In Beings, Ilana Masad’s elegant and ambitious sophomore novel, a queer archivist becomes captivated by two files from the 1960s: the case of Betty and Barney Hill—the first widely documented alien abductees—and the letters of Phyllis, a lesbian science fiction writer navigating an underground queer scene. As the archivist pieces together their stories, Masad blends meticulously well-researched history with lyrical invention, weaving a braided narrative that asks with urgency and tenderness: are any of us ever truly alone?
United by a profound sense of alienation, the characters shimmer with richly drawn humanity. The Hills, an interracial couple already marginalized before they became known for their UFO claims, ache for people to believe them. Meanwhile, as Phyllis searches for love at a time when being gay was illegal, she aches for someone to believe in her. And the archivist, that gentle, nameless narrator, follows their stories until their own begins to surface, tying the strands together in a way that’s as satisfying as it is mysterious.
Like all the best science fiction, where genre becomes a means of exploring feelings rather than technology, Beings shines not by demanding belief in aliens, but by showing what it means that the characters believe. At a time when we’re constantly faced with issues of belief versus fact, it’s a poignant meditation on why we tell ourselves certain stories, and what those stories say about us. The result is a beautifully written and wholly original work of speculative fiction.
Below, my conversation with Masad about Beings.
I’m always curious about how an author’s vision for their novel changes as they work on it. What did you originally set out to do, and how did it evolve over time?
I knew from the start that the novel was going to be about the first alien abductees, but I also knew that I couldn’t write about them in isolation. Originally, the novel had three equally involved threads: the couple (the alien abductees, a self-consciously imagined Barney and Betty Hill), Phyllis (the lesbian science fiction writer who works at the newspaper that outed the Hills), and a genderqueer person named Star who worked at an archive during April or May of 2020.
Essentially, in that third narrative, I set out to write about the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when everything was still very uncertain for many of us—we didn’t know how long we’d need to be staying inside or away from other people, we didn’t know how the disease spread, we didn’t know whether we were witnessing the start of our extinction. I tried to zero in on the smallest of moments, to remember the way that time felt like molasses in some ways but then hours would go by and you’d realize your hand was locked around your phone like a robot claw.
Unfortunately, during the process of trying to sell the book, it became clear that there was a lot of discomfort with that aspect of the narrative in particular. To be fair, the book was also very long because all three parts were equal in length. So I ended up revamping that third strand. Star—whom I still love, and I still hope to write about one day—morphed into the Archivist. I had a rule for myself when I was writing the new character, that each section of theirs could be only a page or so. I was thinking of Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks, how that book, which has several narratives occurring in tandem, also features these very short bursts that come from the perspective of a polar explorer from the 19th century. The Archivist sections are nothing like those, really, but still, how I felt reading Zumas’s short chapters from that perspective really stuck with me.
It’s through the archivist’s relative isolation that they become obsessed with the two different storylines. But you also give them a queer love interest. Why was that important to you?
This might say more about me than about them, to be honest, but one of the joys of being queer, to me, is having little crushes on people all the time. They can be totally platonic or romantic or sexual or any mixture of these things, and they rarely have anything to do with consummation or whatnot—they’re just this kind of intense feeling of recognition or connection with people who think a little bit like you or see the world a little bit like you. In the original version of the Archivist character, there was an actual implied love story, and when I wrote them into the person they are now, I wanted to retain at least an element of that.
I think having crushes can be really nice. It can remind you that you have a body that can reach out, that you have a nervous system capable of excitement as well as anxiety or stress or anger or ennui. By giving the Archivist a crush, I think I was trying to draw them out into the world a little bit more.
What did you learn during your research that surprised you? Did you discover anything that changed the direction of the narrative?
I learned so much during the research! I think one of my favorite aspects was the research into queer history, and learning about the Daughters of Bilitis and The Ladder and all the various people who wrote for it. Listening to Making Gay History, Eric Marcus’s podcast, was a revelation in that I got to hear the actual voices of so many people who lived through this time. Learning about the queer hotspots in Boston in particular was also very fun, like the fact that the Charles Playhouse had a gay nightclub in the basement. I suppose what surprised me most in the research was just how familiar so much of the interpersonal dynamics were. People are people are people, regardless of when and where we are, and I know that intellectually, but reading about or listening to the little dramas of queer folks’ lives in the 1960s, whether they were about relationships or activism or editorial power struggles really made me feel it.
In terms of whether it changed the direction of the narrative, I think a lot of the research I did for the narrative about the abducted couple based on the Hills’ experience shaped my thinking and the book’s narrative. Specifically, I was shocked—and probably shouldn’t have been—to find people writing about the Hills from later years who were so clearly sexist and so clearly just thought that Betty Hill especially was hysterical or excitable, despite the fact that Barney in his own words tells his psychiatrist (this is in the transcripts of their sessions) that she was actually the opposite of that. Seeing the very bald sexism in men’s writing about Betty helped me rethink and shape the wife in my version of the couple.
In your mind, what are the connecting threads between the three stories—the Hills’ abduction, Phyllis’s letters, and the Archivist’s work—and what was your process like putting it together?
Some of the connections are obvious—both the couple’s story and Phyllis’s take place from 1961 to 1969, and the Archivist is, first, researching Phyllis and then later begins researching the Hills. Phyllis also works at the newspaper, the Boston Evening Traveler, that published a story about the Hills in 1965 without their cooperation or consent.
But the other connecting threads are more thematic. When I first learned about the Hills’ public trajectory—that, essentially, we know what we know about them only because someone got hold of a recording they didn’t know was being made of them and then wrote a sensationalist five-part story about them literally in the week leading up to Halloween—the word “outed” came to mind. Their address was printed in the newspaper, because that was common practice at the time; similarly, when queer people were arrested at gay and lesbian bars or accused of “solicitation” or whatnot, their names and often their addresses and places of work would be printed in the paper too. Today, we’d call that doxxing, wouldn’t we?
Then, too, there’s the mental illness aspect. When a couple of normal people claim to have been aboard an alien spaceship—most people would assume they were insane, right? Meanwhile, it wasn’t until 1987 that homosexuality was completely removed from the DSM as a disorder. And, in the present-day sections, the Archivist struggles with both mental and physical illnesses, although I deliberately don’t name them—not because I’m trying to obfuscate in this case, but because I’m trying to focus, as in the other threads, less on what you call something, and rather on what it’s like to experience it.
Some of this was conscious, of course, but a lot of the thematic stuff really came together while I was writing. I wrote the book basically as it’s structured, one section at a time, so I was bouncing from one narrative thread to the next to the next and then back to the first strand, and always had the last voice still in my mind while writing the next one. I think that helped in terms of my unconscious (or whatever you call the mysterious thing that’s happening when you’re making things up as you go) doing that work of creating the connective tissue.
The novel draws from the real abduction case of Barney and Betty Hill. What about them first intrigued you? And how did you decide where fact should end and your own invention should begin?
What first intrigued me about them was how they were both these totally regular people who hadn’t sought out attention for what they went through. I was definitely You’re Wrong About-pilled by the time I learned about them, so I was already thinking about how the stories we tell about famous or infamous people—and how we tell those stories in the media—have so much to do with what our society is like at the time of the telling. But the Hills were also an interracial couple at a time when marrying someone outside your race was illegal in a bunch of states still; they were civil servants, and also civil rights activists. The more I learned about them, the more I wanted to know, and the more I wanted to know, the more I realized how limited I would always be in how close to them I could get.
As a result, I knew from pretty early on in the process that I was going to try to do something kind of impossible: I was going to try to tell their story as accurately as I could, using their archives, the book they had written about them, and the book Betty Hill’s niece wrote years later… And at the same time, I was going to acknowledge from the start that I absolutely couldn’t tell their story accurately at all because any story you tell about another person is also a story about you, about your reactions to that person, about your imagined version of that person. Reading My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland had really cracked open that idea for me.
So, really, the whole thing is fiction—I use facts from history, from the Hills’ archives, and I follow the events as the Hills said they occurred very, very closely, down to what they ate at the diner they stopped at the night of the abduction. But my couple aren’t the Hills; they can’t be. The Hills were who they were. Real people who already told their story in the ways they chose after being outed as abductees without their permission.
I loved Phyllis’s letters. I found them so full of life. How did you approach embodying a queer woman’s interiority, set in the 1960s?
Thank you! I think Phyllis is a lot of people’s favorite character. I did a lot of research, of course—I read books like Sex and the Single Girl by Helen Gurley Brown to try to see how young women’s lives were being described and imagined by someone like her. I watched romantic comedies from the 1950s and 60s. I read about queer women from her day. I read a lot of issues of The Ladder, the lesbian magazine founded by the lesbian rights organization Daughters of Bilitis. I read lesbian pulp novels. I listened to a lot of Eric Marcus’s Making Gay History podcast. And of course I did research into silly little things like whether there were hold buttons on office phones in the 1960s.
But ultimately, I just tried to feel my way into who she was: a teenager who grew up on a small farm in a small town, who fell in love with her best friend, who read science fiction to escape the ways her life felt small at the time, and who literally escaped her home and ended up trying to make a life for herself in a big city she’d never been to before. I tried to find the balance between her actual bravery and her projected bravado, between what she wants and what she believes she should want, between her ignorance and naivete and her ability to learn and grow. And, like other characters in this novel, her aloneness was key to figuring her out, especially early in the book.
There’s a metaphor across the book about otherness and alienation — through literal alien encounters and queerness that’s pushed to the margins of society, plus the politics of interracial relationships. But are there also actual aliens here? I guess what I’m trying to say is, do you believe your characters that they saw what they think they did?
I absolutely believe that my characters believe they not only saw but interacted with aliens, yes.
Ok, so that’s not exactly a yes.
But it’s also not a no! I believe something happened that night, and I have no reason not to believe that what they say happened actually happened. I think some days I believe there were aliens, yes, of course there were, and other days I believe that no, that’s so silly, of course there weren’t aliens. When a belief fluctuates like that, it feels hard to hang onto any which way, and so I’ve sort of receded from this question of my personal belief into a place where I’ve realized what I do or don’t believe doesn’t matter.
What’s your relationship to archives? Am I right to guess that the archive in the book is based on Brooklyn’s Lesbian Herstory Archives?
An earlier version of the novel’s archive was very much directly based on the LHA, yes, cozy couches and brownstone setting and all, but the archive that’s in the book as it is now is based more on what I’ve found to be the much more common kind of archive, which is to say, it’s less romantic, much more library-cum-office. But yes, it’s still inspired by the LHA as well as The History Project, Boston’s queer archive, in terms of the way these archives are quite open to a range of materials and focus on queer people.
I really love archives and libraries—the former are often housed within the latter—because of how they’re these repositories of history, but often messier and more complex than what gets distilled into narrative form in books or documentaries. I love how much humanity can be found in them.
Were you into aliens before you wrote this?
Not really, honestly! I mean, I’ve never been anti-aliens, but doing the research for this book made me both fascinated by the idea of them, and utterly infuriated by the way imagining aliens can be and is used in ways that harm human beings (so many alien conspiracy theories are racist, antisemitic, and/or remove agency and innovation from various ancient—and largely nonwhite—civilizations). So I have a complicated relationship with aliens in terms of how they exist in our IRL imaginations, and I also love love love the ways aliens can be used in sci-fi as metaphors and imagined others who are often more like us than we’re comfortable with.
How did writing your sophomore novel feel different from your first? In what ways have you changed as an author over the course of two novels?
It felt completely different for so many reasons, but mostly because although looking at both novels now from a distance I can see how they share certain themes—connections across generations, say; the obsession with someone dead about whom you can only learn so much—they are such different books in terms of style and plot and structure. All My Mother’s Lovers also came to me much more easily—it wasn’t easy, per se, nothing is really easy to write, but it sure was easier than Beings.
Writing Beings felt like pulling my insides out at times. It felt terrifying and huge and overwhelming and impossible in a way that AMML never did.
I wish I could say what’s changed about me as an author between the two novels. I think that every book I have written and every book I will write will likely feel completely different and will likely require me learning how to write a novel all over again. And I’m sure there’s something that’s different, be it just my age, or the fact that having published one book I have a wholly different kind of anxiety about publishing my second (and had a wholly different anxiety about writing it too). But I don’t know how to quantify it or see it—I’m too close.
Can you recommend other great queer sci fi for curious readers?
Yes: your duology, Yours for the Taking and The Shutouts!
Also, some of these have written straight up SF, some are more broad or speculative, but in terms of contemporary writers, I really enjoy Charlie Jane Anders, Rivers Solomon, Marisa Crane, Annalee Newitz, and N. K. Jemisin. I’m obsessed with Samuel R. Delaney as well—Dhalgren is a work of art and one of the weirdest things I’ve ever read—and I’ve really loved what I’ve read of Joanna Russ as well. While Ursula K. Le Guin wasn’t queer as far as I know, I do think The Left Hand of Darkness is a queer masterpiece.
Beings is on sale now wherever fine books are sold.
