It’s bad enough that I thought this would be a good book and it turned out to be a total dud. But even worse than that is the fact that I told my writing Discord friends about the book, and several of them decided to join me and my spouse in reading it. So I brought a handful of people along on the terrible journey that was Humans by Surekha Davies, and the only reason any of us finished it was Book Bingo.
This should have been a really cool book. It’s about the history of monster-making! I was really looking forward to what I suspected to be an analysis of what the different kinds of monsters we’ve created over history said about our fears and beliefs. Instead, I got very little discussion about mythological and fictional monsters, and a whole lot about othering of our fellow humans.
A discussion of what sort of humans we declare “monsters” and how we then use their traits to create fictional monsters, or how we imbue those humans with the traits of mythic and fictional monsters, could have been really interesting.
The problem is that Davies takes such a broad view of what “monster” really means and basically says that any person who is dehumanized is essentially a monster. To me, this seemed to water down both the concept of monster and the concept of dehumanization. I think dehumanization takes many forms — people can be treated like monsters, yes, but they can also be treated like animals and objects, or even like they simply don’t exist.
It really felt like the author set out to start researching a book on our history of monster-making, found a whole bunch of interesting research, and decided to shove it all into the book regardless of how tenuous its connection to monstrosity really was. When she does decide to talk about a mythic or fictional monster, she often describes most if not all of the plot of the piece of media (for example, the movie Alien or Data’s story arc in Star Trek: The Next Generation) and draws really weird conclusions about it.
Humans is just all over the place. I’d listen to a chapter and wonder what the point was, and how the author managed to jump from Idea A to Idea B.
Unfortunately, it’s not just that the book is disjointed and seems unsure of its own presence. While at times she talks about the dehumanization and thus monstrification (her word, she uses it SO MUCH) of people with disabilities and body differences, Davies seems to display a fair amount of ableism at times.
This is perhaps most obvious when she is contrasting Data, an android, a character who she sees as good, with The Borg, cyborgs, a culture that she sees as bad. She asks whether people give up their humanity when they replace biological parts with mechanical — ignoring the fact that we have human beings alive today who have prosthetics and other technological devices that either replace missing parts or support/replace the function of ailing parts (such as a pacemaker or insulin pump). The science fiction genre is also full of characters with enhancements, other than The Borg, that we could have looked at as a counter-argument against the idea that enhancement detracts from our humanity.
Likewise, while I share the author’s dislike of generative AI, there’s a certain amount of ableism in how she discusses that as well, too. Drawing on the idea that AI will make it so we no longer have to work and can just “do nothing” she looks at the humans in Wall-E, floating along in chaise longues with their every need met. She suggests that DOING and CREATING are key to being human, ignoring the fact that there are people who due chronic illness, burnout, disability, etc may be temporarily or permanently unable to really do much at all, even express themselves creatively. This hues dangerously close to that disgusting claim that autistic people don’t contribute to society (something something never write a poem something something). We don’t have to contribute to society to be human.
This book was just so incredibly disappointing. I hope that by writing this review, I can make up for the fact that I accidentally convinced friends to read it by expecting it to be so much cooler than it was.
CWs and TWs: There’s a lot of discussion of the dehumanizing treatment of people with disabilities and body differences and people of color, including the trans-Atlantic slave trade. When quoting historic accounts, there are uses of dated and harmful language for people of color, people with body differences (especially dwarfism), and intersex people. There’s also discussion of the Holocaust and current anti-trans movement. Just lots of reminders of the ways people can be unpleasant to each other. Also lots of spoilers for media, most of it over a decade old.
Source and Format: I borrowed the audiobook from Seattle Public Library which had a weirdly large number of copies. Maybe they had/have an event planned with the author or it was a book club pick or something.
Reading Challenge Prompts
SAL/SPL/KCLS: Buddy Read. I was so proud of myself for getting three friends to read this alongside me and my spouse, rather than just claiming a book that the two of us read for a buddy read. I really wish it had been a better book but at least we had fun complaining about it, dissecting it, and imagining the better book it could have been.
Reading Challenge Progress
Nook & Cranny (Card 1): 10 of 25, no bingos.
Nook & Cranny (Card 2): 14 of 25, 1 bingo.
Book Riot: 12 of 25.
Physical TBR: 6 of 12.
World of Whimm: 17 of 24, 2 bingos.
SAL/SPL/KCLS: 7 of 23, no bingos.