In 1968, the scientist John Calhoun created a new kind of mouse. Inside a barn with sloping mock-Dutch roofs, Calhoun had designed a habitat he called Universe 25. For the colony of white mice he placed there, it was a perfect metropolis in which to eat, play, grow, and breed—except that there were no exits. Without predation or disease, the inhabitants of Universe 25 were soon at standing room only. What surprised Calhoun was that once they reached this level of overcrowding, the mice were calm. They didn’t fight or go into sexual frenzies, as other mice had in Calhoun’s previous experiments in low-level crowding. Instead, the colony went numb. Post-mortems on some female mice showed their embryos withdrawn back into the womb; other females lost the ability to rear young. Even if they survived infancy and were placed within a healthy population outside, mice born in the late stages of Universe 25 mice did not—could not—thrive.
Some male mice, meanwhile, withdrew from society altogether. Apathetic, asocial, and asexual, they huddled in an inert mass in one of the Universe’s elevated “towers,” isolating themselves to focus on personal grooming. Calhoun referred to these mice as “the Beautiful Ones.” The Beautiful Ones looked as put together as dandies on a boulevard but, as Calhoun observed, their closeness was more like a cluster of oblivion than companionship. Occasionally, the intrusion of a dominant male from the lower reaches of Universe 25 would cause a Beautiful One to go berserk, attacking its nearby fellows indiscriminately; yet the assaulted Beautiful Ones would not react. The mice’s development had been severely stunted by the conditions of Universe 25: Calhoun characterized them as 18-year-olds with the cognitive capacity of 8-month-olds, exhibiting a “pathological togetherness” that precluded complex behavior. They no longer did the things mice are supposed to do. Calhoun determined that the Beautiful Ones were, at the level of Universe 25 society, functionally dead.
Like Calhoun, the novelist Pip Adam examines how her subjects act as the walls around them close in. It’s an experiment she’s been running for some fifteen years; her four novels and one short story collection form a kind of longitudinal study of the claustrophobia of working- and middle-class life in Aotearoa New Zealand. But unlike a scientist, Adam is free to hypothesize beyond the conventions of behavioral psychology, toward the mindfuck of being a mouse with nowhere to go. The last surviving mouse in Universe 25, nicknamed the Grand Old Lady, eked out a month alone in the rubble of a once thriving colony. Calhoun said the scientists working on Universe 25 didn’t mourn her death, because, as he remarked to the WashingtonPost, “You can’t identify with nothing.” Adam’s latest book asks: Can’t you?
Audition begins with a conversation between three astronauts. One of them, Alba, used to play on the spaceship’s basketball court. Now she has grown so big that she only has room to sit in an upright curl, neck bent toward her knees; when Alba sighs, her head bumps the ceiling. It hurts. She can’t see the other surviving astronauts, Stanley and Drew, contorted in the same predicament, but she can hear them talking—“the sound more like touch,” observes Alba, “now we are all squashed so close to the walls, almost part of the walls.”
We soon get to the crux of the situation: The three astronauts were already giants when they got on the ship, but they fit. Somewhere on their journey through space, however, they made a mistake; now, as punishment, the spaceship is forcing their bodies to grow further—rapidly and to seemingly unlimited size. (How the ship exerts this kind of control over their bodies, the giants don’t know. Gravity?) The only way to slow the pace of change is to make noise. But since they can no longer move their limbs to produce claps, crashes, or bangs, Alba, Stanley, and Drew must talk—constantly.
The problem is that they aren’t sure what say. The giant astronauts are also unable to account for who they are, how they came to be here, or where they’re going. (The reader starts to wonder: Are the giants unable to remember the past, or prohibited from discussing it?)
Thanks to Adam’s gifted ear for the inadequacies of speech, the dialogue is both disquieting and funny. The giants harp on the same point, don’t really listen to each other, babble long strings of questions. There are echoes of Samuel Beckett here, although Adam’s astronauts are peaceable and disinclined to the staccato poetry of Beckettian crosstalk. Their attempts at party-line rhetoric are particularly artless. Drew, making a nervous foray into conversation: “I feel like I want to say, They have done a good job of building this beautiful spacecraft called Audition and we are all lucky to be inside her.” This is science fiction besieged by the banality of its astronauts.
Since her debut short story collection in 2010, Adam’s books have been published at a steady clip by Te Herenga Waka Press (formerly Victoria University Press), in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. Her work is now beginning to reach the US audience it deserves. Her second novel, The New Animals, was reissued by Dorothy in 2023; last June, Coffee House Press released the US edition of Audition. From astronauts straining against the walls of their spaceship to women watching the cycle of addiction close in around them, Adam’s protagonists tend to be trapped in place, their desires and physical needs frustrated. The title story of Adam’s 2010 collection, Everything We Hoped For, opens with a new mother experiencing postpartum dissociation as she lies wrecked in her hospital room. In “The Kiss,” a New Zealand Army squadron returns from East Timor for Christmas; it’s supposed to be holiday leave, but the only place the protagonists are at ease is the barracks. In “This Is Better,” the owners of a dollar store hire a mystery shopper to visit every month to test a long-serving employee: their 33-year-old son, whose queerness they monitor as a kind of chronic disability.
In Adam’s first novel, I’m Working on a Building (2013), the personal claustrophobia of Everything We Hoped For scales up to social vertigo. After an earthquake levels New Zealand’s capital city, the government decides to boost national “confidence” by recreating the world’s tallest building in the Southern Alps, a mountain range uplifted by the massive geological fault where the Australian and Pacific tectonic plates meet. Catherine, a structural engineer, laughs grimly at this “clusterfuck.” After years of working on prestige projects, she’s become accustomed to clients who prize spectacle over safety or shelter. Her buildings aren’t designed for people; they’re designed for economic “growth” and the investment class who espouse growth’s virtues. “Catherine makes traps,” another character realizes. “Traps and prisons.”
Across three subsequent books, Adam has continued to refine her experiment in hostile habitats, methodically reducing the physical and economic footprint her characters are permitted to occupy. The New Animals (2017) follows a group of middle-aged fashion workers who helped define the avant-garde scene in Tāmaki-Makaurau Auckland in the nineties. But by 2016, Karangahape Road, once a hotbed of rebellion and invention, has become a playground for the adult children of property developers and bankers. The old hands find themselves commuting from bashed-in flats in the outer suburbs to labor over a trust-fund kid’s half-baked vision of the perfect white T-shirt—charity cases on the street they once loved. Nothing to See (2021) allows its protagonists even less room to move. A pair of identical women—clones, we soon learn—must share one birth certificate, one vote, one tax ID, one chance at social benefits. And then Adam arrives at Audition, where giants are shunted from one form of physical imprisonment to another. Eventually, their own bodies become straightjackets; even to breathe is to take up too much space.
These escalating restrictions narrow Adam’s inquiry to an acute point. In conditions such as these, how can her subjects resist the fate of Calhoun’s mice—the apathy of the Beautiful Ones, the isolation of the Grand Old Lady? And how can their author, a scientist-god who builds “traps and prisons” in order to learn something about society, venture beyond the plotline of political despair?
In its first act,The New Animals dresses as a ticking-clock industry satire. The old Karangahape Road crowd—pattern-cutters, machinists, hairdressers—bite their tongues laughing when their entitled young employers propose to reinvent the leather jacket. (In twenty-four hours, this unimaginative pairing of leather and lace needs to be ready for an expensive photoshoot—it’s an emergency!) But the novel is a bait and switch. All the glinting specificity of the hours counted down, the heartache in old friendships, and the dizzying verisimilitude of Adam’s social geography of Karangahape Road are tossed away by a minor character, a makeup artist, who seizes the storyline, abandons the city and the photoshoot, and wades into Auckland harbor. The makeup artist starts swimming and doesn’t stop. She grows scales. Through force of will—or force of fantasy—she learns to breathe under water.
It turns out Elodie—a hitherto passive, quiet character—has been waiting for her moment of metamorphosis. Adam administers the abrupt transformation as deliberate shock to the reader’s system. The first half of The New Animals is a study in group dynamics; the story unfolds in more or less real time, as a close-knit community chafes under pressures that are once “foreign” (gentrifiers raise the rent) and parochial (a small place where everyone knows everybody can still splinter into selfishness). Elodie’s plot, by contrast, is pure misanthropy. By the makeup artist’s calculation, property speculation and climate change mean Karangahape Road is as good as underwater already; her friends and colleagues might as well have drowned. She begins swimming, and Adam follows her stream of consciousness, in a mesmeric surge through a marine landscape that is not prepared for Elodie’s force of will: Gentle Elodie punches an octopus and rips the flesh off a shark.
Bit by bit, Adam hints that we should see this pivot into quasi–science fiction as a sign not of Elodie’s madness but of her entitlement. “She was the colonizer of this new land,” Elodie tells herself: “She was prime minister, developer, real estate agent.” In a book about gentrification, Elodie’s quest to claim dominion, even if it’s just over a floating trash heap, is less a novelist’s flight of fancy than a thesis of capitalism’s inevitable self-cannibalization. Elodie’s gorgeous and horrifying optimism in her own ascendancy propels her through unchartered water, as her human skin flakes away.
Nothing to See, published four years later, starts from a premise that ought to be out-and-out science fiction: After a spontaneous cloning event one night in 1994, a woman named Margaret stirs from a state of extreme intoxication and finds that she is now two women, Peggy and Greta. Several dozen other New Zealand women have the same experience. But their situation attracts neither scientific attention nor legal investigation—nor, for that matter, government support. With acid acuity, Adam depicts a New Zealand government that simply ignores the doubled women. Peggy and Greta must do as everyone else does: no special treatment, no allowances. Is this bureaucratic incuriosity? Negligence? Or something more sinister?
As the miraculous event is met with social indifference and economic exclusion, Adam’s speculative scenario starts to look less like sci-fi intrigue and instead distressingly close to business as usual. Peggy and Greta, our clone protagonists, spend most of the book just scraping by. They teach themselves not to think about the bigger picture. Even near the end of the book, they are still resolutely determined not to look too closely at their circumstances:
Their lives had been so strange, and the strangeness made them feel vulnerable. They had an idea that the rules didn’t fully apply to them. It was the most dangerous place their minds went. The idea that they were special, somehow singled out—that idea could kill them.
Are Peggy and Greta the product of a simulation engineered by some higher power? It doesn’t really matter. By the end of the novel, the rules of play are shifting so rapidly that, as their friend Heidi, another clone, points out, there might as well be no rules at all.
“So nothing means anything?” said Peggy, and Heidi shrugged. “And nothing matters?”
“Those are two different things,” Heidi said.
Peggy and Greta didn’t say anything.
“Those two things only look like the same thing if you think you can win,” Heidi said. “And you can’t.”
“What matters, then?” Greta said.
“The keeping going,” Heidi said.
Much of the novel is dedicated to the labor of “keeping going”: making ends meet, staying sober, desperately trying not to draw attention to one’s own weirdness. For the most part, the cloning event only exacerbates hardships that are already widespread. The prospect of Peggy and Greta busting out of this closed system of shrinking rooms and shrinking wages seems no less ludicrous than that of a drunk woman self-duplicating overnight. Nothing to See is a counter-experiment within the walls of a larger one: Ultimately, the question is not what cloning does to the women, but rather, what will Peggy and Greta—queer, poor, alcoholic, pathologically together women—do with the little space they’ve got?
Nothing to See is, in part, the story of Peggy and Greta’s discovery of their own taste, skills, proclivities. They are often sad, and often brilliant in their capacity for hope. The discovery of their ability to make a cost-efficient quiche is a eureka moment. I found myself rooting for them to enjoy more material comforts—to better understand how to game the system and to be happier, but also, as if I just couldn’t help myself, to become richer.
Many of Adam’s characters are similarly skeptical of their conditions, yet they still scamper after the baubles tossed into a highly regulated maze. In The New Animals, Sharona and Carla and Duey find beauty in the construction of a white T-shirt and a crew cut. After their quiche-baking era, Peggy and Greta find respite from their ongoing disenfranchisement via sourdough bread and playing the video game RollerCoaster Tycoon. These are the lovely, unreasonable riches of human artistry. But caring about beauty—finding hope in it—is a bind. Sharona, her arms in agony from holding the perfect white T-shirt aloft while her boss hems and haws over whether he likes the design, realizes sadly that she cares too much to simply walk away. “That was the problem,” she thinks. “Everything becomes bearable. Eventually.” Adam’s characters rely upon these artifacts to make injustice endurable, if not excusable.
By the time we get to Audition, material “betterment”—and accompanying class mobility—is simply unavailable. Our astronauts have no future and certainly no baubles to chase. Indeed, there is almost nothing to look at other than their own bodies, the walls, and, if their faces are squashed in the right direction, the stars. This time, Adam doesn’t want us to get distracted by the byproducts of the experiment—she wants us to look at its formula.
As the novel progresses, we piece together a little more about the giant astronauts of Audition. On Earth, they were brainwashed in a mysterious “classroom,” and this earlier period of captivity is described from the point of view of the giants’ jailer, a lackey named Torren. Some of the giants’ opening dialogue is explained, but not too much; close-third-person prose must be two-thirds restraint, and Adam, even in her most exuberant form, never abandons a character’s perspective.
Given that we have so little to go on, the basis for our allegiance to Alba, Stanley, and Drew must be simply that they are people, and we want them freed from imprisonment. We can’t take back that solidarity later, when we learn of the violence the giants have perpetuated on Earth. It turns out that before the cages of the spaceship and the classroom, Alba and Stanley were incarcerated in a New Zealand women’s prison. Alba had already relinquished so much of her autonomy—and her sense of her right to it—that she didn’t think to ask where she would be locked up. Later in the book, she will remember the ability to wonder about such things as a kind of hopefulness between her and Stanley:
One day, back in the prison when they were still close, Stanley had said to Alba, “Are we near the sea?” and Alba said, “Are we?” and looked around as if she were trying to smell the sea air.
“I thought I heard the sea,” Stanley had said biting the nail of his thumb.
“Oh,” Alba said. Then someone from across the table, someone who had been listening because every conversation belonged to everyone who was in earshot of it, said, “It’s the road.”
Another author might coax her readers into a sympathy that hinges on similarity, or mercy, or the promise that the giants will repent and change. Adam, who is writing toward abolition, not social reform, knows that’s not enough. At the pre-flight reeducation camp, for instance, the jailer, Torren, comes to enjoy the giants’ company. But neither affinity with the prisoner nor skepticism about the camp’s operations is enough to propel her into meaningful action against the torture she witnesses. Torren, neither unusually cruel nor exceptionally kind, can’t see what’s in it for her.
Rather than create opportunities for similarly milquetoast morality and wobbly reasoning, Adam forces her readers to commit to the giants outright and upfront, and base our solidarity purely on the principle that no one should be in a cage.
The astronauts’ confinement is a denunciation of all imprisonment, but what Alba, Stanley, and Drew endure is also Adam’s charge against the New Zealand prison system in particular. The country’s incarceration rate is high, at 181 incarcerated per 100,000 people, and, thanks to recent legislation that caps judges’ ability to reduce sentences based on mitigating factors (such as a defendant’s intellectual disability or mental illness), it is set to rise even higher, with more people put away for longer. This will particularly affect Māori, the Indigenous people of Aotearoa, who make up more than 50 percent of the total prison population and more than 80 percent of imprisoned young people.
In Audition, the government is reduced to two visible functions: space exploration and criminal justice. One branch is expansionist and future-facing, the other physically restrictive and fixated on the past. This is not a contradiction but maintenance of the status quo. A purposeful holding pattern of growth and discipline means that each branch perpetuality demands more investment in the other. In a prison ship hurtling through the cosmos, Adam pairs colonization and the carceral system as codependent interests.
The nickname of Adam’s prison ship, Audition, suggests that the giants are being “tried out” for a new role with more ominous implications: that they are on probation, perhaps, that the route is untested, or that the voyage is a rehearsal for a larger assault on the cosmos. A New Zealand reader might also catch a whiff of HMS Endeavour, the ship captained by James Cook in 1769 on the “journey of discovery” that marked the start of British colonization in the Pacific. The giants may have been reeducated, but they still know where they stand on this one: “Cook’s a cunt,” they tell each other. “Nobody wants to be compared to Cook.” Yet even as they voice their rebellion, they are living out the trajectory of Cook’s endeavor. Their disreputable bodies are rendered alien by the state, forcibly removed, and subjected to surveillance and torture. Meanwhile, whoever has set their flight path seems to have seized a chance to optimize. A ship advancing into new territory, manned by disposable people? Interplanetary cannon fodder.
In the second half of the book, the spaceship hurtles through an event horizon of a black hole. Adam, in flinging her giants out of New Zealand, off Earth, and into a new dimension, definitively ejects them from storylines of striving rewarded (home ownership, holding down a job), just desserts (poverty and addiction, imprisonment, social ostracization), and redemption. This isn’t science fiction world-building so much as value realignment.
“The event horizon,” the physicist Avi Loeb writes, in an epigram to the second act of Audition, “is the ultimate prison wall—one can get in but never get out.” But in Adam’s reckoning, being walled in is a condition to which many Earthlings are already accustomed. After surviving political economies predicated on hierarchy and punishment, what makes the blockade of an event horizon so frightening? The astronauts, having entered the black hole, have no desire or expectation of returning to their past lives; indeed, Alba briefly wonders if they have died and gone to heaven. What’s more, given the unfamiliarity of their surroundings, there is nothing to suggest they are giants—a relative term, after all. Here, they are just Alba, Stanley, and Drew.
In this new place, Alba can remember her past. But the person she finds there is unforgivable; her memories are evidence against her. And in this new place, where the only expectation is a modest amount of cooperative labor, there’s not much opportunity for Alba to project her horror outward, angrily, as she once did. We are on a planet that is so unfamiliar that it exists mostly as headspace, and Adam’s narration in this period of self-discovery, following Alba in close third-person, mixes wonder with raw self-hatred—the latter so painful that Alba wonders if the warm welcome of psychic unfettering offered by this planet might actually be a sophisticated form of hostile diplomacy.
But if the mission of the spaceship Audition was to send forth a wrecking ball of brainwashed muscle into parts unknown, Alba, Stanley, and Drew make a very poor showing as proto-colonizers. Once disgorged from the ship, the giants are too overjoyed by their relative freedom to be interested in asserting authority over anyone else. Drew even goes so far as to warn the locals: “The people who sent us. . . . They will probably eat you alive if you give them any room at all.” The locals, who seem to have worked out that properly free people are the least likely to feel the need to colonize others, are unworried: “Well, they haven’t come here. You have.”
Universe 25 was a hit with the media, but John Calhoun would be distressed to see his experiment seized on by advocates for population control, who pointed to it as proof of the inevitability of urban decay, in campaigns that increasingly targeted the global poor as the cause of their own suffering.
Calhoun felt that this was a misreading of the experiment’s results. His finding was not that population density would cause what he called “death of the spirit”; after all, his mice continued to withdraw socially even as their numbers declined. This—and the fact that the mice of Universe 25 became so distinctly strange—suggested that the experiment revealed little about what was a “natural” behavioral response to crowding, and a great deal about how environmental conditions profoundly affect psychological health.
To Calhoun, Universe 25 ultimately showed the necessity of improving urban planning: If inadequate space had such a clearly negative effect on a population, what might change if we invested in making high-density dwellings not merely habitable, but livable?
Unlike a scientist, a novelist can lay Universe 25–style confinement side-by-side with Utopia. In Audition, when Alba, Stanley, and Drew enter the event horizon, they transition from astronauts conditioned by a punitive experiment to aliens encountering an unknown place. They pass through a cloudy pink and purple atmosphere, submerge in an underwater garden, and pause under twinned suns that give them each two shadows, one sharp and one diffuse. And because the beings who live on this planet are unafraid of them, the Earthlings spend the last section of the book wandering unsupervised. The desperate, empty performance of social interaction with which Audition opened is replaced, in its final pages, with walking.
It takes Alba some time to recognize the planet’s absence of walls as permissiveness. Her old habit of pushing against her surroundings is not quite right, and not quite possible, in this new space, in which there is “no competition for food or space or rest.” In truth, it’s not crowding but proximity she longs for: sex, touch, thoughts unvoiced but shared. In the Universe that was the prison ship Audition, the walls stuck to her skin. In the Utopia inside the black hole, it’s plant life that reaches out to hold Alba, Stanley, and Drew. “The ground beneath them murmuring in response to their movements,” Adam writes,
wrapping frond, blade, trichome in the tiniest embrace waking their skin, moaning through their bodies’ speeding hearts, shallowing breath, broadcasting through mycelium and root to all the world back into the liquid and the liquid shouts back.
Food, space, rest. Also: extra sunlight and the erotic intelligence of ferns against skin. It’s not so much to ask of a habitat.
Like Calhoun, the novelist Pip Adam examines how her subjects act as the walls around them close in. It’s an experiment she’s been running for some fifteen years; her four novels and one short story collection form a kind of longitudinal study of the claustrophobia of working- and middle-class life in Aotearoa New Zealand.
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