Content warning: This review of Emma Bull’s Bone Dance contains sexual and physical abuse. There’s also a few spoilers.
Bone Dance starts in a city gripped by a single man with a monopoly on energy. Sparrow, our narrator, is what I’d call a Nostalgist. They find old curiosities and sell them to people who can afford to collect remnants of the past in a future that only serves the wealthy and privileged.
Happiness, in the land of Deals, is measured on a sliding scale. What makes you happy? A long white silent car with smoked-glass windows, with a chauffeur and a stocked bar and two beautiful objects of desire in the back seat? An apartment in a nice part of town? A kinder lover? A place to stand that’s out of the wind? A brief cessation of pain? It depends on what you have at the moment I ask that question, and what you don’t have. Wait a little, just a little. The scale will slide again.
Horsemen of the Cyberpunk Apocalypse
After a big transaction, Sparrow remembers nothing of the night before, waking up with a killer headache. Turns out it isn’t booze. A horseman took his/her body for their own, and now powerful forces are coming for Sparrow. It’s harrowing and heavy material, and not for the faint of heart.
Death, the Sun, the Lovers. Lots of major arcana. Your future’s controlled by others. There’s powerful people playing with it. You’re gonna have to fight to get it back…this is the country of truth. There the Devil, the Star, the Tower. In this country of truth, where your spirit lives, your life still isn’t your own. Other stronger spirits, or maybe gods–they’ve got the say in what happens to you.
I say “them” because, in this young adult cyberpunk novel, fantasy elements are bolted on, often to great effect. The story goes that years back these horsemen were created by the government to be perfect weapons.
The horsemen can infiltrate anyone’s mind, pushing their consciousness. Sometimes, they can push it down long enough to kill them. They made political changes, shaped the future, engaged in social engineering and toppled empires from the inside. But their lives have also cultivated a kind of insanity within them.
The Big Bang. A horseman turned a key and detonated a nuclear bomb, ushering in a dystopia.
No Quest for Personal History and Not Gender Specific
This same government also created androgynous bodies supposedly devoid of thought. These bodies were to be used by the horsemen. One of the main points of tension is the origin of Sparrow, however, because bodies such as theirs are meant to be empty and waiting. They pass for male or female, generally depending on the people they’re around at the time. Sparrow leveraged this to fade into the background and make a life in the shadows. They don’t really have close friends. Ironically, their life is in their media collection, which is massive and references pop culture from before the book was made.
This past is the only thing they care about. Not their own past but the history of others.
Her skin was translucent pale, the complexion of the rich. Money made an excellent sunblock.
But that anonymity is no longer an option once they get embroiled in a plot that puts them at a crossroads with the horsemen.
As the story unfolds, we learn about Sparrow as they painfully learn about themselves. Cyberpunk often puts the marginalized on display. But this time, it’s fully embodied in Sparrow. Performing gender and unfair power dynamics are placed front and center in Bone Dance.
The origin of my body and my mind didn’t matter. I, the part of me that learned, that called on my memories, that knew I’d pulled a plant like this before, that had moved this hand to do it, was fifteen years old and innocent of evil or good. Neutral. From here forward, I was blank tape; what would be recorded there, and when, and why, was up to me.
Cyberpunk Can be Spiritual
A major component to the fantasy elements in Bone Dance is Voodoo. The perception of nature parallels the discovery Sparrow goes through as they have to confront their past and rely on others for help in a way they’ve never allowed themselves to do before. Humanity’s view on supernatural forces, specifically in terms of Tarot and its subjectivity, is similarly paralleled. The major chapters are even introduced with tarot cards. But those answers rely on an interpretation which is flawed for the reader (at least, in my own experience) because of the power dynamics we’ve created with capitalism. So, this information often acts as misinformation.
From the lip of the Ravine I could see the Deeps on the other side, hard gray and brown brick on wood on the nearest structures, shading further in to rose, bronze, black pearl, and verdigris in spires of stone, metals, and brilliant glass. The empress of it all, rising from the center, was Ego, the tallest building in the City, whose reflective flanks had no color of their own, but worse the sky instead–relentless, cloudless blue today. The towers of the Deeps, rising in angles or curves, were made more poignant by the occasional shattered forms of their ruined kin.
Proper Prose and Progressivism
Bone Dance is also filled with some of the best prose I’ve read. At its heart is a character that is unique and intersectional. It feels like the handling around gender identity is done well, though I can’t speak to that much. I’m not one for fantasy usually, but this, as with other genre mashups I’ve read lately, features some of the very best work in cyberpunk I’ve consumed. Published in 1991, this is an interesting and unusually progressive example of intersectional cyberpunk from that time period. It discards some of the problems in the first wave and was released two years before it was declared dead. Of course, I’m talking about Snow Crash.
While Sparrow discovers themself, they also have to confront their place in the world via these naturalist themes because their body doesn’t fit the societal norms. This is tethered to the notion around popular spirituality being polluted by the environment we’ve created. How can we really have a grip on a truth that might be held in spirituality and spiritualism when our reality is rooted in capitalistic notions that conflict with and destroy nature? It’s also about trauma and how Sparrow chooses to process theirs as well as the marks it forever leaves under the skin.
I don’t trust memory, anyway. Why should I? Memories, however undependable, ought to be the stuff on the sand when the tides of experience recedes. As long as they’re part of that process, there’s something valid about them, something that ties them to real life.
Favorite Quotes
Suddenly I could imagine all the things my body might do when I wasn’t there to stop it and I felt so vile they might as well have happened. Maybe they had; they just hadn’t left marks. I thought about a future full of blank spaces, and I knew I couldn’t bear it. If that was the future, I had to escape it.
From the lip of the Ravine I could see the Deeps on the other side, hard gray and brown brick on wood on the nearest structures, shading further in to rose, bronze, black pearl, and verdigris in spires of stone, metals, and brilliant glass. The empress of it all, rising from the center, was Ego, the tallest building in the City, whose reflective flanks had no color of their own, but worse the sky instead–relentless, cloudless blue today. The towers of the Deeps, rising in angles or curves, were made more poignant by the occasional shattered forms of their ruined kin.
Portions of the article above previously appeared on the website, Consuming Cyberpunk. They appear here with permission of their original author.
