A review by trackofwords
These Lifeless Things by Premee Mohamed
4.0
The first title released as part of Solaris Satellites – Rebellion Publishing’s new direct-to-reader range of novellas – Premee Mohamed’s These Lifeless Things is a strange, unsettling, ambiguous tale of the costs of survival and the difficulty of piecing history back together. One of a handful of survivors from when They invaded, Eva ekes out a rough living in the city, avoiding the terrifying sentinels and all the other new dangers, and keeping a journal of her days. Decades later, young Emerson finds Eva’s journal on a research trip to the city, recognising it as a rare opportunity to gain an insight into what actually happened in the years following the invasion.
It’s hard to know quite what to make of a story like this, with all the questions that it leaves unanswered and the sense it gives of a wider, more expansive world just waiting to be explored further. Readers who like stories to be neatly wrapped up by their conclusions may well find it frustrating, but there’s no question that it’s compelling from start to finish, beautifully written and quietly powerful. As a vision of the cold, chilling unknown it’s extremely effective and often deeply emotional, examining questions of survival and the awful prioritisation that requires, love, loss, the preservation of history and even the competitive realities of competitive science, all under the lurking shadow of the faceless, nameless, abstract yet deeply disturbing Them. It’s certainly a story that will last long in the memory, unsettling but thought-provoking.
Read the full review at https://www.trackofwords.com/2021/02/16/these-lifeless-things-premee-mohamed/
It’s hard to know quite what to make of a story like this, with all the questions that it leaves unanswered and the sense it gives of a wider, more expansive world just waiting to be explored further. Readers who like stories to be neatly wrapped up by their conclusions may well find it frustrating, but there’s no question that it’s compelling from start to finish, beautifully written and quietly powerful. As a vision of the cold, chilling unknown it’s extremely effective and often deeply emotional, examining questions of survival and the awful prioritisation that requires, love, loss, the preservation of history and even the competitive realities of competitive science, all under the lurking shadow of the faceless, nameless, abstract yet deeply disturbing Them. It’s certainly a story that will last long in the memory, unsettling but thought-provoking.
Read the full review at https://www.trackofwords.com/2021/02/16/these-lifeless-things-premee-mohamed/