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Trials of Communication and Triumphs of Empathy, a review of Avi Silver’s Two Dark Moons

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DISCLAIMER: I do have a personal connection with Avi Silver, the author of this work. We met in freshman year of college and roomed together the following year. It is up to the reader to decide if that kind of intimacy and co-habitation makes a critic more or less likely to extend unreasonable courtesy towards a given author. I was graciously sent an electronic advanced reader’s copy of the book, and the review that follows is as honest and thoughtful as I am able to render a personal opinion. 

The world of Ateng is one rife with ritual and auspice. 

Ama and Cheheng, the two moons in the night sky over Ateng, govern most aspects of life in the hmun. In Ateng, the heavens do more than assign purported characteristics of personality, as the zodiac is said to do in our world. The moons one is born under determine most aspects of one’s life in the hmun; they govern gender assignation — male, female, or both; they inform what marriages would be considered beneficial; what positions one may hold in the community (leadership, responsibilities, etc); and more, in addition to the more familiar behavior and personality traits. 

The struggle of being out of joint, an interruption in the flow of life and tradition has been a part of Sohmeng’s life ever since her birth. But a catastrophe which resulted in a total collapse (literally) of the traditional migration of the hmun between its two mountain top territories, also ultimately stole the lives of her parents and stalled any chance of Sohmeng and her generational cohort of completing the ritual known as tengmunji which would usher them into adulthood.

The trappings of childhood grate at Sohmeng Par (the second name supposedly denotes the aspect of the moons in the sky on the night of her birth), and her impetuous, “speak first, ask for forgiveness later” character has gotten her into trouble again. The beginning of the novel finds her arguing with her brother as she goes to plead her case to the council of hmun elders.

The narrative of Two Dark Moons is the deceptively simple outer garment of a complex mystery. It follows in the tradition of “Young Adult Fantasy” or “coming of age” novels in that it includes a home, a fall, an adventure beyond the boundaries of what is known, and the journey to return, during which it becomes clear that the person who left the village at the beginning is a stranger to the one who now attempts to return. 

Instead, I believe that the beating heart of Two Dark Moons are the questions of language and communication – epistemology and belonging – which it engages so effortlessly. These questions are so intrinsic to the characters and the story that they are almost rendered invisible.

Every world, every community, every person has a story, a mythology, a structure which defines them and their place in creation. One of the great myths of humankind, passed down from the Ancient Egyptians to the Greeks, that encompass the Torah, the Talmud, the Bible, the Quran, ties language to divinity. We need not invoke the fall of Babel and the fracturing of mankind into disparate groups unable to communicate. Prometheus may have given humankind fire but Thoth taught Pharaohs and their priests to write and in so doing changed the fate of humanity forever.

The utilitarian definition of language sees it as a means of conveying information, words become signs which point to objects or abstract concepts thereby allowing individuals to articulate information about the world. It is also the framework within which any group or community makes sense of the world around them, and of their place within it.

Without sliding into linguistic determinism, Silver’s novel carefully lays out how language reflects and perpetuates the knowledge and structures of a given community. It is no surprise to those familiar with the convention of the “coming-of-age novel” that the limitations of culture and community, and the impositions they place upon the conception of the self, are tested by the experience of travelling outside and beyond them. 

Constructed languages (or “ConLangs” [1]) are a misunderstood though increasingly prevalent aspect of science-/speculative-/fantasy-fiction. In Two Dark Moons, Silver does more than apply the anti-censorship obfuscation tactic of TV (“She’s a fracking Cylon!”) or the use of “foreign” language as a way of making the Other more remote and unknown (“Cthulhu fhtagn” or “the practice of Kelno’reem”). Language is a vital component of life in  and structure of communication in the book form an important dimension of the story from the very beginning.

Language is a constant battle in Two Dark Moons. Sohmeng, the hot-headed protagonist, struggles to communicate, her “speak first, apologize later” attitude has landed her in hot water (the ‘again’ is implicit) at the beginning of the novel. 

As she makes her case before the council of elders, 24 total, representing each of the lunar phases, with the exception of Minhal – the darkest night, the “bad sign” of the new moons, when the Gods’ eyes are turned away from the hmun. 

As she prepares and makes her case to the council of elders, it becomes clear that Sohmeng is no stranger to the difficulties of communication. The complexities of clarity and diplomacy are rendered vividly. 

The struggle to remain both truthful and diplomatic (the first of which, for Sohmeng, is fundamentally compromised by the circumstances of her birth), to balance being understood and to convince others to give you what you want, is put front and center. 

At home, among the hmun, Sohmeng has already lost the battle and tipped the scales more toward brutal clarity, and suffers the subsequent social isolation familiar to anyone with an undisciplined tongue. Sohmeng is the victim of another trait of those who find themselves too close to the edge: she sees with great clarity the threads of responsibility and choice that bind her community together. She has the consigned/committed pariah’s certainty that if people would just take her seriously, life might be easier for everyone.

Somheng’s parents were traders and as such, she speaks the trader pidgin used to conduct transactions between different hmun[2], putting her a full step closer to bilingualism than anyone else in her community. The cognitive and intellectual flexibility introduced with any form of bilingualism (a trait the novel engenders through the use of the incorporation of hmunpa into the narrative), a subtle alienation from a unified or totalizing description of the world which can sometimes develop as a result of monolingualism, primes Sohmeng (and encourages the reader) to successfully re-evaluate the world around her and her position within it. 

Two Dark Moons does not limit itself to exploring language as an instrument of epistemology. It also commits itself to the complex project of understanding sentience and communication in both non-human and non-linguistic terms. In our world, the efforts of conservationists, naturalists, and cognitive scientists have done their part to show that the rest of the animal kingdom has as much claim to sensibility and complex cognition as does humankind and, moreover, that the distance between “human” and “animal” is insignificant.

The forests in the valley from which the five fingers of Ateng emerge shelter a reptilian apex predator, the Sãoni. Even from the safety of the hmun they are all too real to be dismissed as some kind of boogeyman. Like the stories European explorers brought back of panthers and leopards – natives ceding territory to the uncontested regents of the jungle – the Sãoni are a death sentence to those exiled or separated from the community. 

Where Silver’s world building and empathic sensitivity shine, setting the shared world of Eiji and Ateng apart, is their refusal to recognize the traditional barriers of intelligence and love. Anthropomorphized animal narrators are a staple of fantasy fiction, as is the reversal of the seemingly “animal” into an intelligent Other. Silver chooses to remind us that speech is not the be-all, end-all of communication. 

Even as our own scientific exploration now shows that elephants, whales, and dolphins possess a greater capacity for complex thought than previously afforded to them by humanity, the colony of Sãoni she joins show Somheng that viewing language-based communication as the pinnacle of intelligent evolution is an affectation of humanity. 

Ultimately, the demand for complex empathy across species is a lesson which prepares Sohmeng (and the audience) for the much more complicated business of empathizing with those human strangers who look and speak in unfamiliar ways.

It is easy to focus on the tradition of social commentary which has defined speculative fiction from early eu-/utopias through the tradition of feminist and queer SF/F, a tradition of which Two Dark Moons is undeniably a part. Indeed, the novel works diligently to challenge the audience’s assumptions regarding the “natural” organization of human beings and expands the possibilities of gender assignations, linguistic conventions, and reproductive configurations, in addition to more common topics in mainstream SF/F such as styles of governance and environmental systems. 

Silver is also able to impart a wisdom so often lacking from the ever-rising tide of apocalyptic and dystopian fiction which threatens to overwhelm every imaginable media outlet. They recognize that a community and a culture, even in the midst of crisis, is often able to carry on with a semblance of normalcy which can conceal impending catastrophe. As an author, Silver is willing to confront the re-traumatization inherent in history and discovery. There are questions which lurk in the caves and hollows which will never yield answers and the grief of them is something Sohmeng, and ultimately her hmun, must learn to live with, without hope or promise of closure. 

There is a transcendental impulse in Two Dark Moons, best recognized and understood by looking out at the world and knowing enough of life and death to be able to name what is before and around us, that great cycle of which we are a part, as “One.” The decision not to hold one’s self apart from the complexity and intricacies of “everything” reminds us that we are governed as much by the salt of the earth as we are by the movement of the heavens.

Perhaps my only complaint, and it’s merely a matter of form and personal preference, is that the story ends not quite on a cliffhanger (that comes at the start of the novel, actually) but with an unrepentant promise of a sequel. There is much still to learn of Ateng, Eiji, the hmun and the travails that await them, but in a world gone mad for sequels, prequels, series, et. al. it can be exhausting to add another to the list. That having been said, I would not trade my experience traveling through Eiji for anything. 

Two Dark Moons is now available at Amazon. Grab a copy! (Not an affiliate link)

1. “Constructed Languages” can refer to a variety of different types of languages which are intentionally developed by individuals. There are conlangs which are nominally dedicated to facilitating global communication or even communication with extraterrestrials, such as Esperanto and AI. However, the kind currently proliferating are those often referred to as “Art Languages” or “ArtLangs” which are languages developed as part of a wider artistic endeavor or for personal use and/or entertainment. The most well-known artlang is undoubtedly Tolkien’s Elvish, though Dothraki (developed for television by David Peterson) and Klingon are not unfamiliar. Both art- and conlangs are held to fairly stringent linguistic standards, and to be a fully developed “language” must meet the same requirements as any organic or naturally occurring language. For example, they require grammars and vocabularies which exceed a specific quantity. Therefore, most conlangs are developed over years and decades and are the result of an astounding quantity of work and thought. For more information about Constructed Languages and the people who love them, check out the Language Construction Society. (They have a really great convention, I went to it once, it changed my life.) ↵

2. I think it is a collective noun, it could follow the plural prefix format and be bahmun as a plural, but that might be a human/animal plural instead. Without a full grammar for the language, this will have to remain speculation. I hope that we do get a chance to dig into the linguistic world of Ateng in the future.  ↵

Aztec-Futurism, Mental Monster Movies, and Chinese Speculative Fiction

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Lords of the Earth

Rating: ★★★★★

The high concept movie pitch for this book is: Mesoamerican myth meets Godzilla. But Hollywood would never make this movie, and not only because they’re afraid of having a predominantly Latine cast. (Although now I’m imagining Robert Rodriguez and Guillermo Del Toro teaming up to bring this to the big screen … It would be amazing.) The real reason Hollywood could never bring this majestic adventure to the screen is that it would require a fundamental reconfiguration of the archetypes they rely on to make up the difference between “high concept” movie pitches and “great stories.”

This book has, at its core, the very thing that made the original Japanese Godzilla movies so good (and that which has been largely absent from any Western remakes) – there is no singular epistemology which will account for everything humanity is set to encounter. Just as in Mothra it is necessary to return to the folk stories to save Japan, so in Lords of the Earth must Western science meet and meld with indigenous knowledge to save Mexico and the world from the creatures awakened in the Earth’s mantle.

Bowles does a wonderful job fleshing out his characters in unexpected (though nevertheless natural) ways. He manages that nigh impossible feat of presenting genuinely complex – and at times irritating – characters in a way that lets them be fully human. We get to know them in the way you know old friends, full of faults and genius and particularities that make someone we can love.

The form of the novel shifts between points of view (always in the third person) and carefully unfolds the tangled history binding the different voices of the novel together. The famous physicist and TV host, the decorated general, and the Indigenous archeologist form the core of the story, with a shared, semi-public history spanning decades. Now, trapped together by the apocalyptic events set in motion by the emergence of huge, unknown creatures from Mexico’s volcanoes, that history is determined to meet its denoument.

In many ways, reading this book is more like being along for the ride than the slow unspooling and discovery of the narrative which can be said to characterize other SF/F stories. Despite its conglomoration of mysteries (What happened to bind Elena and General Marcos? Where did these monsters come from? How does an upstate New York transplant to Texas in the 1930s factor into all this? How did Elena and Alfonso end up so at odds with one another?) the action never abates.

So, if you like giant monsters, science, mythology, and adorable, kind of fucked up people trying to save the world, you should definitely take this one for a spin.

High Aztech

Rating: ★★★★★

Another book from the Latine SF/F Story bundle curated by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and another unadulterated triumph. I’ve already described it elsewhere as “The book American Gods wishes it was,” but that feels like a diminishment of what High Aztech achieves. (No insult intended to Neil Gaiman.)

High Aztech has all the best parts of cyberpunk/futurepunk speculative and science fiction. It makes me want to convince you of the potential for Aztec-Futurism as a mesoamerican corralary to Afro-Futurism. The novel has mind altering viruses, weird technologies, and a new world order following a global cataclysm (never fully explained). Hogan grabs you, the reader, and immerses you without remorse in the vibrant, familiar unknown world of Tenochtitlan – a new Mexico City undergoing a cultural revolution oriented toward bringing back Aztec beliefs.

The novel overflows with the mid-80s to early-90s hallucinogenic perpetual reconfiguration, like The Invisibles, Transmetropolitan, and Repo Man, except that to survive this story you had better get familiar with Nahuatl and the Aztec pantheon. It’s all worth it.

I haven’t been so moved or so convinced by a transcendental, spiritual apotheosis since I finished Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. Finally, at a moment when the U.S. and Mexico are poised to alientate themselves even further than already provided for by history, this is a story about perspective, and has more than enough political allegory for those not won over by awesome futuristic polyphonic insanity.

Broken Stars

Rating: ★★★★☆

The English-speaking world owes Ken Liu an enormous thank you. With 2017’s Invisible Planets and now with Broken Stars, Liu is bringing some of the best contemporary science fiction to audiences who cannot read Chinese.

Trying to compress my gushing praise and enthusiasm for Invisible Stars to comply with the limitations of coherent English is essentially impossible. Thus far it has most effectively been conveyed through immediate purchase and distribution of Invisible Planets to friends and loved ones, as well as fractured sentences, hand waving, and pleas for people to believe me when I say they must read it, if they wish to experience the full spectrum of what this life has to offer. In short: It’s amazing. Waste no time. Go read it immediately.

But that’s not Broken Planets. Broken Planets is also a requirement for anyone who wishes to experience the totality of human experience. It also requires slightly more patience and is possibly best considered as a more advanced continuation of what Ken Liu started with Invisible Planets.

The stories in Broken Stars are longer and combined with Liu’s push to include both more material from authors featured in the original collection as well as new authors, the editor freely admits the limitations this introduced on how many stories he could present from each author. Hopefully, galvanized by the response of Western audiences to the initial collection, Liu also chose to include some stories which draw more heavily on Chinese history, culture, and genre forms (such as wuxia novels). So while Invisible Planets could readily be given to someone with limited knowledge about Chinese politics, Broken Stars is best appreciated by readers with a little more experience. (For example, Baoshu’s “That which has already passed will in a kinder light appear” is entirely contingent on the reader being able to track events between existing history and a new one.) Footnotes are included throughout, but Liu and his fellow translators work hard to keep them minimal to avoid interrupting the flow of the stories.

Ultimately, I hope everyone has the opportunity to enjoy the work of Xia Jia. Her work has been as a sunbeam cutting through the winter gloom for me. Every single story of hers I’ve read has made me cry, and every one has been worth those tears. (It is not hard to make me cry, but it can be difficult to make me not resent it.)

HUMAN VOICES, an in-depth review of Dreams from the Witch House

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Cover and Illustrations by Danielle Serra

Dreams from the Witch House edited by Lynne Jamneck is a gorgeous book.

It’s a larger than usual format—25.5 cm by 17.8 cm—soft cover, with beautiful full bleed, color illustrations by Danielle Serra. With a smooth, matte cover and generous layout, it feels good in the hands and easy on the eyes.

“There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows much strike before reckoning the consequences.”

H.P. Lovecraft, “The Thing on the Doorstep”

In her introduction to the collection, Lynne Jamneck muses on the fragility of male sanity, particularly in Lovecraft’s own work, and the willingness present in the feminine experience to encompass unknown and unimaginable possibilities.

She lightly admonishes the puritanical impulse in some corners of Lovecraftianism, a reminder that the genre is dedicated to exploring the far reaches of all possible universes. This is a task which demands the greatest possible plurality of voices, a mere fraction of which she has gathered here.

Jamneck opens the collection with a restrained and dreamy historical piece, “Shadows of the Evening” by Joyce Carol Oates, which sees a young woman travel from her German-Hungarian neighborhood in upstate New York to the home of an aged aunt in Massachusetts. Its Lovecraftian elements come through in the setting and the manner in which the young, innocent protagonist is drawn in by some force far beyond her ability to understand, only in part because she has literally left her known world behind. The style is exquisitely crafted, harkening back to the language of a by-gone age, melding an early-20th century style with something older still.

Oates cleverly builds tension throughout the story by compressing time and allowing the future to project itself into the narrative of the past. The reader knows that the young woman will live to be quite old and that she will get married and have a family, which creates anticipation as the audience – aware they are reading a horror story – is rushing ahead of the story to figure out where and what will go wrong. The answer, of course, is almost impossible to describe.

The globe spins. In the next story, the reader finds themselves in an untamed wilderness during the early days of white settler incursion into New Zealand. Tamsyn Muir’s “The Woman in the Hill” is an epistolary story in the form of one letter and a single footnote. It lingers on the terror of wandering out into the hills only to encounter something too old to even recognize. It draws on the primal fear of the wilderness, how it has always been able to close around people and make them disappear, while also asking, “What comes back?”

The story poses an implicit question about the dangers of curiosity and empathy as the land – far more ancient and dangerous than anything else the settlers have encountered – makes its victims into accomplices, consuming them, spirit and flesh, until even their attempts to save the people they care become acts of complicity.

Cat Hellisen’s story “The Face of Jarry” will…

Capsule Reviews I

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It has seemed incomprehensible to some that there should be any need or desire for horror fiction when one need only look to the newspaper or out the window to find things to make one’s blood run cold.

But Professor Nobody, who makes his appearance in Thomas Ligotti’s Songs of a Dead Dreamer, explains why it is exactly, in moments of turmoil and distress, that we turn to horror fiction, not as individuals, but as a collective:

“In transforming natural ordeals into supernatural ones, we find the strength to affirm and deny the horror, to savor and suffer them at the same time. […] In story and song, we could entertain ourselves with the worst we could think of, overwriting real pains with ones that were unreal and harmless to our species.”
— “Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures,” Thomas Ligotti

With that in mind, consider picking up the following titles the next time you are at loose ends and looking for something to read.

The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer

Beyond a barrier blocking off a portion of the Floridian peninsula, some kind of otherworldly natural rejuvenation is at work. In Annihilation, the first book, we join the 12th expedition, this time comprised entirely of female scientists, across the barrier as they seek to understand what is happening in Area X,. Few things in that otherworldly Eden are as they first appear.

The first installment works excellently as a stand alone narrative, introducing us to Area X and establishing the tantalizing promise of the Southern Reach, the government department tasked with understanding Area X. The subsequent two books take you deeper into the mystery of Area X and the Southern Reach to find answers that are as strange and satisfying as the questions to which they correspond. Vandermeer’s lush prose is rivaled only by the Florida landscape it describes and the elegant tapestries of his characters.

Ultimately, Jeff Vandermeer’s alienating masterpiece might best be described as it was by the reviewer Scott Christensen on Google Books: “It’s kind of a love story at the end. And I thought that was sweet.”

(Read Annihilation to prepare for its cinematic adaptation, starring Natalie Portman, Tessa Thompson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Oscar Isaac.)

Looming Low (Vol. 1) Edited by Justin Steele and Sam Cowan

The first anthology out from Dim Shores, a press established by Justin Steele and Sam Cowan in 2015 dedicated to Weird and dark fiction. The press has has made a name for itself publishing chapbooks from esteemed Weird fiction authors including Jeffrey Thomas, and more recently, Gemma Files and Joseph S Pulver, Sr.

Looming Low Vol. 1 serves as a whistle-stop tour of contemporary Weird fiction. While it features works by established names like Michael Cisco, Brian Evanson, Livia Llewellyn, and S.P. Miskowski, it also includes stories from less immediately familiar names. As a whole,  it serves as an excellent introduction to Weird fiction and its impressive variety of styles and topics; from the supernatural to the mundane, the romantic to the fraternal, and beyond, the human heart is metamorphosed before your eyes as it tangles with the incomprehensible and the irreconcilable.

Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti

Thomas Ligotti has been described as a mix between Kafka and Lovecraft. His personal brand of transcendental horror, as if Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau had ascended to that higher spiritual plane only to realize that life is something worse than a cosmic joke, is utterly unlike anything else. His dreamy, rotting post-industrial landscapes peel back to reveal humanity dancing on the end of a string, while elsewhere, close by, the universe laughs.

Perhaps most effectively, unlike the hapless or blissfully ignorant characters which populate Weird and Science Fiction, who unwittingly stumble upon unimaginable horrors, Ligotti’s characters often walk to their doom with some foreknowledge. His protagonists are seekers after truth, aware that they are damning themselves by looking but unable look away.

The Penguin classics single volume re-release of his first and second collections of short stories (Songs and Grimscribe, respectively) is an opportunity for everyone to re-/discover this master of dread.

Edited 26 JULY 2018 (for typos/clarity)

Book Review: The Grimscribe’s Puppets, Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. ED. Miskatonic River Press, 2013

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“I don’t really want to see a ghost, but if someone said, ‘Do you want to go to a haunted house and see a ghost?’ I would say, ‘Yes’.”  — Kelly Link. Oct. 6, 2015. Brown University

A review of The Grimscribe’s Puppets by Justin Steele on arkhamdigest.com said, “Thomas Ligotti, one of the finest horror authors, can be a tough pill to swallow. […] His work is definitely not for everyone though, casual horror readers would most likely be turned off by this particular brand of philosophical horror, yet everyone should read Ligotti at least once.” Though I have never read Ligotti, I can easily (and eagerly) imagine his desolate cityscapes, and agonized protagonists who lurch through them, revolted by the existential truths they have uncovered. Their miserable voices call to me saying, “We are all connected. None of us is alone.”

Book photo from MIskatonic River Press

Pulver’s collection here is (according to Wikipedia) award-winning and rightfully so. The stories in it bring a range of voices, both narratively and creatively, together in a dizzying rush through the darkened, greedy corners of our universe. I started the book in the middle, with Jon Padgett’s 20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism, and from there explored outwards from the center of the book, devouring the stories and letting the thread, whatever Ligottian impulse Pulver had called forth from them for this collection, which bound them together, thread its way through me and draw me in, another puppet for the Grimscribe, or whatever else is hiding out past the blue veneer of the sky.

Of extra special note are Livia Llewellyn’s Furnace, Kaaron Warren’s The Human Moth, Robin Spiggs The Xenambulist, and Gemma Files’s Obliette (which I didn’t save for last, and highly recommend you take the editor’s implicit recommendation and let it be the last morsel of this collection you savor to end the experience). The Human Moth left me feeling like Ms. Link, now that I know stories like it exist, though I might prefer to have eschewed that knowledge, I must seek them out.

ORIGINALLY APPEARING IN PRINT AS THE FIRST STAFF PICK 
AT THE LOVECRAFT ARTS & SCIENCES COUNCIL