2019/133: Agents of Dreamland -- Caitlin R Kiernan
Tuesday, December 31st, 2019 09:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranth2019/133: Agents of Dreamland -- Caitlin R Kiernan
Another of Tor's transformative Lovecraftian novellas. (Previously reviewed: Hammers on Bone by Cassandra Khaw, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson.)
This is an unsettling tale of fungal infestation, apocalyptic cults and alien invasion, with a distinctly noir feel and an interesting choice of viewpoint characters. There's the Signalman, the actual agent of Dreamland (a subterranean government agency which handles weird shit); Immacolata Sexton, representative of an organisation known only as 'Y', who seems to slip back and forward through time; and Chloe, the latest recruit to Drew Standish's 'Children of the Next Level', bearing witness to the events at a ranch on the Salton Sea.
Also features a quotation from 'Here Comes the Flood', a space probe heading out past Pluto, the switchover from analogue to digital TV, and 'The Star Princess', a lost classic of early science fiction film.
Agents of Dreamland required a second reading, because on the first pass I didn't pay sufficient attention to timelines and references. But I think the creeping disquiet would have had its effect anyway: the images and the ideas had already entered my consciousness and begun to fruit.
I am left here alone with myself and the others and with the sizzle of my brains in this woman’s skull, a resonant frequency that perfectly matches white noise, the random signal possessed of a perpetual power supply, and in discrete time, a procession of serially uncorrelated random variables (finite variance, zero mean). [p. 26]
Another of Tor's transformative Lovecraftian novellas. (Previously reviewed: Hammers on Bone by Cassandra Khaw, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson.)
This is an unsettling tale of fungal infestation, apocalyptic cults and alien invasion, with a distinctly noir feel and an interesting choice of viewpoint characters. There's the Signalman, the actual agent of Dreamland (a subterranean government agency which handles weird shit); Immacolata Sexton, representative of an organisation known only as 'Y', who seems to slip back and forward through time; and Chloe, the latest recruit to Drew Standish's 'Children of the Next Level', bearing witness to the events at a ranch on the Salton Sea.
Also features a quotation from 'Here Comes the Flood', a space probe heading out past Pluto, the switchover from analogue to digital TV, and 'The Star Princess', a lost classic of early science fiction film.
Agents of Dreamland required a second reading, because on the first pass I didn't pay sufficient attention to timelines and references. But I think the creeping disquiet would have had its effect anyway: the images and the ideas had already entered my consciousness and begun to fruit.
