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strangehorizons_feed Mar. 23rd, 2026 08:59 am)
Ilana Masad’s Beings overlaps three stories, genres, and narrators in each chapter. Readers who love literary puzzles can latch on to so many links between the stories: connections in chapter headings, crossover characters, contrasting narrative points of view that form bridges between characters across time; sensitive readers will put the book down thinking about our responsibility to understand where truth can diverge from fact and how belief or disbelief in either has consequences. All this in a novelistic triptych that’s beautifully written and a fun read.
In every chapter is an episode following a modern-day protagonist, “the Archivist,” a recluse who can’t remember anything relating to their childhood encounter with a spaceship. The other narratives in the novel are subjects of the Archivist’s research. One is the story of Betty and Barney Hill, a real-life couple who claimed to be abducted by aliens in the 1960s. The other is a semi-epistolary, queer bildungsroman of a lesbian SF writer, Phyllis Egerton, also in the 1960s. Science fiction, historical fiction, found fiction, and epistolary fiction; multiple narrators with multiple narrative points of view: Masad isn’t afraid of merging styles and genres. In a less meticulous writer’s hands, that could make for messy reading. But Masad navigates between the narratives deftly and with clear intent, showing how these characters, who never meet face to face, still manage to support each other.
The Archivist is central to the novel. It’s a great piece of ironic characterization to have a character who’s made a profession of preserving historical documents but who can’t remember anything of a well-documented piece of their own childhood:
On their way back to the apartment, swaying with the movement of the train, their spine curves and their head droops, their body echoing the question mark filling their mind. Why don’t they remember that interview? Why don’t they remember any of it? (p. 16)
With the Archivist, there’s a physicality to their interior life. Their body expresses their feelings and thoughts more than their words. Why? Perhaps because it reinforces the idea that English doesn’t have an adequate vocabulary to describe their gender and, with little faith in language, they only trust their body to convey their thoughts. Or it could be the simple fact that the Archivist doesn’t have anybody to talk to. They have no close friends; they rarely interact with their colleagues; and they avoid contact with their mother.
In fact, at the beginning of the book their most intimate physical moment is when they take the train to work.
It is a blessing, this crush, the irate and hurried sleepiness of the general public preventing their body from being the subject of glares, assessments, confusion, or the raised eyebrows of recognition. Normally, this is also when they most vividly come up against the musky, damp, buzzing reality of other people. It’s the most they’re touched by others. But the scent of coffee on the neighbor’s breath and her golden-brown eyes meeting theirs with ease stick with them today. To be looked at, to be seen, however fleetingly, is to exist. (pp. 23-4)
This is an experience any queer reader can instinctually recognize: the fear of recognition alongside the need for it. Few people would consider the crush of commuters on a train a “blessing.” But the desperate are an exception, those for whom the most human touch they receive is in that cramped space. Only here, where most of their body is hidden in the press of an overpacked train, is the blessing of being seen as uncomplicated. Hanging over the lovely warmth of the coffee-drinking neighbor’s glance is the promise that it will end once they disembark the train and the Archivist will again be “the subject of glares, assessments, confusion, or the raised eyebrows of recognition.” To be seen may be to exist. But to be visibly queer is to exist with the knowledge that recognition can lead to judgement, rejection, and violence.
Perhaps that is the reason the Archivist is unable to remember the child version of themself they see in an old news report about a spaceship sighting: They didn’t even remember the clipping existed until a filmmaker contacted them wanting to do a documentary on alien sightings. But now they’re confronted with an image that they don’t recognize. Whether this selective amnesia is their body acting in self-preservation or the result of alien influence, they must now confront it. It’s time for action. And what, fellow readers, is a more exciting way to face this extraterrestrial, existential crisis than through archival research?
Yes, the quiet work of rummaging through crates, organizing letters, and sifting through computer files is infinitely rewarding; but it doesn’t make for much of a story and Masad doesn’t subject us to it. Instead, the Archivist presents us with their research, telling us their subjects’ histories and, in doing so, becoming a part of them. The search through the archives of their childhood memories and their opening up to the outside world become intimately linked with Phyllis Egerton’s tale of self-acceptance through SF, and with the Hills’ journey of self-discovery through alien abduction.
The parallels between the Archivist’s story and Phyllis Egerton’s portrait of the SF author as a young lesbian are perhaps the most obvious. Phyllis is an aspiring writer who runs away to Boston after high school in order to escape her homophobic mother. It’s the 1960s and she gets work at a newspaper without having to prove any credentials. She writes in the evening, has a few disastrous dates with men, and goes to a psychiatrist for conversion therapy. After realizing that therapy can’t make her straight, she discovers Boston’s underground lesbian scene.
On one hand, Phyllis’s sections tell a classic story of societal and state-approved oppression of queer Americans, a reminder that in the ’60s and ’70s no meeting point was safe from police raids. Violence against queer people went unpunished. Society made no distinction between sexuality and gender expression. And coming out would often mean the end of a career. Still, within a homophobic society, we see expressions of joy and love as well as signs of hope, even in the homophobes.
But this isn’t the kind of story in which the heroine ends up at the Compton’s Cafeteria or Stonewall Inn riots. While those events are in the background, Phyllis’s story is also one of trying to be seen. This comes across in form as well as content. Her story begins right after running away to Boston and it’s narrated in the form of letters to Rosa, a friend with whom she had a high-school romance. But, as Phyllis’s letters to Rosa show a journey of self-acceptance, they also show tension and rejection:
Dear Rosa,
Until you tell me otherwise, I’ll keep writing, even if you don’t respond. You sent such a short letter from Sacramento, and you didn’t respond to the two I sent in reply, but the letters haven’t been returned to sender, so they seem to have arrived somewhere. If you throw them away, so be it. I’ve tried writing in a journal and it’s not the same. I bore myself. When I write to you, I can imagine you caring, even if you don’t. (pp. 64-5)
Phyllis’s story is in line with much queer literature from the mid twentieth century. Like in Brideshead Revisited (1945) and Giovanni’s Room (1956), here we have one queer character seeking love while the other opts for self-erasure into cis-heteronormativity, abandoning their former lover and sometimes destroying them in the process. But knowing the script doesn’t make it easier to see Phyllis’s angst-ridden lines (“I can imagine you caring, even if you don’t”). Instead, it puts tragic emphasis on the need to communicate, on how our exchanges with one another allow us to understand ourselves better. So even after Phyllis realizes that communication with Rosa is one-sided, she’s driven to continue her epistolary self-expression. Her thoughts are uninteresting if kept to herself. As the Archivist said, “to be seen, however fleetingly, is to exist”—even if we’re only seen in our imagination.
That brings us to the Hills’ story. Few characters are seen as much as this couple, who claim to have been abducted by aliens. But even with the media attention, a well-received book about their experience, speaking engagements, and a huge stream of fan letters to which they must respond, their story is ultimately about a couple learning to see themselves.
Before the media attention, they have neither solid proof of their abduction nor any memories they can trust. Affected by a lighter version of the Archivist’s full amnesia, the Hills only remember the aliens’ arrival, and then they flash forward to when they were running away. Any other details come from Betty Hill’s recurring dreams. This uncertainty begins to affect their health and the unremembered event takes over their lives. They subscribe to newsletters on aerial phenomena, their pastor invites them to talk to the congregation and finally, after speaking at a UFO study group, they realize that they need help:
When they drove home that night during an early fall sunset, they agreed that it had been an overwhelming and unexpected afternoon. They also agreed to finally consult with a psychiatrist who could help them unlock the memories of what had occurred during those missing hours. The memories had not returned naturally, and they were both tired of speculation. If a professional could help, then it was high time to seek one out. (p. 58)
For these lost memories, they have no archive to help them. They have to recover their experience themselves. And the only way seems to be hypnotherapy. Putting this mystery to rest isn’t a search for the truth for its own sake, and nor are they doing it for the sake of science and humanity (though they believe that would be a nice side effect). They’re doing it because they’ve lived happily and honestly up until that abduction and, until they can see the entirety of their experience, they don’t know how to look at themselves or continue living normally. They need the truth.
But truth isn’t the same as fact, as their psychiatrist tells them: “[E]ven if they were telling the truth as they saw and understood it, it did not mean this truth was objectively factual” (p. 123). In other words, even if they’re being honest about their experience, and the experience was the same for each of them, that still doesn’t mean it actually happened. This blurring of the lines between perception and fact is a statement on how we understand communication and interpretation, the writer and the reader. The narrator, who inserts their observations into the Hill’s story periodically, gives further texture to this reflection, detailing the interdependent powers of both author and reader:
My memory is fallible, as are the memories behind my various source texts. I hold up what I find most interesting, even if that’s not what’s most important. Or I hold up what I find important, even if it might be uninteresting to you. We’re playing a game, you and I, and while I hold the power in the telling, you hold it in the reading. You get to decide what is or isn’t real. (p. 198)
Eventually, the Hills listen to their recorded hypnosis sessions on tape. And in doing so, they interpret and revise themselves. They’re both authors and readers of their own story and once they can hold both those positions, they can move on with their lives … to a certain extent, anyway.
All three stories can be viewed through this power dynamic of author and reader. In Phyllis’s story, a virulently homophobic society tries to either force her to conform to a false heterosexual framework like Rosa or to disappear from a society that can’t allow itself to believe in happy homosexuals. American public consensus tries to remove her power to be both the writer, one who tells the truth, and the reader, one who determines what’s real in her own life. Phyllis has her memories, her emotions, and her imagination intact. The Hills, meanwhile, need outside help to write the missing parts of their lives, and the Archivist is so entrenched in interpretation that they’ve practically forgotten how to communicate. Phyllis has all the resources she needs to write her own life and the lives of countless characters in her imagination; but all these protagonists must fight this same fight, to be able to both speak their truth and understand their reality. These are important stories to which Masad’s elegant and thoughtful prose does justice wonderfully.
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