Skinship

Bearing the final remnants of humanity and its genetic archive, the last Skinship to leave a dying, distant-future Earth closes in on the Dragonhead Nebula and the prospect planet that offers resurrection. With Applewhite, the First Navigator, apparently in the process of psychic collapse, a conspiracy emerges to murder him before he can compromise the mission or destroy the ship. Resisting this conspiracy is Monamy, a nonhuman Archivist who alone understands the nature of Applewhite’s breakdown. Inside the uncanny ship, chilling violence and grotesque forms break out. Meanwhile, 1,500 years after the abandonment of the planet, the last man on Earth struggles to survive and, somehow, escape.

Cinematic and intimate, James Reich’s latest novel evokes a yearning for the future evolving into panic, and the contradictions of nostalgia for forgotten things. Like Silent Running and The Man Who Fell to Earth before it, Skinship penetrates the loneliness of an ecological crisis.

Skinship is currently available for PREORDER and can be downloaded via NetGalley.

JAMES REICH is the author of a quartet of psy-fi titles with Anti-Oedipus Press that include Skinship, The Song My Enemies Sing, Soft Invasions, and Mistah Kurtz! A Prelude to Heart of Darkness. He is also the author of Wilhelm Reich versus The Flying Saucers: An American Tragedy (Punctum Books) as well as The Moth for the Star (7.13 Books) and two novels from Soft Skull Press, Bombshell and I, Judas. His account of innovations in British science fiction is published by Bloomsbury in its “Decades” series, The 1960s, and he was an early contributor to editions of Deep Ends: The J.G. Ballard Anthology. Reich’s work has appeared in Literary Hub, The Brooklyn Rail, CrimeReads, Salon, SPIN Magazine, The Huffington Post, American Book Review, The Rumpus, International Times, Sensitive Skin, and many others. He holds an M.A. in Ecopsychology from Naropa University and is completing a Ph.D. in Psychology with the California Institute of Integral Studies. Born in England in 1971, Reich has lived in New Mexico since 2009.

"James Reich is a literary auteur in the strictest sense. Nobody writes like him." —D. HARLAN WILSON

"Life aboard the skinship—named for the exotic material that contains and expands it during the travels—is shown through the eyes of Monamy, Applewhite, and a handful of human passengers. The nonhuman crew are responsible for the humans but are detached from their charges by their very nature, resulting in an unsettling relationship. The prose becomes almost eerie in its depictions of the inhuman crew and their ultimate goal of 'a planet overgrown with white plastic, the inhabitants of the skinship drowning, reaching from the wax-like figurines from Dante, trapped in the apocalypse of artifice.' It is intimate, too, as when it focuses on Applewhite or Monamy’s thoughts to explain the surreal ship setting, the Printers, and to consider whether humans can thrive among the stars. Skinship combines body horror with ecological horror as human beings attempt to survive in an unforgiving universe aboard an ever-evolving ship crewed by automatons." —FOREWORD REVIEWS

"Like much of the best speculative fiction, Skinship juggles a lot of interesting ideas: the end of the world and our legacy in the universe, inventive body horror, innovative technologies, backdrops that are alien but also eerily familiar at the same time, all wrapped up in a pastiche of intrigue and mystery. James Reich handles them all masterfully while maintaining a melancholy that feels lived in and crafting characters of great depth and complexity. There are no wasted words, no nagging exposition, and no stereotypes to do the heavy lifting. There are no easy outs in the way Reich brandishes his language and the story always keeps you guessing what will unfold next." —WE THE HALLOWED