Kecia Ali’s Human in Death explores the best-selling futuristic suspense series In Death, written by romance legend Nora Roberts under the pseudonym J. D. Robb. Centering on troubled NYPSD Lieutenant Eve Dallas and her billionaire tycoon husband Roarke, the novels explore vital questions about human flourishing.
Through close readings of more than fifty novels and novellas published over two decades, Ali analyzes the ethical world of Robb’s New York circa 2060. Robb compellingly depicts egalitarian relationships, satisfying work, friendships built on trust, and an array of models of femininity and family. At the same time, the series’ imagined future replicates some of the least admirable aspects of contemporary society. Sexual violence, police brutality, structural poverty and racism, and government surveillance persist in Robb’s fictional universe, raising urgent moral challenges. So do ordinary ethical quandaries around trust, intimacy, and interdependence in marriage, family, and friendship.
Ali celebrates the series’ ethical successes, while questioning its critical moral omissions. She probes the limits of Robb’s imagined world and tests its possibilities for fostering identity, meaning, and mattering of human relationships across social difference. Ali capitalizes on Robb’s futuristic fiction to reveal how careful and critical reading is an ethical act.
ENDORSEMENTS
“Human in Death offers a sustained and subtle inquiry into J. D. Robb’s In Death books as novels of ideas: texts which invite their readers to think about love, desire, and romantic relationships—they are, after all, romance novels—but also friendship, vocation, state violence, and the dangerous allure of utopianism. . . . This is a groundbreaking contribution to the study of mass-
market fiction and the ethics of reading, as well as to the emerging field of popular romance studies.”
“A deeply engaging critical reflection, Ali deftly explores how fiction both shapes and reflects our comple lived realities, how fictional utopias can reiterate and justify the prejudices of the present. Under Ali’s prescient analysis, J.D Robb’s popular novels become a venue for an exploration of American culture, what scares and what satisfies is revealed by Ali as saying so much more.”
“When black people could not see themselves in the stories that shape our lives and only histories of our inferiority were offered as recompense, Afrofuturism argued that we turn our eye to fiction to imagine a better future. Kecia Ali has written a brilliant exemplar of sociology of fiction that honors the spirit of Afrofuturism, although the subject matter couldn’t be further from those we consider racial projects. . . . A thought-provoking and accessible read for sociologists and laypeople alike.”
“This study is a handy resource for any reader interested in a sweeping, yet meticulous look at the sci-fi/murder mystery/romance series. Human in Death: Morality and Mortality in J.D. Robb’s Novels contains an evenhanded examination of the ethical stances visible in protagonist Eve Dallas’s world, especially in relation to gender and sexuality, economic and bodily inequality, and personal and systemic violence. The last is particularly useful for its calling out of the series’ inattention to racism and the slant Robb gives to police brutality and abuse of power in the futuristic United States.”