She lets her house go to seed, starts drinking, stops going to her fulfilling job at the hospital, makes her friends worry. Trina is snarly, mean to strangers who intrude on her mourning. The feeling of losing something and being unable to move on, both a literal person and a way of life, comes through with powerful clarity in The Seep. In the grand tradition of didactic sf, Porter has a ton of philosophical questions as well, but the protracted process of grieving is central to the novel. However, these vignettes are also statements about the project of the novel underneath all the weird and fanciful biocultural advances: what do you do when a relationship dissolves and you lose someone? At the heart of the matter is grief: for a person, for a world, for a sense of self. The Seep begins and ends with directive vignettes, titled “Tips for Throwing a Dinner Party at the End of the World” and “Tips for Attending a Dinner Party When Your World Has Ended and Another World is Just Beginning.” In each, Porter gives instructions on being present, being whole, being open she writes about intoxication and design and desire, companionship. She is currently writer-in-residence at The Catastrophic Theatre in Houston. While The Seep is a debut novel, Chana Porter is also a playwright and education activist with a number of achievements in her fields, including the receipt of an Honorable Mention for the Relentless Prize and a MacDowell fellowship. Trina refuses to be that parent and the two, necessarily, split up-leaving Trina mourning, wounded, and unsure of the costs of a world without a connection to experiential histories. Until, that is, Deeba decides to be recreated into a baby to live a whole new life: to be parented well, to give up her histories of trauma, to no longer hold the baggage of the pre-Seep past.

Trina FastHorse Goldberg-Oneka is a fifty year old trans woman, married to the love of her life Deeba. Capitalism falls so, of equal import, does human mortality (except in cases of extreme physical misfortune or the personally-made choice to die). It is an alien entity that seeks symbiotic communion with life on earth-human and nonhuman animals, plants, objects-and in return for sharing our embodied being, it collapses distinctions, hierarchies, and systems into one shared experience.

The Seep arrives on our planet, and everything changes.

The Seep by Chana Porter