Interviewing Premee Mohamed

 Hellooo!!!

A few days ago I raved about These Lifeless Things by Premee Mohamed a brilliant novel crossing science fiction and cosmic horror with themes of survival, history and the uses of science. I was last year also very impressed with their novel Beneath the Rising which presented a very different tale. Premee was very kind to agree to chat a little bit about the new novella and what else we can look forward to this year

How would you usually tempt someone into reading These Lifeless Things?

I usually try to tempt people out of reading my work, but I’ll try here! I would say: There’s a subset of readers who are interested in the aftermath of things, who when they were kids would get to the end of the story and ask their parents ‘What happens next?’ ‘What do they do after that?’ To be told ‘Everyone lived happily ever after’ isn’t enough. How long is ever after? What does it mean to be happy? I was one of those kids, and I wrote ‘These Lifeless Things’ for the adults we turned into. I would say: Supposing the world ended. Wouldn’t you like to go back and find out what happened? Look for clues and evidence of what people lived through? And supposing you yourself had lived through the end of the world. Wouldn’t you like to hope that other people heard your story, that they knew the truth?  

What led to you choosing to write this tale?

It was initially intended to be a short spinoff story from ‘And Sneer of Cold Command,’ the story strictly about the dangers of the magical (maybe possessed?) statues that act as the invaders’ avatars and snipers, and a former government worker-turned-metal dealer who accepts a mission to find the leader of the human resistance against them. It was such a dark, grim story, I kept thinking: What about life in other places? Just as an example, there are so many more books about wartime in terms of military movements, fronts, battlefields, weaponry, death tolls, and so on, than there are about life on the home front. Not to say that those books don’t exist, but that they are grossly outnumbered by the ones saying ‘Here are all the ways that people in charge waged the war.’ I just wanted to tell a little story about the daily life and truth of people who might be stuck in one of these siege cities, and then it ballooned from there. 

With references from WW2, Chernobyl and even where this tale is set – survival after terrible things rang throughout the novel. How does this feel after experiencing the joys of 2020?

Oh boy, yeah, having it come out in 2021 is giving me some feels for sure. It was written in 2017, I think, so long before any of this happened. But I’m seeing some things in it that I see now, in real life, and I’m very comforted by that. It tells me that circumstances may change, but human nature kind of flexes and adjusts in response, and fundamentally no matter what the challenge is, we would do the same thing under the invasion of extradimensional monsters as we do under a global pandemic. We hunger for human connection, conversation, friendship, and comfort; we delight in little luxuries for a feeling of normalcy; we mourn those we lost every day, and grief sneaks up on us in unpredictable ways; we want to memorialize the dead; we find ways to go on; we find ways to protect each other; we find ways to tell our story. Oh, and being stuck in one place and not having the option to leave is literally the worst, even if we were homebodies before.

You raise a debate of value of social sciences versus the ‘hard’ sciences e.g. physics or biology . SF has often shied away from the importance of history – do you feel that is changing and are we missing out on those perspectives?

I do think it is changing, yes! I still see readers loudly proclaiming their dislike of sci-fi stories when they don’t consider the science ‘hard’ enough, i.e. almost always astrophysics of some kind (sometimes but not always biology and chemistry are allowed into these self-declared hallowed halls). Which is fine, everybody has their individual taste. But I can’t get behind their disdain for all the sciences. It’s just a process, after all: find information; check it against known data and theories; adjust the fit; find more information. Publish it, maybe, once in a while, so other people can do the same thing. So I am delighted to see sci-fi coming out in the past few years that acknowledges the importance of sciences like anthropology, sociology, and psychology, and where all branches of science fit into the study of history. There’s no reason for every single character in a far-future story to spend all their time in the present and never look back at the past.   

In both These Lifeless Things and your novel Beneath the Rising cosmic horror is used to bring about the plot. What is the attraction of these types of threats?

I find myself really attracted to the vagueness of them, honestly? If that makes sense? I love the idea of an enemy that we can’t understand, can’t study, and the idea of interpreting how people react when faced with it. How soon do people give up hope of either negotiation or attack? When do people decide to knuckle under? Who does, who doesn’t? If it’s clear that we can’t win, why would we keep fighting? If it’s not clear, why wouldn’t we? And always the underlying thought that, well, if our foe thinks we’re insignificant, that doesn’t make it true; we can still always find significance in one another. And so the cosmic horror part of it, the ‘You are puny and meaningless in the face of the entire cosmos,’ becomes a terror that is managed by us clinging more closely to one another, not less.

What else can we look forward to you in the future and where can we find out more?

The sequel to ‘Beneath the Rising,’ which is entitled ‘A Broken Darkness,’ is coming out at the end of March, so I hope everyone who enjoyed the first book picks up the second! Nick pretends to be James Bond and bad decisions are made. I also have a sci-fi-dystopia-magic (?) novella coming out with Neon Hemlock this summer called ‘And What Can We Offer You Tonight,’ about a revenant courtesan and her quest for revenge in a far-future city. And finally, I have a post-apocalyptic climate fiction novella called ‘The Annual Migration of Clouds’ coming out from ECW Press in September, which contains, and I can’t believe I get to say this, thirty to fifty feral hogs. I try to keep my website up to date for more info and pre-order links, www.premeemohamed.com, but I also post news to Twitter at @premeesaurus, and I have a newsletter that you can sign up for at my website!   

 If there was one book (not your own) that you wish you could get everyone to read what would it be?

I would love to force everyone I know to read Nick Harkaway’s ‘Gnomon’! I’ve been yelling about it since I read it but I don’t think I’ve yelled enough. Magic, mystery, privacy, surveillance, democracy, capitalism, stocks, sharks, grief, conspiracy, faith. I don’t think there’s a single character in it that isn’t broken in some way by the system in which they live, that hasn’t had something stolen from them and been left what seems like an unfillable void. It’s an intense, emotional, wildly observant book that just speaks to everything I love and fear in society and humanity. I’m on my third re-read in two years.