An eerie exploration of the dangers of mimicry and control, on the Trans-Siberian Railway.
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| Cover design by Steven Marking, illustration by Rohan Eason |
I was at Worldcon this last weekend, and one of the panels—'Monster Theory’—discussed at length a certain tension pervading all dark, scary things that go bump in the night: Who, really, is the monster here? As the panellists agreed, if we treat the monstrous as a metaphorical extension of the dark parts of ourselves (and we usually do), then the most natural revelation follows that the real monsters were the humans we met along the way.
Externalizing all that is dark and scary about ourselves is a fundamentally human way of interacting with the world—not a nice way, to be sure, but relatable. We’d much rather invent an other to embody all the bits of ourselves that we don’t want to acknowledge; and out of the soup of self-loathing (or, if you prefer, clear-eyed understanding of human weakness), dripping and eerie, emerge works of insight, including Sarah Brooks' excellent tale of train horror, The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands.
The year is 1900, and the iron rails rule the Eurasian continent. Distances are shorter than ever before; imperialism unites the world; commerce is king; and The Company will let nothing stand in the way of its drive to unite Beijing and Moscow through its Trans-Siberian railway. Only, in this history, Siberia is not as amenable to ferrous conquest as it proved to be in other timelines. In this history, in the preceding century, Siberia turned weird. Villages disappeared. Refugees told tales of horrors taking their place, horrors followed them, creeping outward. Japan closed its borders. China moved the Great Wall. Russia built a wall.
But The Company is unafraid. The Company will conquer the Siberian Wastelands. The Company built a railway, and runs a train, and by God and King and Country, nothing will prevent this train from making its 15-day crossing. Not the strange creatures that can be seen out the windows during the crossing; not the odd effects of the crossing on the passengers; and certainly not the engineers and train crew who report with increasing desperation that the repeated crossings are changing things.
This book is about one such crossing of the train. Tensions are high in the wake of a previous crossing in which something went badly wrong—something that none of the passengers or crew can quite remember. Marya is the daughter of the engineer who designed the window-glass that shattered on that last crossing, and who died shortly afterwards, under odd circumstances. She wants to know what happened. Next is Grey, a British naturalist, who is determined to uncover the secrets of the Wastelands and display them at the Great Exhibition in Moscow, because how dare nature resist the conquest of science? Finally, we have Weiwei, an adolescent who was born on a previous crossing. For reasons of jurisdiction and expediency, she was de facto adopted by the train crew upon being orphaned shortly after birth, and lives and works on it as her only home. Over the course of this crossing, all three pursue their own agendas, which naturally produce conflict—but not so much with each other as with the larger powers controlling the train inside and the Wastelands outside.
The details of unfolding events are less memorable than the details of setting and vibes, which are provided in lush profusion. The Company is determined to offer its passengers (in first class, at least) comfort, luxury, and the overwhelming impression of security, confidence, and control in the face of the uncontrollable weirdness outside. But the price of that control is a claustrophobic denial of reality. Passengers close the curtains of their windows rather than face what confronts them outdoors, chasing the false security of mundane civilization.
This false security reflects an important theme of the book: the psychology of control. The Company aims to control everything—the crossing; the Wastelands; heck, the world too, while it’s at it. Grey wants to control knowledge and nature. Although he presents himself, and indeed thinks of himself, as a scientist seeking to understand, it is not enough for him to understand the Wastelands on their own terms. Rather, he aims to force the Wastelands into his own framework of understanding, distorting them so they fit in with what he believes he knows about the natural world. Except the Wastelands are not knowable in that way, because they are not natural in that way. These attempts at control are doomed to failure; reality will assert itself, in whatever weird and uncanny way best suits the version of reality outside the closed and curtain train windows.
But not immediately. For a while you can pretend that everything is fine, is normal, is under control. Because that is another theme in this book: mimicry, the ability to look like something that you’re not. Nothing is as it seems, inside or out. Humans on the train cloak themselves in false identities, and Wasteland entities take on human-inspired forms. Odd, massive earthworm things move along beside the train, imitating the shapes of the cars as they hump through the ground. For all its luxuries, the train is not safe; the Wastelands will not go away, no matter how many panes of glass and curtains are interposed; and The Company is not in control.
Yet these mimicries—of safety, security, control, civilization—are only half of the picture. When passengers close the curtains and drink cocktails, they are pretending that something strange and dangerous is in fact safe. But mimicry can go in the opposite direction, too. Early on, Grey contemplates hoverflies, syrphidae, which camouflage themselves as bees. They are weak, and so adopt the form of the strong for protection. They are something harmless trying to look like something dangerous.
So: which type of mimicry are the Wastelands engaging in, when its exponents take on human-inspired forms? Are they something dangerous that humans are invited to see as safe (or, at least, controlled)? Or are they something that, for their own protection, must take on the form of something more dangerous? Who, really, is the source of the monstrous in this tale?
Well, another panel at Worldcon—about the purposes of reviewing books—had some divided opinions about whether spoilers should be avoided. I believe they should be, and so I will not answer that question. But perhaps, if your own preferences fall on the other side of the line, you can guess what my answer would be.
Highlights
Nerd coefficient: 8/10, well worth your time and attention
- Eerie, creepy, otherworldly Siberia
- Locked trains
- Mimicry
Reference:
Brooks, Sarah. The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands [Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2024].
CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative.
