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rachelmanija Jun. 18th, 2022 11:56 am)
rachelmanija Jun. 18th, 2022 11:56 am)These are unrelated novellas.
These Lifeless Things has two timelines. In one the Earth is taken over by Lovecraftian horrors and almost all humans are killed; this one is very effective and moving but stops rather than ends. This makes sense because it's a found document, but is still frustrating.
In the other timeline, it's a hundred years later, humanity has inexplicably recovered and has civilization again, the horrors are gone (OR ARE THEY), people don't seem to understand exactly what happened either during the invasion or afterward, and for no clear reason mostly don't believe the documents of it they do have. Grad students are researching the eldritch horror time; one has the found document, but the other grad students don't believe or care about it.
I didn't understand what was going on with the future plot or what its relevance was; maybe a commentary on how the past is hard to fathom and people deny reality? But the denial of reality is typically for political reasons, and there's no political reason I could figure out why people would overwhelmingly pretend an event that killed most of the population was something other than what it was, especially since there's no competing narrative of what did happen.
The Annual Migration of Clouds is much more successful. Reid is a young woman born after an apocalypse combining climate change and a hereditary, possibly sentient fungal disease. Her community lives in what used to be a university, eking out a hardscrabble and sometimes brutal existence that still allows for relationships, art, and trade. It's one of the most convincing depictions of a post-apocalyptic community I've seen - the opposite of the one-note dystopia.
Reid and her mother both have the fungus. Its effects are extremely variable, but two things are consistent: it controls your behavior to protect you/itself (by preventing you from doing dangerous things), and it often (maybe always?) eventually kills its host. I was very curious about this contradiction, which doesn't get addressed much but is probably an accidental side effect given that the fungus seems to want its hosts to survive. Mostly the fungus is important because of Reid's concerns over whether and how it's affecting her and her mother's free will.
The story begins when Reid receives a letter inviting her to join a fabled scientific domed community. The letter itself is of a technological level unachievable to her own people, but no one's ever come back from that dome or even seen it; does it really exist, or is it some kind of weird trick? If it is what it says it is, does she want to leave her own people to join a group that's hoarding knowledge rather than sharing it?
I will say upfront, so you're not disappointed or annoyed by where this novella stops, that the questions about the dome don't get answered, the entire action of the story is Reid making various preparations to leave while she tries to decide whether she's actually going to go, and the story ends when she makes her decision. The story itself is great and the ending is satisfying on an emotional level, but I really wanted more. I hope Mohamed expands this novella, because the world is fantastic.
Have any of you read anything by her? What did you think?
These Lifeless Things has two timelines. In one the Earth is taken over by Lovecraftian horrors and almost all humans are killed; this one is very effective and moving but stops rather than ends. This makes sense because it's a found document, but is still frustrating.
In the other timeline, it's a hundred years later, humanity has inexplicably recovered and has civilization again, the horrors are gone (OR ARE THEY), people don't seem to understand exactly what happened either during the invasion or afterward, and for no clear reason mostly don't believe the documents of it they do have. Grad students are researching the eldritch horror time; one has the found document, but the other grad students don't believe or care about it.
I didn't understand what was going on with the future plot or what its relevance was; maybe a commentary on how the past is hard to fathom and people deny reality? But the denial of reality is typically for political reasons, and there's no political reason I could figure out why people would overwhelmingly pretend an event that killed most of the population was something other than what it was, especially since there's no competing narrative of what did happen.
The Annual Migration of Clouds is much more successful. Reid is a young woman born after an apocalypse combining climate change and a hereditary, possibly sentient fungal disease. Her community lives in what used to be a university, eking out a hardscrabble and sometimes brutal existence that still allows for relationships, art, and trade. It's one of the most convincing depictions of a post-apocalyptic community I've seen - the opposite of the one-note dystopia.
Reid and her mother both have the fungus. Its effects are extremely variable, but two things are consistent: it controls your behavior to protect you/itself (by preventing you from doing dangerous things), and it often (maybe always?) eventually kills its host. I was very curious about this contradiction, which doesn't get addressed much but is probably an accidental side effect given that the fungus seems to want its hosts to survive. Mostly the fungus is important because of Reid's concerns over whether and how it's affecting her and her mother's free will.
The story begins when Reid receives a letter inviting her to join a fabled scientific domed community. The letter itself is of a technological level unachievable to her own people, but no one's ever come back from that dome or even seen it; does it really exist, or is it some kind of weird trick? If it is what it says it is, does she want to leave her own people to join a group that's hoarding knowledge rather than sharing it?
I will say upfront, so you're not disappointed or annoyed by where this novella stops, that the questions about the dome don't get answered, the entire action of the story is Reid making various preparations to leave while she tries to decide whether she's actually going to go, and the story ends when she makes her decision. The story itself is great and the ending is satisfying on an emotional level, but I really wanted more. I hope Mohamed expands this novella, because the world is fantastic.
Have any of you read anything by her? What did you think?
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I just finished "The Annual Migration of Clouds" a few days ago!
I liked it, but agree that I want more. I want to see Reid's journey and where it takes her.
I have a spoilery question, which maybe I'll post under Rot-13.
I had an interesting reaction in that I felt if you described the setting / plot set up to me, it would sound a lot like something Octavia Butler might have written, but the story/writing itself did not feel like Butler.
Based on your description, I'm not terribly eager to try "These Lifeless Things".
denial of reality is typically for political reasons
Hm. Is that true? Or, even if it is, it seems like these days there is a lot of denial that doesn't feel very political or religious to me, such as anti-vaxers.
It seems plausible to me that people might deny a Lovecraftian invasion and instead just say, we know something terrible happened and we've somehow somewhat recovered, but we don't know the details.
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How is anti-vaxxing not political? It's full of conspiracy theories, appeals to a very particular definition of freedom, and highly charged as a badge of party affiliation.
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When I hear about people worried about their kids getting autism from vaccines, I feel some sympathy, but largely roll my eyes and try to think about something less depressing and infuriating.
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It's true that I was thinking of the COVID denialists, who built on the older foundation of anti-autism which crossed the political spectrum—thanks, broad appeal of eugenics, I guess.
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Plus, I need to retract my original statement. I've been mentally enumerating contemporary denials, and they ARE almost all political religious. The autism version was what first popped into my mind, and colored my thinking.
> full of conspiracy theories
Gah, so many versions of denial are mixed up with conspiracy theories.
So I'd think in the later timeline in "These Lifeless Things", that there would likely be conspiracists, and some *would* be interested in the documents, and/or claim the documents are some kind of coverup.
Thinking aloud: Could denying the Lovecraftian past be political in the way that climate change denial is political today? Those in power want everyone to think everything is fine, everything is under control, there's nothing to worry about. (While presumably they think they are rich and powerful enough to to be insulated from inconveniences, and will be able to escape minor catastrophes.)
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I can see the advantage of concealing the existence of planet-annihilating Lovecraftian horrors if, say, you are a Lovecraftian horror who will be able to go about your business more effectively if no one believes in you, or a person working to summon Lovecraftian horrors similarly. If it's just a case of humanity puttering along not believing in its own past in the face of plentiful evidence to the contrary, then I agree it feels more like a contemporary allegory (let's pretend there isn't a pandemic, let's pretend the planet isn't heating up, let's pretend that facts aren't facts and it's all just a matter of opinion—a global scale of Holocaust denial) and less like the ways in which people actually misconstrue the past.
[edit] If no one believes in the Lovecraftian period, why are there grad students researching it?
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IIRC (and I don't think this was very clear) people do believe something happened, they just mostly don't believe and aren't interested in what people say in the exactly six surviving written documents. They also don't believe the more Lovecraftian elements of survivors' testimony, because they think it's implausible I guess? This is where the allegory breaks down though, because post-apocalypse, literally every living person was a survivor. Generally people are a lot less likely to disbelieve in things their own parents and literally all of society believed in when they were growing up.
One grad student believes, and the others are interested in statistical data of stuff like how many survivors where, not in what exactly happened or what the individuals went through. Again, very allegorical. The problem is that the past document has allegorical resonance, but generally feels like a plausible story.
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I mean, it is in the interest of neo-Nazis to promote Holocaust denial, but then we're back to the idea of neo-Lovecraftians and I'm not hearing from you that the story contains them.
They also don't believe the more Lovecraftian elements of survivors' testimony, because they think it's implausible I guess?
That is very Holocaust, but I agree that the phenomenon of survivors' descendants becoming deniers is not very common (a Spiders Georg joke about Jared Kushner was going to go here, but in the interests of accuracy I don't believe he has ever denied the Holocaust, he was just cool with working for with exactly the kind of people who would have shot his grandmother) and I too have a lot of difficulty crediting the denial if the event being denied was planetary and everybody's family has stories about fleeing the eldritch horrors—which no one does, a century on? I understand that the last few years have been a short sharp shock in the fragility of living as well as historical memory, but people who lived through personal, societal trauma tend to form some kind of narrative about it, even if just "Oh, well, yes, I guess some people died, but we didn't and it wasn't that bad, really, everything's back to normal now."
The problem is that the past document has allegorical resonance, but generally feels like a plausible story.
I can how that makes a disjoint in the two strands of the narrative.
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Allegories tend to hit an uncanny valley for me where they're realistic enough that I want to know stuff like who benefits from the disbelief in the supernatural (who are the neo-Nazi equivalents?) but not realistic enough to actually answer those questions.
I know lots of people hate "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" and "The Lottery," but for me those work because they hit that sweet spot of being clearly not intended as realistic, but grounded enough that they don't float off into abstraction.
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[edit] Not meant as a criticism of this book, just spinning off thinking about disasters, but the post-apocalyptic memory hole is a very old trope of the genre and I feel as though it is based on pop-culture myths of the "Dark Ages" and not actually on how human memory works.
That's the part I was missing: who benefits from the disbelief?
Dunno! Someone else who has actually read this book should please chime in!
I know lots of people hate "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" and "The Lottery," but for me those work because they hit that sweet spot of being clearly not intended as realistic, but grounded enough that they don't float off into abstraction.
Makes sense to me. I also don't hate either one of them.
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I commented on this below, but--insofar as this is an allegory of anything, which isn't my primary reading--I would say it's modeled on climate change denial specifically, rather than Covid or Holocaust denialism.
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I read all of Mohamed's 2021 novellas and her first two novels in December-January, so clearly her voice works for me! "These Lifeless Things" was actually my favorite, although the general public seems to agree with you -- "The Annual Migration of Clouds" and "And What Can We Offer You Tonight?" both got more awards attention.
I don't know if I can explain why the future section worked for me, both because my memory is a bit blurry and because I just ... didn't question it? The future section's general avoidance of/distrust of the accounts of the past honestly seemed like a perfectly realistic trauma reaction to me, especially since it's clear most of the survivors never had any clear idea of what was attacking them and didn't get very clear accounts from the survivors who most closely escaped. It didn't seem to me that anyone disbelieved a catastrophe had happened, only that it was basically a magical Lovecraftian invasion, rather than say something caused by secret experiments or climate change. Climate change does seem pertinent to me, possibly because it looms so big in Mohamed's other work; deniers' refusal to acknowledge or understand a complicated reality, especially when it is outside their personal control, seems relevant even if there aren't massively powerful institutions deliberately spreading misinformation. The whole hard science vs. soft science split (and the bias against "soft" sciences) seemed very plausible, the remnants of intellectual hierarchies still affecting people long after the initial conditions producing the hierarchies are gone.
Anyway, Mohamed announced on Twitter that she sold two sequels to "The Annual Migration of Clouds", so you will get more of that world! I got the impression that one will focus on Henryk and one on Reid, but that may be wrong.
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perfectly realistic trauma reaction
sounds like a great angle that would work for me, if the text supports it: The invasion was so alien and horrifying and incomprehensible, that afterward pretty much no one remembers anything about it, so a century on, anything that sounds implausible is dismissed.
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My understanding of the situation--which may be wrong; Rachel has read this more recently than I have--is that the invasion focused on the major population centers, and most people just didn't escape. The survivors were mostly people in remote areas that the invaders didn't bother with. People who faced the invaders directly and escaped were usually ones who ran fast or had minimal direct contact with invaders, at first because of luck and later because it was simply too dangerous.
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TBH, if climate change denial didn't exist, I'd probably find it implausible in fiction.
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I read her The Apple-Tree Throne. I thought it was richly imagined and beautiful and effective on a scene-by-scene level, but I was often confused by the import of what I was reading. In my Goodreads review I said, "It was as if I were reading something translated from a language and culture whose allusions were unfamiliar to me. I spent a lot of time thinking, So does this mean--? Does this indicate--?'" The end makes things retroactively clear, but for me that meant that the signs along the way were too subtle. ... That sounds more critical than I felt: there were details I loved and moments and scenes that were excellent.