Mycopunkster

Vanja arrives in Amatka, an isolated, polar commune hovering at the slant-light edge of liminal space, where social control is even tighter than in her native commune and the distant lake spontaneously deep-freezes and thaws every night and morning. Fervent and obsessive solipsism is the only thing keeping physical reality in any recognizable shape and the controls are unraveling. It is an obsessive-compulsive’s nightmare—wrong intrusive thoughts, wrong words, can literally make the world dissolve. In all this she finds herself with as banal a job as market research, and her already-existing sense of alienation sharpens until she finds kindred spirits who all flirt with the idea that amorphous, anarchic freedom is better than the claustrophobic, ritualized control under which they all live. After all, this is a world with Thoughtcrime. But, unlike other dystopias, there may be a legitimate reason for that.

This is dream-logic taken to the level of intuitiveness and salience one only experiences in dreams. It is the subconscious myth of the obsessive-compulsive, the pathological need for ritual validated with immediate consequence if not followed—a sense of inevitability, a loss of control over material reality. It is seeped in the grey Soviet concrete-and-root-vegetables aesthetic, and the weak, angled light of the tundra. There are also strong flavors of something I’ve started to call mycopunk, a subset of biopunk that fits well with the ferroconcrete and grey goo, and with a heavily-urbanized and agriculturally marginal people. At the end it abruptly shifts into Hideaki Anno levels of weird and amorphous, heavily-symbolism-laden imagery, which is 100% my jam but may leave people looking for a concrete conclusion dissatisfied.

I place this novella in the same category of myth as Fahrenheit 451 and The Giver. The world feels as though it emerged wholecloth and fully-realized in two hundred some-odd pages of spare prose—it has the power of archetype, primal and known. The power is in the 90% of what is going on that is not explicitly said or even seen, and the worldbuilding that is made explicit is so powerful that these gaps fill seamlessly from the wellspring of the collective unconscious.

I did not realize this book was originally written in Swedish, so smooth and sharp was the English prose. In retrospect the Swedish tundra permeates the book, seeping through under the streets and around the isolated city, a great yellow-white, and the social context of the book is reframed most enjoyably. And, the author did her own translation, which removes some of the inherent loss in a translation, as she knows well what she meant to say. Native English speakers could only hope to speak so clearly and well.