First Impressions Review: On Safari in R’lyeh and Carcosa with Gun and Camera, by Elizabeth Bear

 

“I want to know how things work. I want to know why they work, and what happens if you alter the variables. Sometimes it’s not the variables that alter on you, however. Sometimes it’s the constants.”

            This story feels like something I might have commissioned. A realistic depiction of a middle-aged sushi-loving female scientist who goes down a rabbit hole after taking one of those boxed DNA tests and discovers she has Lovecraftian alien ancestors…and instead of the “auugh, horrors man was not meant to know!” reaction of most Lovecraft protagonists, just keeps gathering more data? Kind of like my beloved ‘Annihilation’ but funny? Yes, please!

            I often get annoyed at how science and scientists get portrayed in media, but with this one I kept laughing or wincing at relatable line after relatable line. For example: “I’m a physicist at a notable northeastern US institution you would have heard of if I named it. I’m not going to, any more than I’m going to give you my real name, because I have tenure but I’m not stupid.” Yeah, while I’ve gotten more relaxed sharing personal stuff after tenure, I probably wouldn’t want my colleagues to know that I thought I had fish/frog-monster DNA either. It might cause awkwardness at department parties. Also:

“I still might not have done it, if my department chair hadn’t stuck his head into my office one afternoon in late August to let me know we had a new faculty member coming on board, and how did I feel about being their liaison during the onboarding process? I note, entirely for the record and apropos of nothing, that I am the only female tenured faculty in the physics department. …I do an estimated thirty-six percent of the emotional labor in my sixteen-person department. Female grad students and admins do the rest. And it’s not like we’re any less introverted and non-neurotypical than the dudes. We’re just forced to learn to endure more discomfort in order to have careers.”

While ecology isn’t as male-dominated (anymore) and dominated by awkward introverts as physics…yes, women and minorities do still seem to end up doing a disproportionate amount of the “people work” and for those of us who are also awkward introverts, that can be exhausting. Yet we'll often still do it even if no one is forcing us - especially if it is a “diversity” thing - partly out of conditioning for helpfulness and partly because we know how much it mattered that someone did (or didn't) do that for us.

            I really like the dynamic between “Greer” and her geneticist friend Roberts, who she consults about the “unknown 10.2%” of her ancestry kit results, and who also can’t let the mystery go.

“Come on, Greer,” he said. “Tell me who you got to put this data set together, so I can mail them a dead badger.”

She and Roberts are old college friends, so they have these charmingly bickery conversations that do not turn into romance – it is just a “wisecracking best buddies” situation featuring a man and a woman. Of course, the fact that they can call each other up at night (sometimes with a “I need you to come over now”) and talk about super weird ideas – and that Greer keeps Bourbon on hand specifically for Roberts - indicates the closeness of this friendship, so some readers might think it weird that she felt so alone at the beginning. But I’ve had periods of feeling incredibly lonely when I logically could have just called my friends...and didn’t because I was already “socially exhausted” from work. 

            It is Roberts trying to dig up a rejected thesis from Miskatonic University that provides the (chronologically) first Lovecraftian turn to the story. That leads to them falling through a portal:

“We…found ourselves gasping up at a streaky, bubbling yellow sky flecked with black, unradiant stars. Not the kind of yellow sky which makes you expect a tornado…It was—and I say this advisedly—an uncanny color. A distressing color. It made me think of pus and the pulsating bodies of hungry maggots, and not in a good way. I acknowledge there’s no good way to think about pus. There are probably good ways to think about maggots, if you’re an entomologist.” Knowing some entomologists...yep, that is correct! 

The geometry is off; Octagonal tiles can interlock, even thought they shouldn’t. And, as Roberts puts it: “These buildings do look like they were drawn by Dr. Seuss on cold medicine. The good stuff, with the codeine in it.”

              Roberts, you might notice, is still talking like a sarcastic modern human, while Greer is starting to insert some more Lovecraftian language into her narration, like “pulsating”, “unradiant stars,” and then “the moons crossed the zenith in spiraling synchrony,” and "There was a smell in the air, autumnal as chrysanthemums but not in any manner floral”. I like this detail – it suggests a “pull of the blood”, as it were, toward her own uncanny heritage. And, once out, do they flee and never speak of it again, yet shudder sometimes in the solitary night to think of the horrors that lurk beyond the knowledge of man? Hah!

“‘We need to go back and document that.’ ‘With GoPros,’ I agreed. He nodded. ‘And guns’.”

            That’s not the world of Greer’s heritage, though. The next part of the story is a nice homage to “Shadow over Innsmouth”. As discussed in the review linked in the first paragraph, I’ve always liked the Lovecraft stories where the protagonist accepts their own monstrous nature better that the ones that are only about the horror of encountering the outsider. Greer reacts to the revelations about herself much as I think I would in her situation: With some trepidation – including worry about not being able to come back to the friends and life hat she’s spent decades cultivating – but also with excitement. I mean, being able to breathe underwater is a pretty neat trick! And meeting long-lost relatives in a bioluminescent city? Awesome. Unfortunately, it turns out social anxiety doesn’t only get triggered by humans! But, by the end, Greer is thinking quite positively about her future and how to integrate her human and sea-person characteristics, her friendship with Roberts, and possible new career directions for both of them. Hell yeah!