Jane Mondrup is joining us today to talk about her novel, Zoi. Here’s the publisher’s description:
At the age of five, Amira watched footage of the first zoi specimen arriving in our solar system, and she became instantly fascinated with the huge, cell-like creature floating among the stars.
Decades later, she and three other astronauts have taken residence in a zoi as it continues its voyage through space.
They have no way of steering its course. Communicating with their non-sentient host is limited to signals of physical needs. And while the zoi meets those needs, it also exposes its passengers to hormonal and even genetic alterations.
Now, as masses of biological material start growing on each astronaut, their interstellar journey begins a new stage–one with far-reaching consequences both for the humans and the zois.
What’s Jane’s favorite bit?
The phenomenon of life is insanely weird. I’m not sure if that fact is comforting to everyone, but to me it is. Life is weird on so many levels. From the sheer variety of lifeforms and ecologies, behaviors and interactions to the mind-boggling complexity of the basic building blocks: the cell and the genes.
The cell is a world unto itself. Most cells in our body are between one-tenth and one-hundredth of a millimeter, but each one contains an impressive number of structures and specialized units, including what resembles little creatures, toiling away at assorted tasks. For a visualization of this, I highly recommend the animation “The Inner Life of the Cell,” made by XVIVO Animation for Harvard University in 2011 (it can be found on YouTube).
We humans have around 37 trillion of these tiny worlds inside us, comprising our bodies. In comparison, the Milky Way contains only around 0.1 trillion stars. Each cell upholds its own existence through procedures that are, in themselves, complicated, but the cell also reacts and adapts to its environment. When cells are part of multi-cellular organisms, this adaptation also applies to their place in the superstructure, and to the superstructure’s interaction with the world around it. It’s all so very intricate. So very, very weird.
I don’t just love this weirdness. To me, it represents the very meaning of, well, life. As living beings, we’re part of this awe-inspiring phenomenon, more complex than anything else we’ve observed in the universe, since evolution drives it towards increasing complexity and variety. I’m not a biologist, and to tell the truth, I find it hard to grasp most of the technicalities involved, but that does not lessen my attraction. You don’t need to thoroughly understand things (or people) to love them. Perhaps the enigma even helps.
Years before I conceived any actual story ideas for biological science fiction, I came across the Symbiogenesis theory about the origin of the eucaryotic cell that forms the basis of multi-cellular life. According to this widely accepted theory, the evolutionary jump from the much simpler procaryotic cells to the highly complex eucaryotes was made possible by a very fortunate encounter between two procaryotes wherein the smaller was incorporated into the larger as an energy producing organelle called the mitochondrion.
This finally brings me to my favorite bit of the novel ZOI, and of the process of writing it. The scientific concept of a merging between cells did at some point merge with other ideas I had floating around in my mind, surfacing as the kind of dream vision that you sometimes have on the brink of sleep. In this vision, I saw two identical women being separated. They looked desperately sad.
This is inspiration in a nutshell: your subconscious mixing up completely unrelated elements and throwing the result at you shouting, “Catch!” Here we touch on another kind of weirdness that I love just as much as the weirdness of life—the roundabout and unpredictable ways our brains work. The human mind has some capacity for logic, but left to its own devices it’s more inclined to work by free association. As a fiction writer, you need both the logical and associative processes, and the trick is to make them cooperate. I suspect the same goes for science, at least to some degree.
I knew that I had to write a story with this dream vision as its focal point: two people, completely alike, floating apart. Since I knew the source of the image, I understood that the women had been incorporated into a large, cell-like creature. They were clones of the same person, being duplicated along with their host, like mitochondria do when a eucaryotic cell divides. I saw the women being separated into a void, and I concluded that the cell-like creature was a space-dwelling one. It traveled through space, and since it very seldomly encountered other life, it had no need for an immune system. Instead, it had developed the exact opposite: a mechanism to accommodate all life forms it came across, since that would be its only way to evolve.
From there, the story took me in all kinds of interesting directions. There’re lots of other elements that I love, like how I was able to use my own bodily experiences to conceive of the hormonal changes that humans undergo inside the cell-like creatures, the zois. I very much enjoyed the exploration of identity and self in the relationship between pairs of clones, both considering themselves the original. I deeply sympathize with the character who is unable to endure both the hormonal alterations and the cloning, and was greatly relieved when I discovered that perhaps she would not have to just perish. Towards the end, the story points towards some very intriguing perspectives. But none of this would have existed without that inciting vision of a separation, and it remains my favorite bit of the novel, ZOI.
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BIO:
Jane Mondrup lives and writes in the small Northern European country Denmark. In her fiction, she’s exploring the boundaries around and between different speculative genres. She’s published a few books and some short stories in Danish, while Zoi, which will be published in both languages, is her debut in English.
