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rachelmanija) wrote2022-06-18 11:56 am
rachelmanija) wrote2022-06-18 11:56 am
The Annual Migration of Clouds & These Lifeless Things by Premee Mohamed
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?
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
[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.
no subject
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.
no subject