THE DEEP ONES: "The Litany of Earth" by Ruthanna Emrys

"The Litany of Earth" by Ruthanna Emrys

Discussion begins March 25.

First published in The Litany of Earth (2014).



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.tor.com/stories/2014/05/the-litany-of-earth-ruthanna-emrys

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1751557

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The Litany of Earth

MISCELLANY

http://www.tor.com/Ruthanna%20Emrys
http://www.jimpyre.com/?p=554
https://twitter.com/r_emrys
http://tinyurl.com/nwwnoa6

I'm reading this in Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2014: A Tor.Com Original, which is still available as a free download:

http://amzn.com/B00P5JNNBE

>2 artturnerjr: Same for me.

I invited the folks over at SF Fans to come join our discussion*, so hopefully we'll get a taker or two.

* https://www.librarything.com/topic/188489#5101872

I read this one online - followed the link in >1 gwendetenebre:

>6 elenchus:

Ditto for me: I toyed with the idea of the free Kindle download, but path of least resistance ...

>5 housefulofpaper:, >6 elenchus:

Me too. I have an old Nook, and I poked around on the Tor site to see if there would be a suitable download. But in the end, I just read it on the web at my desk.

An interesting "non-review" of the story: http://www.exurbe.com/?p=2951

The following shows that Emrys gets it:

All of man’s other religions place him at the center of creation. But man is nothing—a fraction of the life that will walk the Earth. Earth is nothing—a tiny world that will die with its sun. The sun is one of trillions where life flowers, and wants to live, and dies. And between the suns is an endless vast darkness that dwarfs them, through which life can travel only by giving up that wanting, by losing itself. Even that darkness will eventually die. In such a universe, knowledge is the stub of a candle at dusk.

And while her writing style is fine, and the melancholic aspects of the story are done quite well, ultimately I found it not much to my liking. It's too gentle (almost touchy-feely) for what I look for in weird fiction, there is little real suspense, and reducing Cthulhu worship to the mundanities of many modern religions is maybe not the best choice.

Charlie and the bookshop make for some fine sequences, though, and I liked some of the little touches that define Aphra Marsh's personality, such as

“Ab-kar-rak al-laz-kar-nef—” I sound out the paragraph in front of me. “This was written by someone who had heard Enochian once, and vaguely recalled the sound of it. It’s gibberish. And in the wrong alphabet, besides. And the binding . . .” I run my hand over it and shudder. “The binding is real skin. Which makes this a very expensive fake for someone, but the price has already been paid. Take this abomination away.”

Take that!

I don't think I've heard the term "Aeonist" before!

Acc'd to the OED, an "aeonist" is someone who believes the world to be eternal. Apparently, "Aeonism" has also been used of a Christian sect and as the name of a band.

I've never been too fond of the whole take-a-fictional-world-and-use-it-to-present-a-viewpoint-opposite-to-the-orginator's trick, but Emrys did it pretty well I thought. It helps she keeps the cosmic indifference while reimagining the radical Other to essentially like us.

The Litany has evidently merged the Old Ones (or Elder Things or whatever you prefer to call the starfish people from AtMoM) and the Great Race (Yithians, from TSOoT) into one species.

I liked this one a lot. I was very surprised to find after reading it that the author's whole publishing history is just seven stories (all since 2007).

The value-reversal of "The Shadow over Innsmouth" is surprisingly complete. The federal agents generate the same kind of fear for Aphra Marsh that the deep ones do for Robert Olmstead. And like him, she is compromised in the end, working with/for the government that she has viewed as her greatest enemy.

In retrospect, this tale seems to me almost necessary somehow. I've read so very many (literally dozens of) stories elaborating on the events of "The Shadow over Innsmouth," and this is the first one that actually followed an Innsmouth native as a sympathetic survivor of the government raids and arrests. Emrys's comparanda are not just the WWII interment of Japanese-Americans, but (in the revelations about Aphra's mother and Charlie's subsequent reference to Nuremburg) Nazi Versuchspersonen.

(By the way, it seems to be steam-engine time for that notion in my reading. It was a key element in Homo Sacer, which I read recently, and it was also the focus of a "Straight Dope" column* I read this morning in a local alt weekly.**)

The integration of the Yith into the lore of the Esoteric Order of Dagon was a little surprising at first, but I thought the story sold it well.

>9 gwendetenebre: reducing Cthulhu worship to the mundanities of many modern religions

I didn't see that as what was going on at all.

* ETA: "Straight Dope" link won't seem to work:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3215/did-josef-mengele-produce-any-usef...

** EATA: Also, last night, my daughter watched the Series 2 Doctor Who episode "New Earth," where a hospital maintains a secret store of thousands of ectogenic Versuchspersonen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Earth

I like this one too, quite a bit, but wholeheartedly agree with KentonSem not for any thrill or visceral resonance, rather for the way it fits so well into the concept of the Mythos, even as it overturns the usual tropes. The scientific outlook from a vantage of understanding, in place of the horror outlook from a vantage of ignorance.

I liked the many references to water and its comforting context for Marsh.

And hints like these:

I reminded myself that, after humanity faded and died, a great insectoid civilization would live in these hills. After that, the Sareeav, with their pseudopods and strange sculptures. Therefore, I could show patience. “I will do what I can for suffering on my own.”

This is a strong, thoughtful story. Emrys seems to have some difficulty writing dialogue scenes with clarity here (it was not always easy for me to tell which was character was supposed to be speaking in them, which made me have to go back and reread a couple of them), but otherwise I thought this was without significant flaws.

I suspect that many readers will take this story primarily as a critique of Lovecraft's fiction. I, otoh, take it primarily as a fine demonstration of the richness of HPL's mythopoeia. I mean, this stuff is basically all there in The Shadow over Innsmouth. Look at the last couple of paragraphs of that tale again - Olmstead is describing his transformation into a full-on Deep One as an experience of transcendence and holiness, just as Emrys' narrator does; it just takes a writer of Emrys' insight to bring that to the forefront. (Also, the story's Weltanschauung is certainly Lovecraftian, as Kenton points out in >9 gwendetenebre: above).

My favorite line:

I licked salt from my lips, and prayed. I wished I could break the habit, but I wished more, still, that just once it would work.

>11 paradoxosalpha:

I can't help wonder whether or not you bristled a bit at the line about "Crowley and other such nonsense".

>13 artturnerjr: I can't help wonder whether or not you bristled a bit at the line about "Crowley and other such nonsense".

Not at all. A premise of the story is that occultist Enochiana (of which Crowley was a key transmitter) is a corruption of Aeonist lore, so of course she'd view him that way.

I certainly agree with you, Art, that this story "demonstrates the richness of HPL's mythopoeia" -- even as it takes liberties like collapsing the Elder Things and the Great Race into a single species. Another such collapse is performed on the Enochian and Aklo languages. I didn't take any of the inversions of perspective as critiques of Lovecraft or his work, though.

>10 AndreasJ:

I'm pretty sure that Emrys wasn't using the dictionary meaning of "aeonist," but rather coining it fresh from "And with strange aeons / Even death may die" to provide a neutral-sounding, clinical monicker for the cult of Yog-Sothothery. Compare Alan Moore taking "Aklo" from Machen's "The White People" to have a word for the pre-human language that HPL often quotes but never names.

>14 paradoxosalpha:

Oh, I'm quite sure she didn't intend the OED sense (which is obscure to put it mildly). I was just trying to point out that the word has prior usage (in at least two senses) outside the story.

(Part of me thinks the word ought mean Zurvanist, as Aion is an ancient Greek designation of Zurvan.)

HPL does somewhere ("Through the Gates of the Silver Key"?) speak of R'lyehian, which is indubitably the same as Ashra's R’lyehn.

>14 paradoxosalpha:

I'm pretty sure that Emrys wasn't using the dictionary meaning of "aeonist," but rather coining it fresh from "And with strange aeons / Even death may die" to provide a neutral-sounding, clinical monicker for the cult of Yog-Sothothery.

That's the way I took it, too, although it's interesting to find out that it has an actual dictionary meaning.

I just finished reading the review I linked to in >8 paradoxosalpha:

The review itself is pretty awesome work, and boy howdy, do I agree with it.

I wanted to mention that I thought this story was a more successful version of Elizabeth Bear's "Shoggoths in Bloom"* - iow, it also looks at HPL's fiction from a 21st century perspective, but without the slipshod didacticism.

* http://www.librarything.com/topic/155596

>17 paradoxosalpha:

I think exurbe's (Ada Palmer's) non-review is as strong as the story itself. For me, almost qualifying as co-story in this week's reading schedule.

I especially liked the observation regarding Emrys's usage of tense in the two timelines, and that on the link between good magic and the body.

Tense:
Structurally, the story interweaves experiences from different points in Aphra’s present–where she encounters Specter –with her past arriving in the city and encountering Charlie and his interest in her lost culture and languages. The choice to depict the present scenes in past tense and the flashbacks in present tense might seem counterintuitive, but I found it a powerful and effective choice. Past tense reads as “normal” in prose, so much so that we accept it as an uncomplicated way to depict the main moment of a narrative. In contrast, especially when we have just come from a past tense section, the present tense feels extra-vivid, raw, invasive. It feels like a very certain type of memory, the kind so vivid that, when something reminds us of them, they jump to the forefront of our minds and blot out the here and now with the tense, unquenchable emotions of a very potent then.

Magic:
The tender, intimate, visceral but beautiful magic which Ruthanna Emrys has presented is authentic to Lovecraft and to the rituals we associate with “dark arts” and yet positive, a rehabilitation which works in powerful symbiosis with the story’s treatments of discrimination.

I haven't listened to the Viking music yet.

>18 artturnerjr:

I too thought of "Shoggoths in Bloom" when reading this. That one was perhaps more polishedly written, but this one was definitely more enjoyable.

I didn't think to compare this story to "Shoggoths in Bloom." Bear was self-confessedly "picking a fight," and I don't see that here, all despite the common traits of revaluation and historical reflection. The empathy that Ada Palmer highlights in "Litany" seems missing from the more polemical "Shoggoths."

Any thoughts on the name Aphra? Marsh is pretty self-evident.

My only Google result was for Aphra Behn, a 17c. British (Kent) author celebrated for her "scandalous" plays, and later as a role model for women's equality and gender issues.

The Poetry Foundation has this morsel:
Aphra Behn was propelled into writing for a living by the death of her husband in 1665, and her indebtedness as a result of her employment as a spy for King Charles II. Charles refused payment, Aphra was thrown into debtor's prison, and after release made her own way. (No comment on what the nature of the alleged spying, but it mentiones Astrea as her "code name" from the debacle, later styled "The Incomparable Astrea" in deference to her verse.)

I'd sort of presumed that Aphra was a Biblical name, to go with Caleb and the like, but seems it isn't. There's a place-name "Beth-le-aphrah" (with various variant spellings) mentioned in Micah 10:1. The reader is told to roll in the dust there - if Emrys is into serious obscurity, possibly a reference to the un-maritime trials of Aphra and her family?

There's a Saint Afra. Can't say anything in her legend seems relevant, nor do the things she's considered patron of: Augsburg; converts; martyrs; penitent women.

Philosophically, I had some problems with this story.

I see this story as another example of a modern tendency in the fantastic genres to see no conflict as ever really unsolvable and intractable, that the seemingly menacing alien can be dealt with by understanding and isn't really threatening.

Even in terms of story logic, it doesn't work here. As I recall, in Lovecraft's story, the Deep Ones in waiting in Innsmouth very definitely threatened and acted against the regular humans first: enforced religion and violence to be specific.

On the other hand, I do think Emrys worked some clever changes on the Mythos. And I've longed like the idea of the "Enochian" tongue. The Yithians are like the god of Boethius -- they stand outside time and reveal the consequences of our free actions.

I found the Aeonist blood magic compelling described.

The "unreview" looks interesting, but I haven't read it yet.

>11 paradoxosalpha: Have you read Brian Hodge's "The Same Deep Waters as You"? Not exactly a sympathetic look at the incarcerated Innsmouthians, but worth a look.

>24 RandyStafford: Have you read Brian Hodge's "The Same Deep Waters as You"?

Nope. It's not in my library, but I see that it is in some collections that I'm already interested in, so I may well get to it soon.

>24 RandyStafford:

I was struggling get my thoughts in order about this one. The "unreview" set the bar dauntingly high, for one thing!

On the one hand I certainly enjoyed the story, found it absorbing and moving to a degree; but as the story progressed felt more reservations and quibbles coming to mind.

Aphra Marsh (not a quibble, but that first name, both 17th-Century and (I suppose) commemorating Aphra Behn, is almost too "on the nose") is a sympathetic and interesting main character, but with her outsider status and moral superiority to those around her, maybe cleaves too closely to the template of classic Science Fiction and Fantasy heroes and heroines? Current YA fiction too, I would guess.

More worrying for me was the philosophy or ethos underpinning the story because it makes Lovecraft an unreliable narrator of/witness too his own fictional universe. Sure, to objectify other human beings as "Other" starts at wrong and goes on to terrible evils, but in Lovecraft's world the Gods are unambiguously and objectively real (not myth or cultural construct or human psychological need or however a real-world religion might be explained, and immensely powerful, and either uncaring or actively hostile. People who through in their lot with them, in Lovecraft's world, choose to join the other team and are truly "enemies of mankind" ALL mankind, I should emphasise. Whatever Lovecraft's personal issues, cultists, Deep Ones, etc aren't coded references to any real-world group.

(I'm reminded of - well, no, to be honest what in all probability got me thinking along these lines was a review of the second X-Men film in the London Review of Books. They sometimes condescend to consider popular culture. The reviewer was offended - at an intellectual level - by the equivalence of persecuted Jews in WWII and the film's super-powered mutants. There are no super-powered mutants, was the argument, if I remember it correctly, so no parallels can be drawn. The world of the X-Men is it's own hermetic universe and what goes on there has no meaning in the real world).

Tor to publish two Alphra Marsh novels from Emrys:
http://www.tor.com/2015/10/21/tor-com-acquires-two-aphra-marsh-novels-from-rutha...

Sometimes I feel authors would better off leaving strong works alone and not revisit them but I think there's enough here worth exploring that I'm looking forward to them.

>27 lucien:

Nice!

Emrys' Lovecraft Reread series actually came up in a discussion (unprompted by me, believe it or not) in my TBR Challenge group:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/183641#5357284

I just got around to reading this story, and saw this thread. I liked the story a lot, and look forward to the novels that will follow. Was also much impressed by the Ad Palmer Ex Urbe review that >8 paradoxosalpha: pointed out; long but worth reading. Parenthetically, Ada Palmer's first novel has just been published, many are raving about it, and I'm looking forward to reading it.

>29 dukedom_enough:

Ran across this review of the new Ada Palmer book, Too Like The Lightning, first in a tetralogy.

I noticed this mention of Emrys' story in the online annotations to Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows' Providence*:

“They’d like to see us all locked up someplace” echoes the “concentration camps” mentioned in “Innsmouth,” where the Innsmouth fish-folk were interred after the government raid: “Keener news-followers, however, wondered at the prodigious number of arrests, the abnormally large force of men used in making them, and the secrecy surrounding the disposal of the prisoners. No trials, or even definite charges, were reported; nor were any of the captives seen thereafter in the regular gaols of the nation. There were vague statements about disease and concentration camps, and later about dispersal in various naval and military prisons, but nothing positive ever developed.”

This theme of internment, which eerily parallels the interment of Japanese Americans during World War II, has been picked up by some later authors, such as Brian McNaughton in “The Doom that Came to Innsmouth” and Ruthanna Emrys in “The Litany of Earth.”

Like McNaughton and Emrys, Moore is inverting Lovecraft’s sympathies. Instead of Innsmouth’s half-breeds being sinister and scary, here Moore and Burrows present them as sympathetic and persecuted.*

I'll have to put that McNaughton tale up for a Deep Ones nomination; it's in The Book of Cthulhu and some other widely-available anthologies.

* https://factsprovidence.wordpress.com/moore-lovecraft-comics-annotation-index/pr...

I just thought I'd note that our RandyStafford has reviewed Winter Tide, a novel staring Aphra Marsh and taking place after "The Litany of Earth".

Excellent review, Randy.

>33 gwendetenebre: Thanks, Kenton. Glad you liked it.

I'm currently re-reading "The Litany of Earth" as part of my cover-to-cover read of Cthulhusattva, and I'm still liking it. I might get around to Winter Tide this year.