These Lifeless Things by Premee Mohamed
Publisher – Solaris
Published – Out Now
Price - £3.99 publisher site (signed paperbacks also available)
Eva is a survivor. She’s not sure what she survived, exactly, only that They invaded without warning, killed nearly all of humanity, and relentlessly attack everyone who’s left. All she can do to stay sane, in the blockaded city that’s no longer home, is keep a journal about her struggle.
Fifty years later, Eva’s words are found by Emerson, a young anthropologist sent to the ruins to study what happened. The discovery could shed light on the Invasion, turning the unyielding mystery of the short war into a story of hope and defiance.
The common refrain when talking about history is that it is told from the view of the winning side. A warning that bias always creeps into the narrative. But what is history? We tend to focus on the events and consequences – the rulers, the mistakes, the consequences or the architecture and devices of a period. We often overlook the people impacted in the big events - who were they, what was the personal battle that they had to deal with? Do their voices effectively matter after the event? In Premee Mohamed’s magnificent These Lifeless Things we are told a tale of one global event told from the perspective of two groups which make the reader think about all those untold stories going on whenever the world changes and how they will be viewed after the event.
In the near future the world is rocked by the appearance of ‘Them’ an unknown vast intelligence that upon arrival wipes out most of the Earth’s population. They flitter through the dimensions, do not talk to or engage with humanity just wipe it out at signs of resistance. Some trees become sentient and dangerous if you pass too close, mysterious sentinels known as Statues now patrol the streets and sometimes just arriving out of nowhere to cause havoc and tear people apart. Eva lives in one of these occupied ruined cities having lost her family early on in the cataclysm. Food is scarce, she and the small group she has formed move regularly around the city looking for ways to escape without being brutally killed. Each night she records her thoughts in a journal. Fifty years later ‘Them’ left the planet and carefully normal life is slowly resuming for the groups that survived; a young academic named Emerson travels with a group of archaeologists and scientists to the city to uncover its secrets. Emerson though finds Eva’s journal and gets captivated by Eva’s story wondering what this may mean for the future but not everyone is pleased with their discovery.
This is a truly excellent piece of science fiction that really examines how humanity survives great changes. With Eva we are given a middle-aged woman in her forties whose dreams of a normal life are ruined overnight by the appearance of these random extradimensional beings that cause havoc for their own sake. Over the course of Emerson’s readings of the journal, we see what day to day life is like from starvation leading people having to consider eating the dead to the mental toll taken on board as people lose hope they can ever escape. And yet in these dark times we see moments of tenderness – Eva processes new feelings for her younger companion Valentin and suspicions that one of her troupe is not to be trusted. The city is aware there are Agents of Them forever waiting to betray escapes. We see her hopes for rescue, concerns for humanity and dreams for a life outside of these times. Mohamed makes us see day to day living from the older generation who mark this as yet another of life’s troubles to the revolutionaries who fight a hopeless case to the scary interludes when the ‘statues’ start to seek humans. At this this story moves into cosmic horror humanity overthrown by something so alien we don’t understand their motives or plans. We just know they seem to have an unnerving desire for young children to be gathered up for purposes unknown.
Alongside this is Emerson’s viewpoint. Here we see context given to Eva’s tale we see the scale of the disaster and understand the hopelessness that humanity faced. This is no Independence Day retelling simply at some point we seem potentially to have been left alone…but for how long? What makes Emerson’s story so fascinating is that her colleagues find Emerson’s discovery and attempts to verify Eva’s entries to be worthless. They’re more concerned by the hard science/biology experiments into what happened. The past and those who went through it are not worth studying. How people survive dark times - the sacrifices and compromises people make to survive are something no one wants to investigate too deeply.
By putting Eva’s face on the past and making the reader liver her life this story makes the reader question do the people who don’t lead revolutions, make brilliant discoveries or fight the battles matter? If you follow the clues you can easily identify where this story is set – a reminder itself that bad things always happen again and again be they military coups, environmental disasters or wars (and that is only this week) - every day there are people having to make do. We see that life moves on and references come from WW2 to Chernobyl as examples of how events change and yet humanity adapts.
This story any year would have power but although thanks the vagaries of publishing although this tale was written well before recent events it is impossible as a reader not to view this with a post 2020 worldview. To not think of the billions of people like you and me all having an individual struggle thanks to the past year across the globe. Our stories are personal and probably will never be widely known but we all are trying to get through the day – some happily, some criminally and many tragically. The story is open-ended as to what happens next but that is indeed a reminder that we won’t always get neat answers explaining everything.
The best science fiction explores humanity, and this tale is one of those I can see myself thinking back to whenever huge events rock the world. It’s thoughtful, mature, and seamlessly crosses genres to make scenes flow or points to be made. So far the best thing I’ve read this year and one I think everyone needs to look at. It’s a triumph.
