The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed
There are many reasons that this book should have been right up my alley, and I wanted to like it more than I did. I am generally positive about it and very clear that my problems with it may be personal and might not affect you as a reader. So, to open up this review I want to say you should check this book out.
Premee Mohamed is an author I have had my eye on to check out. I knew she wrote about climate themes, and as a believer in Cli-Fi, I generally want to check out all that I can. Her novel Beneath the Rising sounds great, and one that was on the radar. Judging from the length and genre I kind of assumed this was in the Tor novella series. I thought a shorter work was a better place to start.
It appears this is published by some sort of Canadian grant, makes sense it is a Canadian author with a post-climate apocalypse setting of Alberta. The setting and world-building are excellently done, within the first few pages we know society has mostly collapsed except a few domed pockets. Our main narrative point of view is Reid who is accepted to university. It would mean leaving her family who struggles to survive. Scouting parties for water and constant misery are a part of life and Reid doesn’t feel right about leaving her family. The description of the environment is done with style.
“In silent agreement, we squeeze into the window to study our valley. Unlovely in the early spring, crusted with think rime of muddy snow, the river still choked with ice, a single dark thread of water at it’s center. Sleeping tangle of grey saplings, dead shrubs of sepia or amber or faded dogwood red. Brown sparrows and dust-colored pigeons. The only real color is magpipes, repeated shouts of iridescence, irritatingly clean in their black and white suits. Like photographs of actors or spies. How do they stay so clean in this crap, I always wonder.”
The story really gets interesting with the introduction of The cad. It is a fungal infection that is more than just a disease it also alters the mind.
“And people protested. They protested the bans and they protested and they protested the Cad and they mobbed anyone with tattoos of leaves or ferns or cephalopods. No one realized that the infection was cryptic, then dormat, then heritable from either parent. And so it spread, named and considered an epidemic at first- a flash in the pan, like Ebola or Zika or Covid, that would eventually burn-out – and near the end more or less endemic.”
For me, some of the moments that hit me the hardest were the ones that hit close to home. As someone who has been warning about climate change as an activist since 1994…
“It was not instantaneous, the “end of the world,” the way it is in nightmares. The sky didn’t tear open around an asteroid, the earth didn’t swallow us up. And of course the world didn’t end the same for everyone.”
These warnings in the novel made for very powerful moments.
“On a human scale it was slow enough that for a long time it didn’t even seem truly dire; on a geological scale it seemed that nothing was happening, till suddenly the feedback cycles tipped over, became too front-heavy to regulate themselves.”
All this is good stuff. Overall I enjoyed the book for the first half I was thinking very highly. In the second half, there were a couple of chapters devoted to characters hunting. The vegan, animal liberationist in me could ignore a little bit of this but I felt it went on too long and slowed the narrative down. Again this might not bother you as a reader. Also, I was curious about the university and the domes. Those places and settings we never got to explore.
Overall the best compliment I can give this short novel is that it made me more interested in the author’s other work. Even if I didn’t love this novel, I can see lots of stuff I do like. I would also recommend it to most Sci-fi/CLI-FI readers.
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