Ann LeBlanc's New Novella "The Transitive Properties of Cheese"
This month's newsletter is different. Instead of talking science, I'm talking with Ann LeBlanc about her new novella, The Transitive Properties of Cheese, because her writing is amazing and I think you'll dig it. It's about transhumanism and uploading and queer community and cheese.
From Neon Hemlock's 2024 novella Kickstarter, which you can back to get Ann's novella and five others, plus a short story collection:
Millions Wayland was cutting the curds when she learned someone had thrown her cheese cave into the sun. To find out who is responsible, Millions makes a copy of her digitally-uploaded consciousness and transmits it to a nearby orbital city. Soon enough, she becomes entangled in a messy conflict between several copies of herself that she made decades ago—forcing her to deal with the unresolved history between them.
And I get the privilege of revealing the novella's cover! It's by Drew Shields and it's totally boss:
Let's start with the novella's copying and body swapping. You've mentioned your frustration with how the book Altered Carbon used—or, more accurately, failed to use—its body-swapping premise to full effect. I'm curious about what other ways you got into the story of The Transitive Properties of Cheese.
A big impetus for the novella was to do something actually interesting (and queer) with the worldbuilding concepts from Altered Carbon. Being able to transfer your consciousness semi-seamlessly between bodies is such a cool idea, and obviously in the real world anyone who has ever felt alienated from their body would be all over that. And not just in the mundane body-switching way. If you have this technology, people are going to get weird with it, and quickly.
I wanted to explore what trans lives would look like in a world with that sort of radical body autonomy. What does it even mean to be trans when you can give yourself the perfect body? What sort of cool things would furries do with that tech? Humans are pleasure-seeking creatures; so what would that look like in synthetic bodies?
A lot of the novel was inspired by my time volunteer organizing in New York City. I ran a rooftop garden that provided herbs and vegetables to a soup kitchen, and I helped out on the admin side of the parent organization. The actual work of trying to make things better for people isn’t glamorous, it isn’t like the revolutions in books and movies. Activist burnout is a huge problem. There’s way too much work, and not enough people (or money to hire people) to get it done. So people working at nonprofits or in activist spaces push themselves beyond their limits and then burnout and have to step away.
I wanted to explore how consciousness-copying/body-swapping/synthetic-bodies would change the activist/social-justice/nonprofit world. I don’t think it would fix it, but gosh, being able to make a copy of yourself to help lighten the load would be so nice.
I found that idea deeply tempting, given my experiences in organizing and activist spaces. I’ve got to admit I’m afraid I’d have more fights with my copies than anyone else, though.
Being able to copy myself would absolutely magnify all the worst and weirdest parts of me.
That was part of the fun of designing the copy’s characters. Each one is an aspect of myself magnified to an extreme. It was easy to write Miller, because there is absolutely a part of me that longs for the false-peace of assimilation. Hattie is my hedonist side; Wayland is the part of me that just wants to infodump about my craft special-interests. And the fourth copy, is uh… well… I don’t even know how to name or identify that part of me.
(If I ever write a sequel, it will absolutely be about the weirdness of the fourth copy and their brethren.)
Where'd you first encounter some of the cyberpunk concepts that you're putting your own spin on? I remember learning about the concept of copying yourself from Fred Pohl and Jack Williamson's Doomship, in which a man beams a copy of himself onto a probe ship taking a one-way trip. The man steps out of the cloning booth and thinks, ah, it's not me. Then the story cuts to the same man stepping out of the booth on the probe ship and thinking, oh, no, it's me. I read this when I was like ten and then had an existential crisis. Hopefully that's not your origin story for these concepts!
Oh, goodness, the first time I encountered copying yourself was probably the Duplicator story line from Calvin and Hobbes. In the comic, Calvin uses a cardboard box to make copies of himself to do his chores, and predictably the copies are as chaotic as he is, and refuse to do what they’re supposed to.
In the novella, the protagonists (who call themselves the Millions) are already several decades into making copies of themselves. While there might not really be a million of them (or maybe there are, out beyond the asteroid belt), they are absolutely as chaotic and argumentative as Calvin with no Hobbes to restrain them.
Body duplication (and body/gender swapping) is all over science fiction, so there are dozens of stories and ideas that are also woven into the DNA of the novella.
It’s very common among trans people to find these sorts of stories fascinating (often for reasons they don’t understand, if they haven’t come out to themselves). It really is a useful tool for exploring feelings of self-alienation.
Izzy Wasserstein also has a cyberpunk novella, These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart, that engages with similar concepts. Body copying/swapping is a very common element in trans fiction, and I’m very excited to read her take on it!
It’s almost like people who’ve experienced that alienation and wrestled with changing their bodies would have well-considered ideas for the tech beyond, “gosh, what if you were in a body that presented as a different gender than your identity, who could imagine what that might feel like, it really makes you think.”
Yeah, who could imagine? It really does make you think.
The novella struck me with its inventive imagery and a gonzo willingness to go for it, really leaning into how weird the future can be. It's also very funny in places. At the same time, it's tackling self-determination and autonomy (bodily and otherwise) and what we'd owe each other if we were a branching spread of copies of ourself. How'd you balance the tonal aspects of the novel with its thematic aspects?
I’m so glad my imagined future felt weird and gonzo to you! One of my goals with the novella (and really all my fiction) is to make it as weird as possible, to really push the premise (and the characters) to the extreme.
Trans outsider-artists like Palimrya Cannonglass and Frog Kosaric are definitely inspirations for the weirdness in my book. Palimrya has a story coming out in Embodied Exgesis: Transfeminine Cyberpunk Futures, the anthology I’m editing. And Frog Kosaric’s collection Oleander Grip is absolutely fantastically weird.
That balance of tonal/thematic aspects reflects what real life is like for trans people (and really, for all people, but I think some of the juxtapositions are more extreme for marginalized populations).
Transition is an absolutely wild and magical experience, especially at the beginning. And then, years go by, and it becomes normal to you. And the whole time you’re going through this transcendental experience, you still have to deal with all the mundane joys and terrors of life, like feeding yourself, and paying rent, and brushing your teeth.
Tonally, our lives are full of a mix of joy and terror, hilarity and bleakness. The political situation for trans people right now is pretty scary, with transphobes making up bizarre caricatures of us in order to justify exterminating us from public life. And while that’s terrifying and depressing, our lives go on. We’re still here, making jokes and being stupid and fun on the internet, trying to take what pleasures we can from life.
I think it’s common in fiction to tackle serious/depressing topics in a serious manner. But I think it’s fun, and in some ways more realistic, to show how humor and joy persist in the face of disaster.
Similarly, the novella bops among a bunch of points of view with disparate personalities, bodies, outlooks, and sensoria, and who are copies of the same person. I don't really have a question here, just an observation that that sounds like a lot to juggle and thinking about it makes me feel the need to lie down and nap.
The original draft was actually just one POV, Millions Wayland the cheesemaker. That worked fine, I guess, but something was missing. It was only when I gave each of the copies their own POV, that everything really cohered.
Writing four POV characters who are all copies of the same person was a big challenge! They needed to be plausibly the same person, but different enough to be distinct characters, and to spark conflict. It helped that each copy had been operating independently for decades, so I could show their shared past, and then use both current events and their divergent history to show how they’d each changed.
Four POVs ended up being great for establishing narrative tension. These four all have their own goals, and are often working at cross-purposes, so being able to set up the inevitable betrayals via POV switching was a fantastic tool. It was also so nice to be able to use the character’s reactions to each other to flesh out how they were still the same, and how they had diverged.
I was impressed by how grounded the novella's characters are in bodies, in a way that cuts against a strain of transhumanist thought where the goal is to ditch the meatsack and become pure code. The characters of The Transitive Properties of Cheese have that option, but it's not where they spend a lot of their time. What made you lean in that direction for this story?
Yes! This was absolutely intentional. One of the big themes of the novella is the importance of the pleasures of the flesh. The world wants marginalized people to be miserable, and so focusing on the small pleasures of life can feel like a revolutionary act.
I recently played Citizen Sleeper, a post-cyberpunk narrative game, and I loved how even in this post-human world, people still enjoyed a good meal, and took pleasure in each other’s company.
I also didn’t want to create a world where post-human possibilities meant everyone was in an aesthetically-beautiful gleaming new body. Trans people, fat people, Black people, disabled people, etc., are often excluded from those standards of beauty. So I wanted to show a world where one of the characters chooses to be in a fat body because she likes that and finds it beautiful (and she’s correct). I wanted a world where the characters in synthetic bodies take pleasure in how those bodies feel the world, and how they conform to the characters’ own sense of self.
I love how the novella tackles queer community in a way I haven't seen much in cyberpunk beyond Melissa Scott's Trouble and Her Friends. And it's not an uncomplicated community! Hattie's helping organize a huge mutual aid society that's providing life and meaning to a lot of people, but it doesn't keep her from hurting Weyland her clone-relation, and that hurt isn't neatly solved even as they continue to be in community with each other.
I wrote this novella in the shadow of what was done to Isabel Fall, and all the other less-famous incidents of transmisogyny. I wrote it in the shadow of all the ways the queer community hurts and excludes our POC members. Queer people aren’t magically rendered more virtuous by our marginalization. We just have less institutional power with which to hurt each other, but we can still be just as cruel and kind to each other as any random cishet person.
It’s common in the internet age that the first recourse for any infraction is to socially ostracize the offender, to exclude them from the community and from any support they might receive from it. This is what happened to the main character of the novella. She fucked up in a really bad way, and then isolated herself to escape the waves of harassment aimed at her. That isolation made her vulnerable to outside forces that wanted to exploit her.
That’s a thought I’ve returned to many times in recent years. If the main response to hurt is to sever someone from community, that leaves them ripe to being taken advantage of. I don’t have a good solution, because sometimes expulsion is the healthiest thing for a community, but I appreciate the novella tackling that head on.
I don’t have a good solution either. Part of the problem is that social media companies want to completely control their moderation systems, but it isn’t profitable to give them the resources they need to actually work. And they don’t want to give people/community the tools to build their own systems.
And with the consolidation of the internet, if you get run out of town, there isn’t always another town for you to go to. This is particularly bad for anyone who falls afoul of the big payment companies (like sex workers). It’s not hard to get permabanned from a major part of the infrastructure of the modern world, with no real way to appeal or have your case judged fairly by your peers.
It sure is fun living in a capitalist cyberpunk dystopia!
Speaking of things I haven't seen that often in cyberpunk: actual modern capitalism! I'm used to the trope of a big bad company owning a person, or someone paying rent on their pancreas, but pretty soon it's back to hacking around ICE and also katanas. This novella has the kind of financial awfulness that's going on today and that you can read in a Matt Levine column: turning a commodity into a financial instrument that you can sell and then manipulate; private equity buying a defunct company for its IP. What inspired those aspects of the novella?
A lot of the capitalist awfulness in the novella is inspired by my time working as a programmer in Silicon Valley. I saw—over and over again—how venture capitalists would screw over founders, and then how founders would screw over their workers (and of course how the startups end up screwing over the world). Thankfully I escaped that world, but my anger at Silicon Valley is baked into a lot of the fiction I write.
And of course, the people most likely to be screwed over in any capitalist situation are the marginalized, in large part because it’s easier to get away with. I’m thinking of the way that land was/is stolen from Black and Native farmers, the way that Da share z0ne (which came up with the “just quit, hit da bricks” skeleton meme) was stolen from a trans woman. The way our accomplishments get buried or erased or assigned to others. I don’t have to look to the future for capitalist awfulness, it’s all already happened, and it’s not terribly creative, so it repeats itself over and over. Those thefts, of ideas, of money, of property, of credit, were the inspiration for the initial cheese theft in the novella.
I love the insight of the bankrupt incuriousness of capitalist rapaciousness leading to repetition. I suspect, in the novella’s world, we’d see the same repetition in hand-wringing over the protagonists planning a cheese heist in response, probably in editorials in The New York Times. “Sure, the original theft is bad, but isn’t the response the real crime?”
In the world of this novella, I’m 100% sure that NYT hand-wringing was responsible for the "One Person One Instance" anti-copying laws.
One of the major themes of the novella is the fragility of the communities and systems we build in the face of the real power systems of the world (nations, corporations, rich people, etc.).
You’ve already mentioned a lot of great queer spec fic earlier. Is there any others you’d recommend folks read?
You just said my sleeper-agent activation phrase! There is SO much queer spec fic I’d love to recommend.
I just finished The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera, and WOW what a fantastic novel. The way it layered the mythic and the modern, the past and the present, was SO cool. You can tell the author comes from a short fiction background because of how rich and intricately crafted the book is. I loved the Sri Lankan secondary-world setting.
OKPsyche by Anya DeNiro is fantastic fabulist tale about being a trans mom digging her way out of a personal apocalypse while a real one happens all around her. I loved the way this book experimented with prose and structure.
I highly recommend Bang Bang Bodhisattva by Aubrey Wood if you want more trans cyberpunk. This book is FUN (while also being quietly heartbreaking) and does cool stuff with bringing cyberpunk’s noir elements into the modern internet age. A+ absolute trashfire of a trans protagonist.
Unity by Elly Bangs is like if a cyberpunk hive-mind book was set in Fallout 1. I loved the way this book really got into what it would FEEL like to be part of a hive-mind, to connect fully with another person.
The Four Profound Weaves by R.B Lemberg (or any of their other Birdverse books). I loved the way this novella talked about being an OLD trans person. And the way the magic system intersects with transition in this world is SO cool.
Empire of the Feast by Bendi Barret. Another Neon Hemlock novella! What if the only way to save the galaxy was homoerotic sword fights and gay sex? Eldritch cosmic horror meets empire, and it's not clear which one is worse!
In the short fiction world, I cannot recommend Baffling Magazine enough. They publish some of the most inventive queer spec flash fiction I’ve ever read. Your story The Sigilist’s Notes on The Fell Lord’s Staff is a great example of a story that uses structural experimentation to deliver a gut-punch of a story about queer yearning. (interviewer's note: *blush*)
Also, I have another title coming out from Neon Hemlock this year. I’m the editor for Embodied Exegesis: Transfeminine Cyberpunk Futures, an anthology of weird cyberpunk and posthuman short stories by transfem authors. The future of cyberpunk is trans, baby, and it’s gonna get weird!
I could go on (and on and on), but I should probably stop there!
Awesome! Thank you for talking with me!
Thank you so much for this fantastic interview! I had a great time talking with you.