When is a novel like an archive? Or is it the other way around? On the most basic level, each represents a storage-and-retrieval system for information and memory. And yet, what does that mean in terms of narrative? Both the novelist and the archivist, after all, are storytellers, seeking patterns in the data and the details they have gathered. Both fulfill a necessarily subjective function in that regard. As Stacy Nathaniel Jackson observes in his first novel, The Ephemera Collector, “impressions aren’t that difficult to manipulate if you try hard enough.”
The Ephemera Collector comes billed as an homage to Octavia E. Butler, and Jackson is not shy about that heritage. His protagonist, Xandria Anastasia Brown, is a curator at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, and her brief includes the author’s papers, which were the subject of a real-life 2017 exhibition, Telling My Stories. This is just one of the ways the novel blurs the line between fact and fiction; in the world Jackson creates, Xandria helped mount that show. And yes, the story opens in the near future, with much of the action taking place in 2035. Yes, the world, beset with wildfires and other environmental calamities, has continued its accelerating collapse. At the same time, I want to argue, the influence of Butler is too narrow a lens through which to consider this ambitious book.
As the novel begins, the Huntington has been taken over by a conglomerate called With Intention Kindness Always, a name that belies its predatory goals. “I ask for your continued patience,” the chairman and CEO writes to the museum staff, “as we combine this collection of amazing assets to create the world’s premier arts and entertainment company.” Not long afterward, during a board meeting on the museum campus, he is taken hostage, and the facility is locked down.
I don’t want to dwell too much on the mechanics of the plot here; among the novel’s pleasures is seeing it unfold. In part, this is because Jackson has arranged The Ephemera Collector as an archive in its own right, building a narrative out of fragments: transcripts, timelines, correspondence, images, documents. Perhaps more interesting is his decision to complicate this archival imperative by rendering Xandria as memory-challenged, due to both long COVID and her subsequent exposure to a second iteration of the virus, COVID-34. She exists in a state not unlike dementia, where even the most vivid shocks and traumas (including the deaths, in quick succession, of her wife and her mother) are often muddled or unrecalled. “Forgetfulness for a curator-archivist was untenable,” Jackson writes early in the novel. “The work was collective memory.” The result is not an unreliable narrator, exactly, since The Ephemera Collector is a third-person account. It’s more accurate to say that the narrative itself is unreliable, emerging, as it does, from the edges: of Xandria’s consciousness, to be sure, but also of the gaps in the archive, between what has been discovered and what has been lost.
That this is the case with every narrative should go without saying; all stories are necessarily incomplete. It’s a factor that, in the context of Jackson’s novel, makes Xandria’s focus on ephemera particularly apt. “Assessing nondescript objects,” she asserts, “which arguably could be of value someday, creating a decision tree to preserve and protect all things is an impracticable act.” What she’s referring to is conditionality, which in this instance has to do with how meaning accrues in the most unlikely places—not least the future, which remains, as it must, unwritten until it has been lived.
Such an idea sits at the heart of Afrofuturism, which uses the strategies of speculative art and fiction to reframe or center Black history and culture as a vehicle for imagining a world that, if not necessarily utopian, is nonetheless more equitable, more liberationist, more open to possibility. Butler remains an avatar of the movement, as do Samuel R. Delany and Sun Ra and his Arkestra. This is the broader tradition in which Jackson is working, although for him the future is a mixed bag. Xandria, for instance, is both cured and cursed by a medical algorithm that, in adjusting her physiology to restore memory, also drastically extends her life. The novel comes framed by a curator’s pair of interviews with her conducted in 2288, 300 years after she was born. In that sense, it is as if she has become a living, breathing archive, her recollections, enhanced or otherwise, individual and collective at once.
This idea takes shape most fully with her research into Diwata, a self-sustaining undersea Black settlement in Northern California, developed after an asteroid strike devastates much of the western United States. “My intention,” Xandria explains, “was to document the spirit of black and brown futurity.” As for the Diwatans, she considers them “realists. And dreamers. By any means necessary.… They were committed to designing a world open to them on Earth.”
Here we see the radical heart of The Ephemera Collector: the notion that preservation matters. This is the subtext of the corporate takeover of the Huntington, which begins with the sale of one of its most famous holdings, Thomas Gainsborough’s painting The Blue Boy. Such an act of deaccessioning feels particularly relevant in our own bleak season, as DOGE dismantles the federal workforce and all our cherished notions of past and future, of history and hope, are under assault. In the face of that, how do we form the basis for resistance? The only choice, Jackson suggests, is to maintain our memory. This is not a sentimental endeavor. “In the face of Black people’s continued eviction from the category of human,” he insists, “we should not mistake the erection of the monument or memorial for repair.” Rather, it is about memory as work, as essential effort, in which only by maintaining the artifacts of the past can we hope to understand the present and move through it, forward into the unknown.•
