When I sat down to write Tabula Rasa, I had no argument in mind about genocide, or feminist rage, or the moral obligations of an injured species. I was writing towards a feeling, and I could not have told you what the feeling was at the time.
It took Shoshana Groom’s review for Be About It Press to make me sit down with the feeling and interrogate it.
Her review of the story is close, serious and generous about the writing, and entirely straight about where it lost her. I said as much in the comments and I meant it: for a piece built to be physically and emotionally uncomfortable, having someone sit with the imagery and the politics rather than recoil from the surface is what I had hoped for, and I am most grateful.
Her objection comes in two halves, and I want to answer them both more fully than I could in a comment box.
The first is a craft objection. The story sets up a problem, refugees exploited by the species that took them in, and resolves it the way action cinema resolves things: X is bad, kill X, celebrate. The narrator isn’t distinguished from the alien mass around her, her client is barely a person, and the leap to species-wide extinction is a formula the story hasn’t earned.
The second is political. Seize the Press is an explicitly anticapitalist magazine, and no progressive movement survives without some belief in the goodness of the people in it. If we decide humanity is beyond saving, Groom asks, what is the point of organising it into anything better?
She is right about political and social movements. But the story is not that room. And the narrator has never been counted as a member of any movement, because there has never been one that counted her.
The demand for hope
What Groom is asking for, underneath the craft complaint, is a constructive ending, one that deepens the reader’s understanding of the injustice and moves her towards action. It’s a reasonable thing to want from political fiction.
However, the narrator has no legal status, no state, no citizenship, no recourse. She has a green sigil tattooed under her skin certifying that she is clean and usable. She has a bag of wet wipes and pain shots, a child under a foil blanket who dreams of oceans they have never seen, and a sister auditioning for a porn shoot and calling it integration.
To ask her for hope, or for a story that leaves room for humanity’s goodness, is to ask the most brutalised person in the room to model good conduct for the people who brutalised her. It asks her to look past the laboratories, the men who buy her, the order that keeps her poor, and reassure the rest of us that some humans are probably decent. It is one of the oldest jobs handed to the abject: metabolise what was done to you into something your brutalisers can take away and feel improved by.
I didn’t think she owed us that. So I didn’t write it.
How the machine makes a body purchasable
This is not a claim about human nature. Every institution the narrator encounters treats her body as something to be tested, classified, sold or consumed, but that isn’t the work of a uniquely wicked cast of individuals. Governments open the borders. Laboratories establish the aliens’ biological usefulness. A market develops around their bodies once the labs are finished with them. Patriarchy, xenophobia, scientific racism and capitalism are doing this together, and none of them needs the others’ active cooperation to keep functioning: a client can treat each encounter as a private transaction only because the larger system has already finished the work of turning a refugee into a purchasable object.
One correction: the aliens aren’t lunar, as Groom’s review has it. They’re refugees from a world with three moons. Earth’s moon matters for a different reason. Humans have already marked even that untouched place with the same territorial gesture repeated across the walls and windows in this story — a cock scratched into lunar dust. The refugees arrive to find a species that has extended the compulsion to claim from its streets into space itself. It’s the same gesture the narrator repeats, and reverses, in the story’s last paragraph.
The tattoo is where the story’s machinery is easiest to see. It doesn’t say who she is. It says clean, usable, a warranty and a grading stamp in one. She cannot check the client at all; every particle of risk in the exchange has been moved onto the person being sold. Martha Nussbaum’s essay on objectification separates the word into several distinct things it can mean — treating a person as a tool, as inert, as violable, as ownable — and the one that fits the tattoo best is fungibility: treating someone as a unit rather than a person, on the understanding that any one of her kind will do.
Nancy Fraser draws a distinction that explains the order events happen in. Capitalism doesn’t only buy labour from people free to sell it. A population that can be robbed outright is what makes the ordinary wage bargain look like freedom by comparison. What happens to the narrator in the lab is confiscation. What happens in the car afterwards is a sale. The story is careful to show the first one producing the second.
None of that makes the sex itself the site of the degradation. Juno Mac and Molly Smith’s case, from inside the sex workers’ rights movement, is that what’s unbearable about this kind of work is mostly unbearable about work generally, and what makes it dangerous is the absence of papers, of recourse, of any alternative, not the transaction itself. I wanted the work in the story to read as work: she is skilled, she is bored, she is timing the encounter against her childcare, she withholds something of herself for a second because she wants, once, to keep something back, and then she doesn’t. That is a description of labour under coercion.
The only lever she can reach
Look at who actually gets into the car across the story. Men who use prescription medication, have poor diet, suffer chronic stress, nurse old injuries. Men squirming with shame and calling out to a god of purity while buying twenty minutes in the shadow of a dead paper mill. These are the lower rungs of the machine, not its designers. The people who ran the labs, who wrote the regulation for what colour her tattoo should turn, who opened the borders, none of them get into the car. She cannot reach those people. What she does is kill the ones she can reach, which is a different and sadder thing than killing the guilty.
Her position resembles what Mike Davis calls the informal proletariat; warehoused in settlements, shut out of the formal economy, with none of the strategic leverage associated with organised labour. She has no union, no workplace to occupy, no strike to call. If every alien sex worker in the city stopped tonight, the men would find somewhere else to go by tomorrow. Organising was never on the menu for her. She reaches for the one lever she can actually get her hands on, biological, and the one form of power nobody can confiscate, price or stamp with a sigil. She does not use it because it’s strategically wise, but because it’s all that remains to someone to whom collective action is impossible. Calling it lazy mistakes a portrait of powerlessness for a recommendation about tactics.
Then, in the last paragraph, she preserves the chimney. Two hundred and eighty feet of brick, kept deliberately, as a monument, after a whole story spent erasing cocks from steamed glass and hating them on every wall in the city. The mark of the patriarchy is now hers. She does it with a wry smile, and humour, even.
When the survivor is a monster
Leigh Gilmore has written about what happens to women’s testimony as it travels, about how doubt attaches to certain speakers before they’ve said anything at all, and how unevenly judgement falls on women who bear witness. Being a credible witness isn’t a fact about a person. It’s a status an audience grants, and can withdraw at any time.
The narrator of Tabula Rasa would fail every test for credibility. She isn’t fragile — she’s lethal, and she knows it. She isn’t engaged in a respectable project — she’s soliciting outside a kebab shop. She knows her regulars by heat signature and repeat booking, and the worst of them she’s given a name, Pigman. On top of all that, she isn’t human.
Groom wanted a survivor. I wrote a monster.
Not angry, exactly
Brittney Cooper’s case for Black women’s rage is that it’s a form of clarity, a resource that can be aimed at an injustice and made to do work on it. Sara Ahmed’s feminist killjoy describes the other side of that bargain: the woman who names an injustice and then finds herself made responsible for the discomfort of having named it, so that what gets demanded of her is a manageable version of the anger, rather than an end to whatever caused it.
My narrator manages neither, and I didn’t notice this until Groom’s review sent me back to the page to check. She counts the man’s heartbeats. She notes the inflammation in his shoulder. She resents the time he’s costing her, because there are only so many hours before nine o’clock and somebody else is minding her child until then. She plans the end of a species in roughly the tone of a woman doing an inventory. I’ve come to think that’s worse than fury would have been. Fury, especially righteous fury, is a form of address; it assumes somebody is listening and might yet be convinced. A woman who has stopped being angry with you has stopped expecting anything from you at all.
And then you realise she means you
A woman reading Tabula Rasa is invited to recognise herself in the narrator, not the biology, but the conditions. A body other people believe grants them rights over it. Availability mistaken for consent. Survival treated as evidence that it can’t have been that bad. Being wanted and despised in the same breath, while the men who use you go home afterwards and think of themselves as decent. None of that is alien.
So by the end, the reader may feel some sympathy for her, and at exactly that moment the alien turns round and counts her in with the men. But that’s not fair! I have done nothing wrong! The story has misidentified her because she was on the alien’s side all along. It’s the story’s not all humans moment.
The narrator is not conducting a moral audit. She hasn’t drawn up a list of the men who paid, the scientists who cut, the officials who turn a blind eye to the shanty behind the mill walls, and everyone else who simply looked away. She has experienced humanity as a category, because humanity handled her species as a category from the first quarantine onward, and she returns the compliment exactly.
If the story punished the guilty men and spared everybody else, the reader could close it in comfort, justice served, moral order restored, her identification with the alien retrospectively confirmed as good taste. I didn’t want to restore anything. I wanted the reader who had spent the whole story moving towards the narrator to discover that identifying with somebody gives you no say in what she does next.
Where the criticism lands
Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg have argued that blaming ecological catastrophe on humanity as an undifferentiated species conceals the fact that a small, identifiable minority made the decisions that damaged the environment and took the profits of that damage while most people had no say in any of it, and that species-level guilt amounts to an amnesty for the few, laundering responsibility by spreading it evenly across everyone. We, collectively, need to do more for the environment, even though it is the private jets used by the super-rich which do more damage in an afternoon than a small family car does in a year.
Tabula Rasa does exactly the thing Malm and Hornborg warn against. The story is minutely attentive to class while describing the narrator’s life, then drops class entirely at the moment of judgement. Her verdict falls with the same weight on the man in the expensive car as on every human being who could never have afforded to be in it.
That’s a real cost to the story’s politics.
There’s a version of this that cuts the other way. Mark Fisher opens Capitalist Realism with a line he credits to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek: that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Groom’s objection amounts to saying my story would sooner exterminate a species than picture the arrangement changing. She’s right. That is what it does. But I’d ask what it means that this was the ending which felt inevitable to write, and, judging by her reaction, familiar enough to be called a formula. If the ending is a cliché, the cliché is a symptom, and I’m more interested in a story that exhibits the symptom than one pretending to have been cured of it.
Sianne Ngai has written about the minor, unglamorous feelings — irritation, envy, disgust — that produce no release and authorise no action, and about art turning to them as a way of examining its own stuck position in a world that tolerates art precisely because it poses no threat. A story that leaves you with an ugly feeling and nowhere to put it hasn’t malfunctioned; it’s told you something true about its situation, and about yours. Revenge fiction has always licensed an excess that real justice cannot and should not permit. It lets rage be disproportionate, for one page, in a made-up world, at no cost to anyone. Horror is where that permission lives, and I wanted the reader to feel it. For one moment, I wanted her to think: yes, kill the bastards.
Where that leaves us
Groom wanted a piece of fiction that deepens understanding and moves the reader to act, and she found instead one that ends in an atrocity and doesn’t apologise for it. That’s an accurate account of the story, not a misreading of it.
Progressive fiction can imagine coalitions and better worlds. It can also make room for the rage of people excluded from those possibilities, and refuse the optimism that keeps getting asked of them. I refused to put humanity back at the centre in the last paragraph. I refused to make the alien responsible for reassuring us that we deserve another chance. And I refused to let a female-coded figure who has spent an entire story being bought acquire power only on the condition that she use it in a way we’d find palatable.
I wanted you to recognise yourself in her. I wanted you to be angry on her behalf. I wanted, for one dangerous second, for you to root for the monster.
And then I wanted you to understand that to the monster, you are the monster.
The tortured alien doesn’t owe you a way forward. That is the point. If it were otherwise, the whole thing would be a lie told to make us feel better about the machine, and there are enough of those already.
Works cited
Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press, 2017.
Cooper, Brittney. Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower. St Martin’s Press, 2018.
Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. Verso, 2006.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books, 2009.
Fraser, Nancy. “Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography: From Exploitation to Expropriation: Historic Geographies of Racialized Capitalism.” Economic Geography 94, no. 1 (2018): 1–17.
Gilmore, Leigh. Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives. Columbia University Press, 2017.
Groom, Shoshana. “Review: ‘Tabula Rasa,’ by Amy Kitcher.” Be About It Press, 7 August 2026.
Mac, Juno, and Molly Smith. Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights. Verso, 2018.
Malm, Andreas, and Alf Hornborg. “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative.” The Anthropocene Review 1, no. 1 (2014): 62–69.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard University Press, 2005.
Nussbaum, Martha C. “Objectification.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 24, no. 4 (1995): 249–291.