It's often said that dystopia is the default for science fiction. And some are grimmer and more credibly rendered than others. Agustina Bazterrica's Tender is the Flesh resides in Camp Bleak with a world that is far fetched but discomfortingly believable.
Marcos is struggling to keep his head above water. He works hard to pay the care home bills for his ailing father, and he's consumed by grief after his infant son died and his marriage disintegrated. He has little enthusiasm for his job, which he increasingly experiences with a growing sense of alienation. But this job is quite prestigious. He is the manager of a high class slaughterhouse. And the livestock it processes? Human beings. In this future, all domestic animals and pets have been exterminated as a precaution following an alleged viral outbreak. Rather than adapt to a new vegan reality, the demand for meat sees populations prey on undesirables (immigrants, criminals) until each country develops domestic markets in industrially farmed human flesh. Cannibalism is normalised, and there are strict rules separating people from livestock - punishable by ending up on a service platter as a rare and exotic meat-with-a-name dish. Marcos has sworn off meat since his son's passing, and with his father lost to dementia he spends time in a nearby abandoned zoo with the memories of visiting it as a boy and what life was like before the "Transition". But he undergoes a revelation when a female "head" with sought-after First Generation Pure branding is delivered to him as a gift and starts seeing her as something more than an animal.
Bazterrica's cannibalistic premise is not entirely original. Neal Barrett Jr's Through Darkest America is the obvious inspiration. But while his was a post-apocalyptic cowboy adventure in a society based around herding human livestock, Tender's future is fully industrialised and otherwise no different to our own. And through Marcos, Bazterrica is able to slide her world building into his every day. It's not subtle, but neither does it take the form of egregious info dumps. And so we see the killing and butchery process, how strains are selected, the presentation of meat at social occasions, and the consequences - emptier cities, new euphemisms and hypocrisies, and authoritarian moralities backed by grisly punishments.
Originally published in Argentina in 2017, Tender will forever be timely because it's a treatise on dehumanisation. Most obviously, the livestock are denied their humanity by their separation from people and the laws that govern them. Like Darkest America, sexual relations between people and cattle are strictly forbidden and punishable by death. Breeding is strictly controlled, and there are mountains of paperwork behind every livestock pregnancy. Ownership is also strictly regulated. Human cattle cannot be trained up and deployed as slaves, and doing so is a capital offence. The dehumanisation, however, doesn't end there. A society thus constituted is universally rebarbative. Consumers, typified by Marcos's idle sister Marisa, want their cuts of human meat - she takes pride at presenting an arm at her father's memorial service. Those who cannot afford meat congregate outside slaughterhouses, hoping to pounce on an escapee or stray or, occasionally, will attack a livestock transport. In one such assault toward the novel's end, these people - dubbed Scavengers - raid a truck and butcher its cargo on the spot, up to and including eating them "fresh". We also have the Church of Immolation. Its role is to provide industrial cannibalism spiritual sanction by "donating" volunteers as willing sacrifices. Having taken leave of their senses, when the holy delegations depart they're stunned and thrown to the Scavengers outside. There is a ready cottage industry in hunting, and laboratories conducting Mengele-style experiments on livestock are among the new normal. Marcos views all this with a cynical and occasionally disquieted eye, but the ending - which hits like a bolt gun to the forehead - shows how dehumanised he also is.
The comment on the instrumentalism of capitalism is not far from the surface, but it never becomes clumsy nor does it get in the way of the storytelling. The writing is spot on, the amoral vacuity of all the characters is well rendered, and as a relatively short work it never outstays its welcome. She is able to get across the full horror of this world without much in the way of gratuity. There is less of an ick factor than Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, for instance. Tender is undoubtedly one of the best literary SF novels of this century, and Bazterrica deserves every success this has brought her.
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