4thace reviewed Spar by Kij Johnson

Kij Johnson: Spar (2009)
Not for anyone objecting to explicit content
5 stars
This was a much talked-about short story I read a few months after it came out, which amazed me because of how it committed to the alien body horror topic and left me with questions about the moral aspects of what happened. In a survival situation, basically a lifeboat scenario, how much loss of autonomy would you put up? And if you don't have any actual choice in the matter, how does it change how you picture yourself afterwards? Would you start to think of your body as something that can be hacked from the outside like some mechanism, or is that too hard to separate so easily from the idea of self? The story should be fenced around with trigger and content warnings for readers who might be set off by scenes of sexuality and possible violence.