'Trina Goldberg-Oneka is a fifty-year-old trans woman whose life is irreversibly altered in the wake of a gentle—but nonetheless world-changing—invasion by an alien entity called The Seep. Through The Seep, everything is connected. Capitalism falls, hierarchies and barriers are broken down; if something can be imagined, it is possible.
'Trina and her wife, Deeba, live blissfully under The Seep’s utopian influence—until Deeba begins to imagine what it might be like to be reborn as a baby, which will give her the chance at an even better life. Using Seeptech to make this dream a reality, Deeba moves on to a new existence, leaving Trina devastated.'Heartbroken and deep into an alcoholic binge, Trina follows a lost boy she encounters, embarking on an unexpected quest. In her attempt to save him from The Seep, she will confront not only one of its most avid devotees, but the terrifying void that Deeba has left behind. A strange new elegy of love and loss, The Seep explores grief, alienation, and the ache of moving on. '
The Seep is something of a strange book, a story that centres on one woman's journey through a strange new future, but really takes a look at human nature, at what people would be like if all of their dreams and desires were catered to, and asks readers to recognise the flaws in our world today through that lens.
The story sees a world where humans made contact with a sentient species called The Seep, a species that holds no physical form itself, but by bonding to us, to humans and animals, and seemingly any object, they're able to not only communicate with us and experience the universe from our perspective, but can allow humans to experience anything they want to.
We follow Trina, a woman whose life is altered by the Seep, though not necessarily for the better. Even early on we get the sense that whilst those around her have embraced the Seep, allowed themselves to fall in love with the new type of lifestyle it allows, to give themselves over to a life where the pursuit of pleasure is the main driving force, she's not completely sold on the whole thing. Over the course of her story we see this shift even further when her wife, Deeba, chooses to use the body altering abilities of the Seep to let her regress into a child, to allow her to essentially be born again and experience life fresh and new, without any memory of who she used to be. This leaves Trina alone in a pit of depression and pain, in a world where such thoughts and feelings are supposed to have been eliminated.
Whilst the narrative seems to make this loss of Deeba the main focal point of Trina's dislike for the Seep, of her feelings of isolation and pain, I saw things slightly differently. You see, Trina is a trans woman. This doesn't really come up much in the story, because it's not really that relevant to her journey or experience. This isn't a story about being trans, she's simply just a woman who is trans on this journey. But, there is something that happens fairly early on that stood out like a beacon to me, and I think is the real underlying reason that Trina has problems with the Seep.
When talking to a friend of hers, years after the Seep came to Earth, she discovers that the face he wears, the person she's know for years, isn't his real face; that it is the face of a lost lover of his. When Trina learns that this means the man before her wasn't born a person of colour, that he's essential changed races, it upsets her on a fairly deep level. It's here that he makes a flippant comment that she must have used the Seep to allow her to have transitioned in some way, and seemingly compares the two things. This obviously gets to Trina, but doesn't get given much time in the book because it's very quickly after this that Deeba chooses to become a child again, and that becomes Trina's main focus.
But, here's what I picked up, the thing that I think shapes a huge part of Trina as a character. This new world created by the Seep allows people to alter themselves seemingly at will, letting them turn themselves into babies, different people, and even animals; and it's all treated completely normal. It's looked at as fine and acceptable because its all part of this huge human wide experience of being allowed to do and feel whatever makes you happy. As long as it doesn't hurt anyone it seems to all be fair game. But I don't think Trina completely sees it this way.
Now, I'm drawing on my own experiences here, of my own journey as a trans woman; but I think the Seep really bothers Trina because until it came and changed the world she had to fight every single day to be herself. Transitioning has often been sensationalised in the press, and there are a lot of misconceptions about it out there, but it's about being who you really are, about being the person you know you are on the inside but that no one else can see.
Transition is a really hard journey, and you have to fight for it every step of the way. You have people who tell you you're wrong when you first come out, people who'll try to brush away your feelings by telling you you're confused or mistaken. They'll insist that you're not trans, you just must be gay, or that maybe you could just wear women's clothing at home on the weekends. You get told that you're a fetishist, getting some kind of sexual thrill out of it, and that it's not a real, valid thing to want to change your body to reflect who you are. You'll be judged by friends, family, colleagues, strangers, everyone you meet. You'll lose people. You'll have to fight with doctors who try to dismiss your feelings, be forced to go to therapy to prove your own thoughts and feelings are real, often with invasive and degrading questions thrown at you. You'll have to go on years long waiting lists for treatments, or be forced to pay huge amounts out of pocket. And even if you get through all of that and finally get a chance to be you, you get demonised in the media, campaigned against by bigots, and will feel like a target every time you step outside your home.
I've lived through that, I think most trans people have. To be trans is to constantly fight to be seen as who you are, to be accepted as a real, valid person, and to not be dismissed as something less than human. But then the Seep comes along and suddenly everyone can alter themselves, everyone can change the way they look, the type of person they are. Suddenly being trans is nothing out of the ordinary, because anyone can be anything, and all that fighting and all that pain you've been through amount to nothing as those people who once judged you and ridiculed you, and made your life hell are giving themselves different colour skin, or antlers, or changing the colour of their eyes. And I think that is the real reason why Trina has a problem with the Seep.
I might be wrong about this, it's just my interpretation, but this is a story about a trans woman finding a world where anyone can change and be anything difficult, written by a queer person, so I think that there might be something to it. It's not just a story about someone having to come to terms with loss, or about finding their place in an ever changing and shifting world, but a story about coming to terms with all that internalised pain and torture you've had to go through and learning to let it all go.
Trina's journey will probably mean something very different to people who read this and aren't part of the trans community, but I don't think that they'll have a worse experience with the book because of it. It's still a story about learning to cope with grief, about learning to see the wonder and beauty in the world, and it presents readers with this wonderfully bizarre kind of utopia that I think we all kind of want our world to be; a place where anger and hate get left behind, where happiness and the pursuit of it are the main driving forces in the world.
The Seep is a story that will mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but to me I saw it as a story about hope, about fighting through your pain and depression and finding the things in the world that bring you joy, that make your life feel happy, and fighting for that with everything you have. It's a book that spoke to me about the amazing power of humanity, of the strength we have inside us, and the hope of a better tomorrow.
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