AD ASTRA, THROUGH EIRE

AN IRISH OPERA TAKES AI, PRONATALISM AND HUSTLE CULTURE TO SPACE

- STORY: HUGH MORRIS / NYT

If contemporary music sometimes feels like a perilous glacier to scale, then the works by Irish composer Jennifer Walshe are more like climbing walls, with an abundance of reachable footholds to get you started and handholds to grasp if you get lost.

In the past, Walshe has created Aisteach, a fictional history of the musical and artistic avant-garde in Ireland, and Personhood, about personal agency in an era of technofeudalism and surveillance capitalism. Her latest project, Mars, which the Irish National Opera will premiere Friday in Galway before the production travels to Dublin next month, continues in a similar, ideas-heavy vein.

The Irish National Opera has described Mars as “about space colonisation, reactionary futurism, pronatalism, the madness of hustle culture and the unsettling futures encroaching on our present”. Add to the list: fate, resistance, artificial intelligence, labour, the non-neutrality of technology, melancholy and loss.

Mark O'Connell wrote the libretto. A journalist and author, he published the book To Be A Machine (2017), a gonzo-style travelogue of encounters with members of the transhumanism movement, who believe that the evolution of humanity involves some integration of technology into people's bodies.

Similar themes crop up in the opera. Four female astronauts board a spaceship in hope of preserving the human race on a new planet, only for their mission to be privatised halfway through the journey by a venture capitalist, their liberated lives suddenly jeopardised.

Of the many questions