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?