This October, I had to get at least one space horror book on my schedule, as the pickings have been a little slim through the rest of the year. Luckily, Kemi Ashing-Giwa has a horror novella just in time for the spooky season. This World Is Not Yours is a queer, climate-adjacent horror story about the dangers of colonization. Needless to say, it called my name.
Vinh and Amara are starting a new-ish life, helping to jumpstart the colony of New Belaforme. Vinh is the chief of security and has a special knack for beating the odds. Amara is the resident biologist and is concerned with the everpresent Gray that dominates the planet but doesn’t seem totally active just yet. When a rival colony attacks New Belaforme and endangers the new colony’s chances of survival, Vinh and Amara must take on new male partners to boost population numbers. Meanwhile, Amara’s childhood friend is running experiments with the Gray that might lead to a disastrous future for everyone on the planet.
This novella perplexes me, and I think part of it is that the marketing for it is very different from the story. The other bit is that the novella has a lot of interesting ideas that feel unformed, and some others that start down paths that are cut short. I didn’t hate this book, but I didn’t really like it either, and given more space, I think Ashing-Giwa could have realized some of her more compelling ideas. But I have a hard time not thinking about this book over the last couple of weeks since finishing it.
Let’s start with Vinh and Amara. They are a lesbian couple with problems. Vinh comes from a colony almost forgotten, having clawed her way through the social hierarchy to be where she is now. Amara is the daughter of a wealthy and powerful family who she wishes would just disown her already. Their story starts with the first time Vinh tries to run away and break it off. It’s a fascinating choice that sets up a tension in their relationship dynamic that doesn’t really ever come back in a meaningful sense. It’s a great framing device that sets up a sort of tone for their future conversations, and part of me likes that it’s never brought up again. But it’s also jarring in a book that relies on its short fast chapters.
Another aspect to their relationship that showed me a rabbit hole I wanted to go down was the emergency coupling they were forced into after the rival colony destroyed their incubators. I’ve been reading a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction lately, some from the ’60s and ’70s where gender politics were a lot more regressive than today, so to see a similar play in this book opens up a nice avenue of critique. As the dying of the colony is the end of the world for the people involved, it was a nice change to see the regression. But even in the short setup, this measure felt out of left field. The horror of it, though palpable up front, dropped quickly as neither Vinh nor Amara thought it through. Vinh recognized she was too important to be pregnant, and Amara never really made it an issue with regard to her autonomy, focusing instead on who the two were partnered with. And while it made for decent character drama, it left the societal implications in the cupboard.
Finally, we reached the part I was most interested in, the environmental aspects. Throughout the story, the characters are trying to avoid drawing the attention of the Gray, an ever-present mist that blankets the planet. It seems to react most to invasive or unwanted presences, and the characters do their best to remain on its good side, whatever that means. Amara is enthralled by it from a distance, observing its nature, keeping humanity separate from it. Meanwhile, Jesse breathes it in, wants to feel it, be with it to understand it. He doesn’t want to avoid it, he wants to live with it. The fact that they are both scientists deepens this aspect a little bit, playing with the different ways we understand nature and scientific observation. It also scratches the surface of “colonial science,” but doesn’t quite really stick with it. The fact that these two are paired together could have led to conversations about “science,” and its role in constructing our relationship to nature, but they just each do their own thing. It’s all disconnected until the final chapters when Jesse’s relationship with the Gray is fully revealed. And the reveal leads to the most interesting thing This World Is Not Yours wants to dig at (at least for me), before abruptly ending. Another path cut short.
Listen, I don’t think novellas need to have an answer. They are a great medium to explore an idea or theme in a direct, concentrated fashion. It can spend its entirety, just asking questions, branching deeper and deeper into its own subject matter, revealing all the tangles we just normally assume are unconnected. This World Is Not Yours is fine if you want to watch two people who don’t know how to be together, be mean and vindictive to each other and their forced partners during a terrible situation. But, even that lost some steam by the end of the story for me.
I wanted to really like This World Is Not Yours, but it teased me too much, without really delivering on anything I came for. A lot of this can be chalked up to marketing, but part of it is on the book too. It didn’t have a raison d’etre. It just is a story that plays with a lot of ideas that are on people’s minds right now. I didn’t even really dive into the fact that the horror elements were few and far between. I was hoping for something more, but that could be on me.
Rating: This World Is Not Yours – An interesting disappointment
-Alex
