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Ruthanna Emrys

Author of Winter Tide

14+ Works 1,320 Members 66 Reviews

About the Author

Includes the name: R. Emrys Gordon

Series

Works by Ruthanna Emrys

Winter Tide (2017) 597 copies
A Half-Built Garden (2022) 269 copies
Deep Roots (2018) 202 copies
The Litany of Earth (2014) 116 copies
Cthulhusattva: Tales of the Black Gnosis (2016) — Contributor — 35 copies
Imperfect Commentaries (2019) 23 copies
The Deepest Rift (2015) 14 copies
The Tor.com Sampler (2016) — Contributor — 11 copies
Those Who Watch 9 copies

Associated Works

Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2014 Edition (2015) — Contributor — 153 copies
The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu (2016) — Contributor — 153 copies
Worlds Seen in Passing: Ten Years of Tor.com Short Fiction (2018) — Contributor — 124 copies
Ex Libris: Stories of Librarians, Libraries, and Lore (2017) — Contributor — 95 copies
New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird (2015) — Contributor — 79 copies

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Common Knowledge

Other names
Gordon, R. Emrys
Birthdate
19??
Gender
female
Nationality
USA
Places of residence
Washington, DC, USA
Short biography
Science fiction and fantasy writer. Lovecraftian monster apologist. Rumored to be ontologically challenged.

-- from https://twitter.com/R_Emrys

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THE DEEP ONES: "The Litany of Earth" by Ruthanna Emrys in The Weird Tradition (July 2017)

Reviews

Took me a while because I've suffered from HPL malaise & overexposure to Cthulhu my this stuff. Despite that, the book has a slow start but once it finds its legs a few chapters in, this book takes hold & doesn't let go.

I never thought I'd be able to empathize with Deep Ones or worshippers of the Old Ones. This author & book proved me wrong. Great details that mesh Innsmouth & Miskatonic into history & geography alike. I'm eagerly awaiting the next novel....
1 vote
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SESchend | 26 other reviews | Feb 2, 2024 |
The year is 2083. Judy Wallach-Stevens, while monitoring environmental sensors for the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Network, sees a phosphate surge in the Potomac River. She heads out with her baby and her wife, expecting something routine - only to find an alien spacecraft, landed by the river. Baby Dori does what babies do, and Judy must change a diaper in view of the ship. The alien expedition leader emerges: shaped long and low, with many limbs, eyes on stalks, scaled - and she is feeding her own two babies from her body somewhat as Judy does for Dori. The "Ringers" are most insistent on including children in meetings and negotiations, and Judy has inadvertently passed the aliens' first test for humanity. Other tests will follow.

Much of the future Earth is organized into watershed networks like Judy's, conserving carbon footprints, intensively monitoring every environmental parameter, continuously improving their methods and knowledge of the Earth system. The watersheds are linked by the dandelion network, a social-media system optimized to promote expertise and consensus in online discussions. Despite a year-round hurricane season, too many extinctions, and a billion people dead in disasters, they think they are making progress toward saving the planet.

But the Ringers solved their own, similar problems thousands of years ago by abandoning their planets and building a Dyson swarm around their sun. Of the several planetary civilizations the two Ringer species have detected, the Earth's is the first that has not become extinct before their arrival. To the aliens, the lesson is imperative. Humans must leave Earth, turning it into building material for vast space settlements, starting soon.

The corporations and governments that wrecked Earth's climate are still around, their scope and power much reduced from our time. The corporations' responses to the Ringers' proposal are less Earth-friendly, aimed at restoring their former power, but also more in tune with the Ringers than those of the watersheds. The US Government also gets involved in negotiations, particularly NASA, still pursuing dreams of humans in space - and are those dreams really so bad? Meanwhile, the dandelion network has been hacked, and the best ideas are no longer foregrounded.

Community is the core of Emrys' story. The dandelion networks, comprising "...algorithms that spoke for the needs of river and tree and air, and gave weight to the values that we strove to preserve in all our problem-solving...", support a view of the individual in society radically different from many that prevail today. Judy wants to operate with constant updates from the network, not with her own decisions - quite differently from SF's standard, heroic, lone protagonists. Beyond the networks, Judy's family and neighborhood, very progressive by today's standards, support her quest to save Earth by directly helping her, and by being a good place to live, where old prejudices have faded - two of the four adults in her household are trans, for example. A crucial plot turn occurs at a Passover seder.

The aliens have their own version of community. They originate from two habitable planets in the same star system - the second species are 9 foot tall, 10 legged furry spiders, sort of, who dwell in trees. A central metaphor for the paired species is their long-ago first contact, when the scaled plains-people reached the planet of the neighboring tree-people: "That's what symbiosis is to us. When we outgrew our worlds, the plains and trees were the next branch for each other - we grasped, and swung, and found our new perch together." It's common for alien families to include persons of both species. Can Judy bring networks, aliens, and Earthly rivals to an understanding that leaves our planet intact?

These are Hal Clement aliens, really. Communication between us and them comes too easily, in service of getting to the ideas part of the story, just as Clement used to do it. The reader must make allowances here. One also misses discussion of the implied, unending, impossible, exponential growth that the aliens' system seems to aim for, which would be an obvious line of argument for Judy and her allies. And there's no mention of the Fermi Paradox, integral to thinking about intelligent life elsewhere.

Emrys has done a great job imagining a climate-stressed future that is not the usual doomscape. Even the corporation minions are not a straight-line extrapolation of today's conservative rich people - for example, their system of personal pronouns is way more complex than that of the watershed networks or anything today. And social media that amplifies facts and sound opinion, not lies? Tell us more. I rarely say this about a book, but this refreshingly optimistic novel could have benefited from being longer. Thinking about it was fun.

Ruthanna Emrys puts acknowledgments at the end for some of her inspirations for this novel. I rate it an extra half star for her friend [[Malka Older]]'s coining of the term "diaperpunk".
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½
4 vote
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dukedom_enough | 10 other reviews | Jan 25, 2024 |
You know the joke that starts "how do you know if someone is polyamorous?"
1 vote
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sarcher | 10 other reviews | Dec 27, 2023 |
A follow up to the excellent Winter Tides, here we see the Mi-Go, the “Fungi from Yuggoth”, presented in a sympathetic light.

Turns out they’re people. People whose mission is to “talk to everyone”, to learn from any intelligent life, anywhere, and to introduce the people they meet to the true sprawl,of the universe.

Lovecraft’s Mi-Go seem hostile—tearing out people’s brains and po—ing them into canisters, where they can see and talk with the right technological accessories, but where access to those tools is subject to the whims of the aliens. Emrys’s Mi-Go, “the Outer Ones”, demonstrate a more positive plan—in general, they only take those who desire the experiences they offer, and they can swap brains back and forth between bodies and canisters.

They’re not unambiguously good, however. They can, and do, take people without permission sometimes. They’re also willing to do some mental manipulation when it’s to their advantage, and there are different factions whose plans for humanity clash.

Aphra Marsh and her confluence encounter them while searching for more relatives with Deep One blood, hoping to continue/restore the onshore community they lost in the Innsmouth raid. Both our friendly and less friendly FBI agents get involved, and old wounds are opened between the Deep Ones and the aliens. In the end, the tensions between regular humans, Deep Ones, and Outer Ones change, but remain unresolved. The Cold War lumbers on, with the possibility of nuclear annihilation continuing.

We may have managed to thread that needle thus far, with the peak and breaking point in the 1980s, but the threat remains, with newly unstable nuclear powers, including some we thought were out of the game, back to issueing blustering threats. At least the Deep Ones will (probably) survive the destruction of the surface world; the rest of are not so lucky.
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cmc | 11 other reviews | Oct 27, 2023 |

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Allen Williams Illustrator
John Linwood Grant Contributor
Stefanie Elrick Contributor
Erica Ruppert Contributor
Luke R J Maynard Contributor
Vrai Kaiser Contributor
Kristi DeMeester Contributor
Rhoads Brazos Contributor
Jamie Mason Contributor
Noah Wareness Contributor
Alix Branwyn Cover artist
Gord Sellar Contributor
Don Raymond Contributor
Bryan Thao Worra Contributor
Scott Bakal Cover artist
Daniel Polansky Contributor
Guy Haley Contributor
Victor LaValle Contributor
Malka Older Contributor
Cassandra Khaw Contributor
Adrian Tchaikovsky Contributor
Matt Wallace Contributor
Seanan McGuire Contributor
Kai Ashante Wilson Contributor
Melissa F. Olson Contributor
Nnedi Okorafor Contributor
John Jude Palencar Cover artist
Mark Smith Cover artist
Christine Foltzer Cover designer
Liana Krissoff Copy editor

Statistics

Works
14
Also by
8
Members
1,320
Popularity
#19,471
Rating
3.8
Reviews
66
ISBNs
31

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