Power Dynamics in Fantasy: Adam Johnson’s “Interesting Facts”

Adam Johnson’s “Interesting Facts,” collected in Fortune Smiles (2015) and featured in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016, is a powerful novella. This essay considers that the double impulse of fantasy and mimesis there results in what Clayton Koelb calls a “truthful though incredible” fiction (33), which questions power and reflects the potential of our world.The story seems to be that of the narrator’s loss of power as she is treated for breast cancer that spreads: medicine, which is supposed to make her well, harms her, healthy women have designs on her husband, and people seem to “ghost” her. Though she imagines herself with a ghost’s power to wreak revenge on other women or to protect her children, and believes cancer gives her superpowers of perception, the character’s inability to connect with others is a clue that she is, in fact, a “real” ghost, a marvelous interpretation that appears logical within the realm of the story.Thus, the novella poses the question of the dynamics of fiction and reality, as suggested by a title that stands out in a speculative fiction anthology. Writing about his own wife’s cancer, Johnson blends facts of his family life with fantasy, in what may be deemed creative nonfiction. In a consideration of fantasy and mimesis, the mystery of the story echoing that of the human condition and the power of love apparent there are shown to add depth to the storyworld and make it believable.Finally, “Interesting Facts” is fantasy that raises and broadens consciousness, for Johnson questions the dynamics of power. He uses his wife’s voice and knowledge to question the society that alienates her, an opening onto a minority consciousness that ranks this work as counter literature as understood by Anthony Mangeon, for instance. His craft, spurred by the hope that the power of fate would alter, makes the world that the text opens onto, one in which new energy can enter and new spaces be made, a true picture of reality.