The Membranes: Chi Ta-wei’s eerily prescient novel on the terrors of technology available for the first time in English
- Published originally in Taiwan in 1995, The Membranes is set at the bottom of the ocean, where humanity has been forced to retreat because of climate change
- The author’s project is large, as is his vision, and imagines the future like the best of our dystopian meditations
The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei. Columbia University Press
“Shadows, Momo thought. Everywhere.”
Momo is the main character in this philosophically rich, imaginatively potent novel. And her realisation about the “unknowable shadows” of our identity is the chief concern of this eerily prescient work.
Written in Chinese and published originally in Taiwan in 1995, the book is available for the first time in English, translated into impressive accessibility by Ari Larissa Heinrich, who also translated another cult classic of queer Taiwanese literature: Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre (1996). Given the erratic style and structure of that book, Heinrich was perfectly suited to tackle the altogether zany world that Chi Ta-wei constructs in The Membranes.
Momo is Japanese for peach, the fruit depicted on the cover whose delicate and permeable skin recalls the membranes that encase us all. The character Momo is a dermal care technician who lives in T City in the final years of the 21st century. The world is unrecognisable, though Chi’s vision is powerfully prophetic: humanity has been forced to retreat to the bottom of the ocean because of the irrevocable effects of climate change.
