The Colony

by Jillian Weise

Anne Hatley is a sharp-witted and acerbic young teacher from the South, in need of a reprieve from the drudgery of work and an increasingly tedious relationship. She accepts an invitation to the nation’s largest research colony, where scientists—DNA pioneer James D. Watson among them—hope to “cure” Anne of a rare gene that affects her bone growth: She is missing a leg and walks with a prosthesis. Anne feels fine the way she is, and she strives to maintain her resolve under pressure from her peers and from doctors eager to pioneer an experimental procedure, which would make her the first patient to generate a new leg. Meanwhile, she falls into a reluctant romance with the rakish Nick, possessor of the “suicide gene”; befriends Charles Darwin, who is on site digging through the eugenics archive; and attempts to come to terms with her first love.

The Colony is the story of one young woman struggling to accept who she is, and who she will become. It is also a novel that mines some of the most polarizing issues of our time—among them, medical ethics, body image, and genetic engineering.

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Disability, Dystopia, Science Fiction Fantasy, Disability Studies

340 pages, Paperback

First published February 10, 2010

About the author

The Cyborg Jillian Weise (Cy/Cy's/Cyself, also She/Hers) is a poet, video artist and activist. Recent essays include Common Cyborg and The Dawn of the Tryborg. Cy started Borg 4 Borg Productions and directed the film A KIM DEAL PARTY ft. Eileen Myles, Patricia Lockwood, Alice Wong and more. From 2016-2020, Weise performed the fictional character of Tipsy Tullivan across social.

Reviews

[martha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked:
- the unconventional way this was written -- the interludes of lists, etc
- the protagonist, generally
- the commentary on ableism and genetic ethics

I didn't so much like:
- how eventually the characters got so ~*~quirky~*~ that they were paper dolls doing things that don't make sense with no consequences. Character X makes a suicide attempt (real? fake?) and within one sentence -- in the middle of the scene! -- it's completely forgotten, never to be mentioned again. The main character acts super cold (to her love interest) or false (cheerily telling people being incredibly rude that it's fine) most of the time, and it's often hard to understand why. (I also couldn't get into the love interest calling everyone baby the second he met them; who does that?)
- the Darwin bits got fairly tedious as the book went on. In general, the pacing was fairly slow.

[Tara Chevrestt · Rating 4 out of 5]

For 5,000 dollars a month, would you go live in a colony and allow scientists to poke, prod, analyze, and attempt to modify or mutate your genes?

Clink on link to read full review...

http://wwwbookbabe.blogspot.com/2010/...

[Tracy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have mixed feelings about this. In terms of self-identity and ableism, spot on and 5 stars. And I thought the layering of story with interludes was great, really interesting and they complemented the story well.

I expected, and didn't get, a more ... thorough exploration of the ethics of genetic modification. And I was expecting more 'science' in a book set in a research colony, among the human guinea pigs being experimented on, but that was not to be.

But I was extremely annoyed by the elements of magical realism that started intruding. I honestly feel that they not only failed to bring anything to the story, in the end they made it weaker. When Mercedes' 'treatment' took, I put down the book for over a week out of annoyance. When Darwin's existence was confirmed to be seen by others, I pushed through just to get the book over with. That aspect made me want to give it 1 stars.

I'm giving it more because what was done well, was done great, but enough was done poorly that I don't know I'll try anything from the author in the future.

[Linda Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant debut. This book has been on my hold list for a year. Checked at the library and it had been reshelved at its home library, and I forgot why I'd held it, and where I'd discovered I wanted to read it. So when the book did arrive, I was ready for some interesting surprises. Jillian Weise is a skilled writer, a keen observer of the human condition, and a smart and sassy reviewer of the ridiculous. I haven't found many modern novels that feature fully-formed women. Dimensional, complicated, rich, vital woman. Anne Hatley is at the top of that list. I laughed out loud, I looked up some of the genome science, I scowled at Gee, and walked the path with Leonard, Nick, Mercedes and followed Eliot's trail of pistachio shells around The Colony. I hung up on Grayson, offered Charles Darwin a Winston. Weise's novel may be a new genre, one I'll work to find an algorithm to discover others like it.

[Kiesha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Woot, woot!

I loved the interludes between chapters in this book. It felt sort of like poetry that I could grasp, and that is a rare occurrence. After Langston Hughes, Weise is the probably the only poet/novelist out there who can hook me with a poem. I really liked the blend of snarky, sassy dialogue and sci-fi/futuristic don't-drink-the-water-or-trust-the-doctors eugenics plot.

Weise is a great friend from my BsAs days and we hung out together a lot when she was working on The Colony, so I felt an intimate connection with this book. She was pretty much done with the actual writing when our burgeoning friendship took flight, but we talked about it often. It felt like I waited forever before I was able to get my hands on a copy, but it was worth the wait.

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing first novel. It reminded me of other outstanding books set in a dysfunctional future, books like THE HANDMAID'S TALE or FAHRENHEIT 451. The protagonist, Anne Hatley, is also insanely likeable. She's both intelligent and childlike, sexy and cold, thoughtful and impulsive—demonstrating a wonderful complexity to which we can all relate. But finally—and possibly most importantly—I loved the book because of what it said about the expectations society puts on us to be "normal" and/or to fit in. THE COLONY shows both why that's impossible and why it's so unimportant, letting all of us who don't fit in the "typical" box embrace a character for whom we feel great empathy. A simply stunning book.

[Ellen Mcgrath · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am familiar with Jillian's poetry and was super-pumped to discover her fiction. The story is interesting and the ways in which Weise weaves in historical research adds to the plot. I like the short, titled chapters, especially those interludes that almost feel like wry metacommentary. The protagonist's ambivalence about relationships, her life, the ambitions of geneticists to "repair" a condition she has always known (she has one leg, the other being a sophisticated prosthetic leg) make her an interesting character; the romantic interest in som ways distracts us from the protagonist's aporia. But the romance and sex are important in the novel, and Weise is at times hilarious in the ways in which the sex is treated in the words/views of the young protagonist. Several issues related to disability are dealt with (ie., the sex-positive approach works against a tendency to desexualize PWDs), but they are worked into a novel that is more a po-mo work of speculative fiction in the tradition of Pynchon than it is an ostensibly "disability-themed" work. This in itself is an important feature of the book. There are also some amazing pop-cultural critiques at work in relation to the issue of genetics as a corporate industry, some awesome implausibilities (one character at the colony, Marlene, who is being treated because she carries a gene for obesity, becomes so light she floats away) that in their outlandishness make me think of the implausibilities that actually occur in our lives today, and wonderful anachronistic interactions between the protagonist and Darwin. Not to mention wicked smart-ass turns of phrase, especially in the protagonist's dialogue.

[Elaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely well written -- funny and poetic and terribly sad and moving at the same time. The scientific satire was crisp and original, and the meditations, both comic and deeply serious, on what it means to have one leg (be different) are mesmerizing.

I resisted the fantastic nature of some parts -- like the Darwin interludes (I like my sci fi "realistic", which is my problem), but eventually let go and enjoyed the author's playfulness.

What I didn't come around to was what seemed like the repetitive push and pull of the narrator's relationship with Nick, too much coming together and coming apart and coming together and being jealous and... This was the slightest part of the book (Nick was a little too yummy to be true) and yet got too much weight.

But a powerful writer to a watch.

[Caleb Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

Click the image to watch the video book review



It’s been a while since I’ve done a book review. It feels weird, like I’m returning to an abandoned lover, hoping for a warm reception. Please, viewer, take me back!

This time I’m looking at The Colony by Jillian Weise, a novel about a science collective/get-away for people with genetic abnormalities. But this book is less The X-Men and more if Gilmore Girls had predispositions to suicide and strange abilities to grow missing appendages. Trust me, it makes sense.

[Sarah Talley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciated the exploration of science and genetics. I also thought the book was overall very well-written. I appreciated the Darwin scenes, as well as the exploration of how the 'disabled' are treated in society. I thought the book had a voice often unrepresented. The female character was strong and interesting, sexual and powerful.

At times, the book seemed to be wandering, with the sudden disappearance of Mercedes and the back and forth with Nick. It kind of fell apart a bit at the end, and the sex scenes, although interesting, were perhaps too frequent. It could have been refined a little more, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. It moved quickly and examines interesting issues.

[Diana Tilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jillian is so much cooler than me, I'm always surprised that she's my friend. This is a fantastic novel. Read it.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

A prescient satire about ableism, genetic engineering, and the morality of science & medicine, with a brilliantly messy protagonist whose love life is a train wreck.

[Wyatt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay, this is from a rough draft paper I just wrote, so it's going to be dry and thorough...The Colony is the story of a young woman, Anne Hatley, who is invited to a research facility in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, along with other paid volunteers who are also having their “genetic deficiencies” tested. Anne was born with one leg and has been mostly unhindered by it in her social and romantic life. Through the process of synthetic genomics, the researchers eventually attempt to grow a new second leg for her.
This is Juliane Weise’s first novel. It is a variant of “chick lit" infused with post-modern, technologically-conscious comedy in the vain of Douglass Coupland’s J Pod or James P. Othmer’s The Futurist.
I was reading his along with Michael Crichton's Next. Despite the purposeful meandering of his narrative, he takes a rather straight-forward approach to the subject matter, illuminating the scientific possibilities, the economics and the politics of genetics, whereas Weise’s strong point is instead her representation of human beings undergoing genetic treatment, throughout which they retain a level of humor, uncertainty, mysticism and romance in the face of rational science. The successes and failures of the genetic researchers become part of the patient’s story of human existence within the colony, rather than the other way around. Thus, the multiplicity of human experience avoids being absorbed or reduced by science.
The Colony, does much to undercut the idea of biological determinism. Weise’s methods involve employing surrealism as a stylistic subversion of rationalism. Over the course of the novel Anne is repeatedly visited by two apparitions, Charles Darwin and an entity she calls “Old Faithful.” Old Faithful (I think) is the metaphysically pure embodiment of her first love. He is at once her old boyfriend and simultaneously love in Platonic form. Old Faithful is her comfort, familiarity, consistency and groundedness, versus Darwin, the spirit of evolution, who appears to Anne for the first time once she enters the colony.
In her more lucid life, Anne experiences this same tension between idealistic love (Old Faithful) and evolution (Darwin). Though she’s evolving physically, growing a new leg, her true evolution is primarily the social-emotional evolution as a 25-year-old woman. These tensions are played out between her dwindling relationship with her boyfriend Grayson and her budding romance with Nick, a fellow resident at the colony who supposedly has “the suicide gene.”
Anne’s personal trifles and ambivalence about between clinging to a ideal and/or evolving to the realities of the present moment, parallel the tensions that we face on a greater scale when it comes to our treatment of technology. This is Weise’s roundabout way of keeping humanity front-and-center while addressing the possibilities and the dangers genetics. She creates a realistic character while drawing attention to larger issues without making Anne into a trope. Anne’s flaws are not just having one leg, but common human shortcomings: infidelity, escapism, failure to attend to a friend’s needs.
Anne’s conversations with Darwin in particular have a resonance to something greater than her own life experience. The two have seemingly passé discussions about eugenics only to note that at the core, the old fashioned concepts mirror what is currently happening with genetics. By including Darwin, Weise displays a repetition in history which breaks the assumed paradigm that we are always moving forward to new precedents. Meanwhile, Anne is aware that she more agile on her old robotic leg, just as she is more at ease in her former relationship. This is one of Anne’s question, which is both personal and universal: are we truly moving forward? It is personal in terms of her love life and universal with respect to our love affair with technology.
The absurdity of Anne’s visitations by spirits cause the reader to wonder which is truly the more absurd in her reality: her fanciful conversations with Darwin and Old Faithful or the bare bones fact that they are trying to grow her a new leg.
There is a poetic nature to The Colony and though there are decipherable allusions in her inclusion of Darwin and Old Faithful, other magic realism moments and metaphors go unanswered. Some speculation can be made on the situation of her friend Mercedes however, whose gene therapy cause her to begin to levitate. Mercedes, a slim-bodied beautician in her thirties, has been diagnosed with “the fat gene” that threatens to make her obese, though no observable evidence of this has ever been recorded. During a party at the colony, the ropes tying Mercedes are accidentally loosed and she floats away into the air. In this moment, there is both biblical transcendence and a moment of failure—the failure of the human community to tend to a friend, and the failure of science to safeguard its test subjects.
There are warnings in Weise’s novel. It is not without tragedies such as Mercedes disappearance, but, by and large, she takes a Vonnegut-inspired tack toward technology. There's certain level of humorous non-correspondence between the genes that the characters have been diagnosed with and their behavior. Mercedes, though possessor of the “fat” gene has a physique that makes people falsely accuse her of anorexia, and ultimately she becomes lighter than air and practically evaporates. Nick, the holder of the “suicide gene” is in fact a happy-go-lucky lover boy and remains that way. What Weise emphasizes tactfully is the option for uncertaintly and for the poetic. By giving precedence to the non-sequitor, she subverts the idea of the supposed determinism of the gene sequence.
The title of the book, The Colony, can represent itself in several ways, to be taken as a reference not only to the group of characters but to colonies manifesting in cell culture. Weise plays with the word, conflating the human level and the cellular level, an appropriate title for a novel that teases out the relationship between the two. Colony also implies a power dynamic. Who is colonizing and who is being colonized? At certain points in the novel the relationship between doctors and research subjects moves from congenial to adversarial, especially when the assumed superiority of the worldview of science is being pushed forward.
The multiple meanings in Weise’s title is similar to Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit (2009), another novel about a collective of human beings being used for bio-medical purposes. The Unit refers to the idea that we can all be measured in terms of exploitable units, that that our bodies can be quantified, objectified or even sold, but alternatively, it refers to the family unit, and most obviously, to the name of the facility where the characters (a group of unwilling organ donors) are being held. Both of these titles subvert a rationalistic term and to bring the focus back to a community of human beings: the (family) unit and the colony.
I couldn't say which of these two is better. They're both good.

[Bob · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. Got about 1/3 into it and still waiting for a plot beyond random stuff happening. I get its supposed to be about one person's journey and other stuff but you still need a plot to knit it together.

[Johanna Markson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unreadable. Just didn't care where it was going and what she had to say.

[Brian Tucker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favorite line:

You are willfully murdering the roses.

[Natalie Rynczak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked this up off the street - not what I might have chosen for myself, but a strong narrator with a great voice.

[Carley Blank · Rating 3 out of 5]

While not my favorite read this year, this book is a real conversation starter. You definitely need at least 2 other people to talk about it with. It’s made to be dissected.

[Audacia Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very funny and bizarre. If you liked Orphan Black, you will like this book.

[Slinkyboy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny, moving, weird, crass, disturbing, thought-provoking... and wonderful.

It's been a while since a book surprised me as much as this one did.

[Kristy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thought provoking at times. While this book raises some good points about the ethics of genetics and ableism, in general it was just weird and not my cup of tea.

[Владимир Ленин · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought that this was a highly entertaining book, especially with the unexplained "Darwin" appearances. The only thing that I didn't like was the abrupt ending to the story.

[Beth Wemple · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an odd book! Confusing, original and utterly fascinating. Read it dudes!

[ruralisolationshortie · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of the best books ive read all year. i am truly in awe of this book. a strong writer, incredibly funny. i checked this out from the library but im gonna buy a copy to keep at my desk

[Avi · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book! The concept and themes were what drew me in, but I just couldn’t get on board with the writing. It was super confusing and felt sort of aimless to me.

[WBTM BOOKSHELF]

Author interview @ Bomb Magazine:
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/201...

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Using human beings as literary guinea pigs is not an unheard of practice—so many authors explore elements of their lives or their world through their writing, things and occurrences that they would have no other way of experiencing—but Jillian Weise takes this conceit into new territory. In her hands, the five test subjects at the core of The Colony are victims to their genetics in ways only magical realism can allow. Magical realism, albeit sparingly used.

In The Colony, we’re introduced to Anne Hatley, a woman born with only one leg—and a mutated gene that, if prodded through science, could allow for her second leg to grow from the stump that already exists. Anne, along with four others, has signed up to be a part of the ambiguous colony of the book’s title, where she and the others will undergo a variety of tests and therapies designed to understand and alter their unique physiologies.

All this would sound like rather straightforward science fiction if not for the fact that each genetic “abnormality” is a thinly veiled, but much toyed with, metaphor. For example: Mercedes, a rail-thin woman who supposedly possesses the obesity gene—no matter what sort of life she leads, at some point she will balloon up to an extreme weight; then there’s Nick, Anne’s would-be lover at the colony, who is in possession of the suicide gene—no matter how happy-as-a-clam he may seem, one day, one moment, Nick’s body will trick him into throwing himself off a building. In Weise’s world, fate has little to say when the intrusiveness of genetics will mark a person’s life in such dramatic ways. Even the treatments they undergo are literary metaphors, with Mercedes’ triggering such happiness and an unfailing jovial attitude that she quite literally becomes lighter than air, floating up into the sky should she neglect her ankle weights.

All this without mentioning Anne’s one-on-one’s with the ever-elusive (and long dead) Charles Darwin.

The Colony is certainly enjoyable, if only to be witness to Weise’s ever-present creativity and wit. A playwright and a poet, Weise is no stranger to economical language. The Colony is a light, quick read; interspersed with chapters detailing the day-to-day lives and relationships of the colonists are snippets of interviews, lab reports, experiments, and various findings that help to flesh out the overall narrative.

That said, I finished The Colony feeling less like I’d taken a journey with Anne and her fellow test subjects, and more like I’d witnessed a series of vignettes designed to guide the reader through a network of allegories used to show us how clever and off the beaten path they all were—not to mention the world they live in, where such a colony could exist. Weise touches on the moral implications that this sort of genetic therapy might prompt, but never with enough veracity to truly impart the potential ramifications on our world and our culture. That feels like a missed opportunity.

The Colony was a charming, satisfying book, but once finished I feel that Anne and Nick and the others have been left behind, so much the same as they were in the beginning, and that Weise has abandoned the moral implications of genetic alteration in much the same way.

[Angie · Rating 4 out of 5]

"...everyone takes their bodies seriously. I think that's why...when they see me...they say I'm brave because I remind them they're something like mica"

"No one should feel like a condition, as if their life, how people see them, revolves around a microscopic chromosome. ..And don't give me the b.s. about finding someone who looks beyond that. what am I supposed to do? be so happy, so appreciative when I find someone who looks beyond me?"

I think that these 2 quotes...and I shortened both a little...are good to explain the strange thinking that society has about what is good and bad, normal and not normal, right and wrong. We judge society by scales and these scales are based on human thoughts of normal. if you are missing a body part, if your too tall or too short, pretty or ugly...all things determined by flawed human beings. I liked this book because it made me think. ..it made see that we are people, not test subjects, not animals with no emotional tie to what is happening around us, to how society can make us feel if we are different than what they have decided is normal.

I would recommend this book. if anything it is interesting. ..Anne Hatley is a great main character...flaws and all.

[Akeiisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting premise- a genetics company has recruited a group of individuals for their "defective" genes in order to study their genes and offer them a cure. If given the option to grow a limb you'd never had, would you do it? That's the central question posed to the protagonist, Anne Hatley, as she also wrestles with lovers past and present.

Weise does a great job of exploring how Anne identifies herself, how she believes others think about her, and how she wants to be perceived. Some elements of the story left me scratching my head (floating, Darwin), and others left me wanting more, specifically on the ethics of the experiments being conducted at the Colony. Overall, a well written novel.

[April · Rating 4 out of 5]

Last one, but I am just starting. Funny. Fast~paced. I'm enjoying it even tho their are things about it I don't like.

I was very interested in how at first Nick was gungho about science & Anne was very suspicious, but then Anne caved to percieved public pressure to have two 'natural' (?) legs. She was right, tho, it was a horrifying but realistic ending. An ironic twist in the relationships between Anne/Science/Nick.

But I do think the relationship(s) took up to much of the book. Altho I found the past analyses of everyone other than her current relationship intriguing. It almost seemed as tho her needs & wants changed as she was genetically modified.

Definitely DIS/topian. The ending is pure horror.