An Unkindness of Ghosts

On the Matilda, class is codified by the letter assigned to living-quarter decks. People at the end of the alphabet, in the Q and Y and Z Decks, are lower class. People at the front of the alphabet are higher class. There is also a middle class with far more freedom to interact with the upper classes than with the lower classes. We know little about what people from the higher classes do for work or how they preserve their place in the hierarchy. Mostly, we see Matilda from its lower-class residents’ perspectives. 

The lower classes work for little to no pay on a set of vast, mechanically rotating fields under a large and radiant nuclear generator called Baby, which resembles a sun. Their labor is systematically coerced within the rigid class hierarchy. This system parallels the structure of slavery in the pre-Civil War American South. Like antebellum slavery, it is based in an ideology of race and gender supremacism.

Normativity and the more casually employed adjective “normal” are not synonymous. There is nothing special about the fact that the Sun revolves around our crops here on Earth, helping them grow. Even before Copernicus described the model of the solar system, there was nothing much human beings could do to change that relationship.