As soon as I heard this was coming out I had to leap on it—because it’s a Lovecraft pastiche, and specifically one coming at his mythos with a feminine perspective. Which I love. I’m another of those readers who adores the Lovecraftian mythos in general but who has significant problems with the author’s racism and sexism, so every time I see a modern author taking a crack at interrogating ol’ H.P., I just have to take a look.
This work hit me in the heart when I got to this quote:
She had never met a woman from the waking world. Once she asked Carter about it.
“Women don’t dream large dreams,” he had said, dismissively. “It is all babies and housework. Tiny dreams.”
The Carter here would be Randolph Carter, a recurring Lovecraft character, and in particular the protagonist of
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. I’ve read that work, and I have distinct recollections of coming out of it with a broad sense of “WTF did I just read?” even as I was quite impressed by the stream-of-consciousness fluidity of Lovecraft’s prose.
Kij Johnson does a splendid job of calling back to that fluidity with her own prose. Except this time, her protagonist is a woman. And not only a woman, but an experienced one who happens to be 55 years old. Vellitt Boe must set off to retrieve an errant student from her university, a young woman trying to escape out of the dreamlands into the waking world with her lover, which puts their entire city at risk of being destroyed by an angry god.
Her quest is every bit as large as Carter’s, underscoring what any woman of today who loves SF/F already knows: that all of us, regardless of gender, can dream without bounds or limitations. Yet at the same time, Johnson’s novella celebrates the waking world in ways you never see in Lovecraft. Yes, dreams can be amazing—yet so can the waking world be. Gods have power, but so does science. It’s a refreshing balance indeed.
Nor is Vellitt Boe the only female character active in this story, by a long shot. Several women of the university where Vellitt teaches appear at the beginning of the story. And several of the ghouls she encounters are in fact female, giving us a tale where it’s perfectly acceptable for the monsters as well as the humans to be so. And the student she tracks into the waking world, Clarie Jurat, is herself vitally important… though I shouldn’t say how, because spoilers. Instead, I’ll say, go read this novella.
A longer version of this review is posted on the blog Here Be Magic here.
