These are the few notes I made while reading These Lifeless Things:

— the Setback lasted 3 yrs, only 6 verifiable documents survive from that period. But now there’s the notebook (journal? diary?)
— it was some kind of invasion, worldwide—a weird invasion though, not alien spaceships [is this like the Cthulhu mythos?]
— switches back and forth between excerpts from the journal and the scientist (anthropologist) who found and is now reading it
— anti-science tone running thru the book
— almost ¾ thru and this is v. repetitive, getting a bit boring—first ¼ is quite subtle and intriguing, but the next two ¼s author doesn’t add much, just more of the same
— it’s the content I don’t think much of, writing style itself very good
— ¾ way thru suddenly Kyiv mentioned—first and only place-name in book
— underwhelmed

I like “subtle”, like “strange” very much too—and also like unreliable narrators, at least one of which we may have here, but in the end still found this pretty uninteresting anyway. ( )

99.5% of humanity were wiped out in 3 short years after They arrived. 50 years later, a team of researchers sift through the ruins of a siege city to better understand the catastrophe. When Emerson finds a survivor’s journal, it feels like the jackpot. But can Eva’s account be taken at face value?

There is so much to unpack in this remarkable novella, which interweaves Emerson’s frustrated efforts against the clock with the horror of Eva’s final months in the unnamed Ukrainian city. So many apocalypse narratives focus on a last ditch defence or the fight back. Here, we get the small stories of life in the ashes, the humanity of a handful of ordinary lives making history only because one woman chose to write them down. It encompasses everything from the civilian experience of war to academic pecking orders, with a side of (implied) cosmic horror.

These Lifeless Things may not be for everyone: it raises far more questions than it answers. We never discover what They were (are?) or how They were defeated (even if They were defeated), and – perhaps inevitably – we never find out what happens to Eva. Shockingly, given my addiction to coherent world-building, I didn’t care. It works brilliantly on its own terms, and keeps us firmly in Emerson’s shoes: the past is a mystery, of which we can only grasp at fragments. Perhaps it resonates so deeply with me because I studied archaeology; perhaps I love it purely as a reader for inviting me to fill its world with my own theories.

Either way: it’s bloody brilliant. These Lifeless Things was one of my Best of 2021, quiet and fierce and unnerving.

Full review ( )