-scale rapine, and begun to live in a low-impact way. I'll be dead, thank goodness, so I won't be there among the neoVictorian hellscape of Manchester II and New Pittsburgh as the .01% suck on fresh oxygen tanks as decent, worthwhile people die at 35.)

In this lovely fever dream, Ellie's been given resources to work on reintroducing the thylacine, extinct since 1936, into Tasmania's wilds. She's limited her world to the achievement of this goal. The miserable childhood stuck in an exoskeleton because her mother's adventure-seeking selfishness exposed her to a teratogenic substance. The loss of her innocence when a kindly motivated friend said of the boy who wouldn't be her boyfriend, "Look at him. Now look at you." The death of the grandmother whose life was over long before she died: “It’s just past my time. I’m all out of place.” All these pressure her to achieve...something...something far grander than a mere life restoring the raped Earth's clothes to some kind of order: Revive something our careless, heedless, really quite stupid actions fumblingly killed.

But the course of obsession is never easy. Her political boss, Bureaucrat Grimley, cuts her funding because who actually cares about this animal dead for 137 years? There are ripped seams to mend, scratched limbs to bathe and heal, all over Tasmania. Thien (at times the copyeditor went to sleep and let "Tien" appear, which irked me) is her henchrat, the gayboy who loves the crippled girl for her mind (there's a trope we could let die without losing much), finally tells Ellie some home truths: Get out. Go live your life. We're not going to succeed. Some battles can't be won.

Tell that to the spearing, smashing mantis shrimp, Thien. Ellie is a misfit and, beautifully, that means she gives not a single fuck what stands in her way. She will beat it or slice it, but she *will* move beyond that obstacle, the next, and the one after that.

The world, it turns out, needs that person as much in 2073 as in 1609 or 1905. This is a sentimental, sometimes inelegant, but readable and even occasionally persuasive story of what the world needs from its junk-drawer people, the ones whose shapes, sizes, or dubious utility don't earn them a proud, sculpturally fitted slot in the easy-to-reach places.