Felixstowe, 2053
Revisiting a tantalizing Zadie Smith short story
Zadie Smith should write a science fiction novel. That was my takeaway when I first read Meet the President, her 2013 short story. Returning to the story after twelve years has me wishing yet again for a longer Smith foray into the genre.
Meet the President is set in Felixstowe, England in 2053. Though the story doesn’t say so explicitly, the crucial hint is when the narrator alerts us to our protagonist—fourteen-year-old Bill Peek—reflecting that ‘A hundred years earlier, almost to the very month, a quaint flood had killed only forty-eight people.’ Felixstowe experienced a flood that killed forty-eight people in 1953. This flood is identified as ‘quaint,’ in Bill’s (indirectly-discoursed) estimation, presumably because there have been bigger floods since then.
Felixstowe is worse for the wear in more ways than just intensified flooding by the time our story begins. Bill Peek finds himself on a pier, being forced to interact with ‘locals,’ when all he wants to do is to play his virtual-reality game. He meets a ‘very old’ (she turns out to be forty-nine) woman with a young girl in tow:
“Bill Peek!” the old woman cried. “Oh, but we’ve had Peeks in Anglia a long time. You’ll find a Peek or two or three down in Sutton Hoo. Bill Peek! You from round here, Bill Peek?”
His grandparents? Very possibly. Local and English—or his great-grandparents. His hair and eyes and skin and name suggested it. But it was not a topic likely to engage his father, and the boy himself had never felt any need or desire to pursue it. He was simply global, accompanying his father on his inspections, though usually to livelier spots than this. What a sodden dump it was! Just as everyone had warned him it would be. The only people left in England were the ones who couldn’t leave.
Later on, Bill tells the girl, Aggie, ‘If you can’t move, you’re no one from nowhere.’ Felixstowe in 20253 is nowhere, and our protagonist is being forced to interact with nobodies even though all he wants to do is play his game.
Bill is a student of the Pathways Global Institute—based ‘(in Paris, New York, Shanghai, Nairobi, Jerusalem, Tokyo)’—and thus a citizen of everywhere and nowhere. His father is part of the Incipio Security Group, which participates in the sinister, globe-bestriding ‘Program’ which directs the ‘craft’ (drones, seemingly) that bob and weave off the shores of Felixstowe. The craft are a menace to wayward locals and anyone else who breaks an unstated set of rules. We can infer some of these rules via the Pathways motto: ‘Capital must flow.’
Though Bill valiantly tries to play a level of his game in which he storms through a war-ravaged Washington, D.C., the woman, Melly, leaves him in charge of the little girl, Aggie. They were on their way to a ‘laying out’ of Aggie’s deceased older sister, who, as Melly makes sure to inform Bill, was ‘whorish.’ The rest of the action of the story encompasses Bill’s begrudging shepherding of Aggie. In the final scene, he ends up in the ramshackle church where the sister’s corpse lies: ‘He couldn’t even extend an arm—there were people everywhere, local, offensive to the nose, to all other senses.’
There’s a sense of lingering menace throughout the story. Bill understands his security to be guaranteed because of who his father is. The craft which might provide that guarantee are ever-present, and up to something, even though they don’t seem to be targeting anyone on-stage. Bill isn’t particularly powerful himself, but he has status. Melly and Aggie are human to him only within the sentimental schemas he’s been taught; locals are objects of curiosity, as long as they don’t step out of line. Bill might as well be gawking at bison in Yellowstone, the remnants of another, wilder age. Except unlike a mere tourist, Bill might be able to zap these animals out of existence, at least if he can talk his father into it.
This feeling, at once foreboding and elegiac, hangs heavy throughout Meet the President. Managing to layer on this distinctive atmosphere is one of many reasons why the story is a victory for the forces of imagination-by-inference. The outlines Smith takes from our present—outlines that have, I’m sad to say, only sharpened in the intervening twelve years—become the bold-faced self-justifications of Bill Peek:
“If you’ve done nothing wrong,” Bill Peek said, solemnly parroting his father, “you’ve nothing to worry about. It’s a precise business.” He had been raised to despair of the type of people who spread misinformation about the Program….
“Everyone’s got a good angel and a bad angel,” she explained. “And if it’s a bad angel that picks you out”—she pointed to a craft swooping low—“there’s no escaping it. You’re done for.”He listened in wonderment. Of course he’d always known there were people who thought in this way—there was a module you did on them in sixth grade—but he had never met anyone who really harbored what his anthro-soc teacher, Mr. Lin, called “animist beliefs.”
(I’m doing Bill a little dirty there by deleting the part in between where he wonders at how ‘precise’ the Program really is, but still.)
Smith performs the alchemy of Meet the President on soil she knows well—an England riven by class disparity1. Like any writer positioning herself on the terrain of the best science fiction, Smith starts with the familiar and hurls it so far that it’s a stranger when it lands. The task then is to map the uncharted territory where these recognizable facts and themes have come to ground. Meet the President is a skillful map that left me wishing Smith would chart more of its world.
Science fiction gets to reconstitute what’s going on now in a way that goes beyond simple ironization or critique. There’s a warning and an indictment in a story like Meet the President, yes. But there’s also the conjuring of specters that are both familiar and unfamiliar, and therefore uncanny. Parts of Bill Peek and Aggie could exist in our world, and parts of them couldn’t. We only get the whole if we follow them into their realm. And once we’re there, we only understand them if we look back. The best science fiction calls us forward into a space strange enough that the only thing we know how to do is listen for the ghost of our present.
Forgive the epigrammatical theorizing. The point is that Zadie Smith shows tantalizing promise as a science fiction writer. I’d argue that her most recent novel, The Fraud (2023), is her best work and likewise underscores that she should let her powers of invention roam farther afield. The Fraud is so satisfying precisely because of the wonders Smith can conjure up when she sets herself the task of imagining places and times she and we will never go. Zadie, if you see this, send the craft after us. We’ll be OK. We’ve done nothing wrong.
Calvin and Hobbes Corner
We hate rules:
There are times when Calvin shows admirable self-awareness. What truer statement could anyone make about Calvin than that he ‘hate[s] rules and the organization and teams and ranks’ in sports or anywhere else? We’ve gone from the reflexive sexism of the last strip to calm reflection.
It’s also nice to see Calvin happily playing with Susie—sharing a see-saw. For all that Calvin rants about his aversion to all girls, and for all that he likes to antagonize Susie, she’s ultimately his best and only human friend. There’s something touching about her being the interlocutor for Calvin’s moment of understanding.
In the final panel, Calvin of course has to undermine his insight into himself by suggesting he might one day join the army. Typical thing for a young boy to say, but Calvin would probably be dishonorably discharged before even finishing basic.
A Poem
Faith Arkoful is desiring a second coming.
Smith is, of course, perhaps the most praised living chronicler of class in London.