Is it the lustre of immortality?
I liked so much of T. Kingfisher's What Stalks the Deep (2025), I just wish it had leaned as sfnally into its premise as it had the scope for.
To cut to the top of the third act, the abandoned coal mine in West Virginia to which Gallacian sworn soldier Alex Easton has been reluctantly summoned is not haunted as locally rumored from the more than ordinarily strange noises, movements, and lights far down in its depths that were reported almost as soon as the first shafts were dug. It houses the biomass of an aeonically undying hive mind that evolved as a sort of giant siphonophore layer in the warm oceans and took refuge in the subterranean rivers and cave systems of what had become the Appalachians when the glaciers came. It has hibernated there ever since, sealed and dreaming within a nacreous, impenetrable shell. Insofar as it needs a name, it thinks of itself as "the wholeness." Early in the mine's history, an accident of blasting cleaved off a portion of the wholeness, which learned to survive under the conditions of a working mine by radically testing the boundaries of its evolutionary defense mechanism of mimicry, i.e. it can sculpt and color itself into an almost totally convincing facsimile of a human male, modeled after the miners it observed over the centuries. Fundamentally he remains a bucket of sentient glop that naturally bioluminesces a dull deep-sea red and finds it easier not to hold a shape at all. Required to furnish a form of address, he refers to himself as "Fragment." He poses no threat to Alex or any of kan companions; he may have accidentally generated much of the spooky reputation of Hollow Elk Mine, but he has never harmed anyone, not even to learn about their bodies; he just wants to end his exile of consciousness and rejoin the wholeness in which his experiences will persist like the rest of the shared knowledge of his species without any sense of individual self. The threat comes from the other detached part of the wholeness which turns out to inhabit the mine and its environs, where it has been preying on and, more disturbingly, incorporating its human and animal kills as revealed in the superbly gross set piece where it discards its impersonation of a dog with a recombinant splatter that would have delighted practical effects artists of the 1980's. Fragment himself just looks like a random man in an old-fashioned miner's coat and dark goggles, communicating in ambidextrously simultaneous boustrophedon through the slate which he carries everywhere with him because the speech apparatus is the one part of the human anatomy that eluded him completely, except for when he doesn't look even slightly like that.
Unsurprisingly, I love Fragment and his imperfect protective coloration and his mild, serious affect that makes him the straight man in a conversation right up until he does something like melt suddenly out of his own clothes, but I love just as much the set-up which enables him. Questions of individual and collective identity are one of the science fiction evergreens and it is especially attractive to explore them through a character who has no interest in investigating or embracing their individuality. His name alone is a poignant acknowledgement obliged by interaction with the separateness of humans who need him similarly differentiated from the wholeness of which he still considers himself a part, however traumatically split; he refers to himself as an I rather than a we for its duration, which makes his interlocutors more existentially as well as grammatically comfortable and should strike the reader as more double-edged, since he may have functioned as a discrete personality for the last century and change, but it is not his natural state and he should not be encouraged in it merely because it is the human default. We meet in the course of the novella a cautionary counterexample, whose separation from the wholeness potentially as far back as the Pleistocene glaciation has driven it into lonely solipsistic madness. Fragment doesn't even know to worry about that possibility, he just likes to flow down into the luminous limestone cavern where he can touch the iridescent shield on whose other side is the whole of himself. It makes him a great foil for the series protagonist, whose chosen identity requires an exhausting amount of explanation, assertion, or resigned erasure anywhere outside of kan own country, a Ruritanian backwater reminiscent of Peter S. Beagle's Bornitz, distinguished primarily by its variety of personal pronouns including the one for rocks, the one for God, and the one which treats soldier as a gender as well as a profession. Fragment can pass for just about anyone so long as he keeps his goggles on—it's a problem with rendering the complexity of the human eye, but he can otherwise literally rearrange his face—and he doesn't want an identity as such, period. I would love the novella more if it seemed to care. All of the information is present in the text, but the narrative makes hardly anything of it. Given the structure which is two-thirds coal-country folk horror slow burn and one-third high-octane science fiction action thriller, it may not have much time to, but it is the kind of story whose characters talk to one another: Alex even accompanies Fragment on one of his painful and comforting visits to the inaccessible wholeness, right before the climax kicks into high body horror gear. The subject could just once have come up. The closest the novella gets is the late scene in which it is understood that while it would not be possible and Alex would not want it, the greatest thanks Fragment can offer kan is the wish that he could invite kan into the wholeness with him. It's a beautiful exchange. Where most science fiction of this flavor would want to find a way for Fragment to learn to live as his own person, I appreciate deeply that this one instead takes as read that he should be rejoined even when the narrator cannot help but view that personal dissolution as a kind of death rather than the resumption of a real life that it evidently is to Fragment. It could have dug into it so much more.
On finishing the novella, I guessed its primary influences had been Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness (1936), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993–99), and John Carpenter's The Thing (1982). Per the afterword which I had missed originally between its black spacer pages, it was just shoggoths. Kingfisher's conception of them diverges sufficiently from Lovecraft's, however, that it seems to leave even more of a gap in the novella—none of his anxieties about enslaved and rebellious constructs apply to her wholly natural colonial organism, which is not necessarily a bug when it averts so much of his racism, but then if there is any valence of metaphor to Fragment and the wholeness, the text needs explicitly to get into it because it does not come preinstalled by canon. I thought it left excellent room for an unusually directed meditation on identity. I am reconciling myself to the fact that the author was not interested in one, or at least not as interested as me. A+ haunted coal mine atmosphere, though. Manly Wade Wellman would indeed have been proud.
In conclusion, I enjoyed the novella, I argued with it, I finished it and wrote a long string of e-mails to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks from which this post has been largely rearranged and went to bed and read Le Guin's "Nine Lives" (1969) and "Vaster than Empires and More Slow" (1971). I can always re-read Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human (1953), too. And Elizabeth Bear's "Shoggoths in Bloom" (2008).
To cut to the top of the third act, the abandoned coal mine in West Virginia to which Gallacian sworn soldier Alex Easton has been reluctantly summoned is not haunted as locally rumored from the more than ordinarily strange noises, movements, and lights far down in its depths that were reported almost as soon as the first shafts were dug. It houses the biomass of an aeonically undying hive mind that evolved as a sort of giant siphonophore layer in the warm oceans and took refuge in the subterranean rivers and cave systems of what had become the Appalachians when the glaciers came. It has hibernated there ever since, sealed and dreaming within a nacreous, impenetrable shell. Insofar as it needs a name, it thinks of itself as "the wholeness." Early in the mine's history, an accident of blasting cleaved off a portion of the wholeness, which learned to survive under the conditions of a working mine by radically testing the boundaries of its evolutionary defense mechanism of mimicry, i.e. it can sculpt and color itself into an almost totally convincing facsimile of a human male, modeled after the miners it observed over the centuries. Fundamentally he remains a bucket of sentient glop that naturally bioluminesces a dull deep-sea red and finds it easier not to hold a shape at all. Required to furnish a form of address, he refers to himself as "Fragment." He poses no threat to Alex or any of kan companions; he may have accidentally generated much of the spooky reputation of Hollow Elk Mine, but he has never harmed anyone, not even to learn about their bodies; he just wants to end his exile of consciousness and rejoin the wholeness in which his experiences will persist like the rest of the shared knowledge of his species without any sense of individual self. The threat comes from the other detached part of the wholeness which turns out to inhabit the mine and its environs, where it has been preying on and, more disturbingly, incorporating its human and animal kills as revealed in the superbly gross set piece where it discards its impersonation of a dog with a recombinant splatter that would have delighted practical effects artists of the 1980's. Fragment himself just looks like a random man in an old-fashioned miner's coat and dark goggles, communicating in ambidextrously simultaneous boustrophedon through the slate which he carries everywhere with him because the speech apparatus is the one part of the human anatomy that eluded him completely, except for when he doesn't look even slightly like that.
Unsurprisingly, I love Fragment and his imperfect protective coloration and his mild, serious affect that makes him the straight man in a conversation right up until he does something like melt suddenly out of his own clothes, but I love just as much the set-up which enables him. Questions of individual and collective identity are one of the science fiction evergreens and it is especially attractive to explore them through a character who has no interest in investigating or embracing their individuality. His name alone is a poignant acknowledgement obliged by interaction with the separateness of humans who need him similarly differentiated from the wholeness of which he still considers himself a part, however traumatically split; he refers to himself as an I rather than a we for its duration, which makes his interlocutors more existentially as well as grammatically comfortable and should strike the reader as more double-edged, since he may have functioned as a discrete personality for the last century and change, but it is not his natural state and he should not be encouraged in it merely because it is the human default. We meet in the course of the novella a cautionary counterexample, whose separation from the wholeness potentially as far back as the Pleistocene glaciation has driven it into lonely solipsistic madness. Fragment doesn't even know to worry about that possibility, he just likes to flow down into the luminous limestone cavern where he can touch the iridescent shield on whose other side is the whole of himself. It makes him a great foil for the series protagonist, whose chosen identity requires an exhausting amount of explanation, assertion, or resigned erasure anywhere outside of kan own country, a Ruritanian backwater reminiscent of Peter S. Beagle's Bornitz, distinguished primarily by its variety of personal pronouns including the one for rocks, the one for God, and the one which treats soldier as a gender as well as a profession. Fragment can pass for just about anyone so long as he keeps his goggles on—it's a problem with rendering the complexity of the human eye, but he can otherwise literally rearrange his face—and he doesn't want an identity as such, period. I would love the novella more if it seemed to care. All of the information is present in the text, but the narrative makes hardly anything of it. Given the structure which is two-thirds coal-country folk horror slow burn and one-third high-octane science fiction action thriller, it may not have much time to, but it is the kind of story whose characters talk to one another: Alex even accompanies Fragment on one of his painful and comforting visits to the inaccessible wholeness, right before the climax kicks into high body horror gear. The subject could just once have come up. The closest the novella gets is the late scene in which it is understood that while it would not be possible and Alex would not want it, the greatest thanks Fragment can offer kan is the wish that he could invite kan into the wholeness with him. It's a beautiful exchange. Where most science fiction of this flavor would want to find a way for Fragment to learn to live as his own person, I appreciate deeply that this one instead takes as read that he should be rejoined even when the narrator cannot help but view that personal dissolution as a kind of death rather than the resumption of a real life that it evidently is to Fragment. It could have dug into it so much more.
On finishing the novella, I guessed its primary influences had been Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness (1936), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993–99), and John Carpenter's The Thing (1982). Per the afterword which I had missed originally between its black spacer pages, it was just shoggoths. Kingfisher's conception of them diverges sufficiently from Lovecraft's, however, that it seems to leave even more of a gap in the novella—none of his anxieties about enslaved and rebellious constructs apply to her wholly natural colonial organism, which is not necessarily a bug when it averts so much of his racism, but then if there is any valence of metaphor to Fragment and the wholeness, the text needs explicitly to get into it because it does not come preinstalled by canon. I thought it left excellent room for an unusually directed meditation on identity. I am reconciling myself to the fact that the author was not interested in one, or at least not as interested as me. A+ haunted coal mine atmosphere, though. Manly Wade Wellman would indeed have been proud.
In conclusion, I enjoyed the novella, I argued with it, I finished it and wrote a long string of e-mails to
rushthatspeaks from which this post has been largely rearranged and went to bed and read Le Guin's "Nine Lives" (1969) and "Vaster than Empires and More Slow" (1971). I can always re-read Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human (1953), too. And Elizabeth Bear's "Shoggoths in Bloom" (2008).
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Which does make it more of a pity when you spot other kinds of things the rest of the genre isn't really exploring, and then this one misses the mark, too. I think you have supplied me with a whole headcanon for when I get around to reading this volume, though.
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High-five, because when
Which does make it more of a pity when you spot other kinds of things the rest of the genre isn't really exploring, and then this one misses the mark, too.
It's so close! It's like she just needed to turn the novella a little and it would all come into focus! And instead it's a half-turn off and instead of anamorphosis it's a smear! It is also driving me up the wall that I would swear I had encountered some other narrative not already name-checked in this review in which a character makes Fragment's choice and I am currently, maddeningly unable to place it for comparison. I feel as though any kind of hive mind/collective consciousness/gestalt intelligence not portrayed negatively in fiction is rare enough that I should be able to. I have a real hit-or-miss rate with Vernon's Kingfisher titles, but I really appreciate Fragment.
I think you have supplied me with a whole headcanon for when I get around to reading this volume, though.
Then I am glad of that!
I don't think it came out in time to make the Yuletide tag set unless counting the entire series, but I am unrealistically hoping that someone will request a missing scene for this book that at least gestures in the thematically right there direction.
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I mean, not reading this properly, because I haven't read the book, but that is the ending of the whole Asimov Robots/Foundation thing, if that's not too obvious? (Which I remember mostly because as a teen I got so enraged about it I may never have come down again since).
(I was going to switch my default icon to a more appropriate one and then remembered why this is actually the most appropriate icon I could use!)
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I don't think it's too obvious and I wouldn't mind you suggesting it even if it were, but either it doesn't happen in the original three books or I have blanked it from my memory! I never read the full eventual series. At the risk of re-enraging you, what did Asimov do?
(Which I remember mostly because as a teen I got so enraged about it I may never have come down again since).
I have never gotten over the last Emily book by L. M. Montgomery and I even re-read that one periodically to try to figure out what she was thinking.
(I was going to switch my default icon to a more appropriate one and then remembered why this is actually the most appropriate icon I could use!)
(Hi, Daneel!)
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Yes, it's in the final book, after the Foundation series merges with the Robots series. I won't swear to anything at this distance, but after all the books of Foundation trying to work out what humanity should do, I at least was very much not sold on the answer being what I saw as "R Daneel has decided that the entire human race should become part of a giant sentient planet blob now and everyone lives happily after, yay." But you know teenaged revolts against books! Not very reliable.
At the time, I just felt cheated, in a "well, that question is too difficult, here's an easy answer to finish things off" way. I would definitely be interested in reading something that actually took the time to sell that concept well or explored how it worked in practise.
I also have a big squick for physical transformations/loss of identity/memory when suddenly flung at me and presented as positive, so I'm not the most unbiased reader - which isn't to say I mightn't easily have missed obvious foreshadowings, of course, if I wasn't looking for them. (I am not the audience for those "Ha, the princess turned into frog" type retellings! XD)
(Hi, Daneel!)
<3
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Possibly, but I am inclined to trust teenaged you because that sounds like an absolutely left-field crack solution. I am not sold on it, either!
I also have a big squick for physical transformations/loss of identity/memory when suddenly flung at me and presented as positive, so I'm not the most unbiased reader
Every time I actually re-read Silver on the Tree, the concluding memory wipe gets stupider and I remain thankful that I have a friend who wrote such a good fix-it that I can consider it canonical rather than Cooper, beloved and formative as so much of the rest of that sequence may be.
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Oh, really, I don't trust myself, so please don't! XD What I remember that I'm fairly confident of is that R. Daneel turned up under another name 1000s of years later, and this was his plan for everyone in the end, and I also know that they chatted to about 2 of the gestalt entity people and they were earnestly happy about being gestalt entity people, so obv it would all be fine.
Every time I actually re-read Silver on the Tree, the concluding memory wipe gets stupider and I remain thankful that I have a friend who wrote such a good fix-it that I can consider it canonical rather than Cooper, beloved and formative as so much of the rest of that sequence may be.
Yeah, I do hate a memory loss at the end - so often so upsetting! Some stories can pull it off, but it's so often such a let down - I haven't reread that series since the first read, but that was definitely disappointing. <3
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Don't resist! I read your story when it came out! Maybe it's what I was trying to remember.
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More people should know about Albanian sworn virgins! (I learned about them in the course of reading some gender stuff for my senior thesis on Viking weapons.)
I have a real hit-or-miss rate with Vernon's Kingfisher titles
Same, but I read What Feasts at Night because it was in the Hugo packet and then promptly backed up to read its predecessor, which turned out to be a little heavier on the dread and horror and lighter on the acidic commentary, therefore somewhat less to my personal taste. But very effective dread and horror, and I still enjoyed it enough that I am absolutely on board for the third one!
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I have no idea where or how I learned of the practice! Agreed that as a gender option you'd think it would show up in more worldbuilding.
Same, but I read What Feasts at Night because it was in the Hugo packet and then promptly backed up to read its predecessor, which turned out to be a little heavier on the dread and horror and lighter on the acidic commentary, therefore somewhat less to my personal taste. But very effective dread and horror, and I still enjoyed it enough that I am absolutely on board for the third one!
I have not yet read What Feasts at Night, although its jacket copy looks folklorically promising.
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I was not particularly bothered by the fungus; it was the overall atmosphere + the hares, especially that one scene with the latter. Or maybe just that the secondary characters unique to What Moves the Dead were less congenial to me than the ones in What Feasts at Night (phrasing it that way because Angus and Miss Potter are common to both, and I like them).
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Understandable. Neither would be particularly safe to spend time around.
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This sounds **great**--at least the parts you liked, the parts you describe here. I've read precisely one T. Kingfisher story (which I enjoyed), but most times I hear about other works, they sound fascinating. In spite of your reservations, I'll definitely give this one a try. Especially as it's short! (Even though that may be one of its deficits.)
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I can regret that your feelings became complicated, but I still appreciate the existence of the story for its thoughtfulness and rarity.
This sounds **great**--at least the parts you liked, the parts you describe here. I've read precisely one T. Kingfisher story (which I enjoyed), but most times I hear about other works, they sound fascinating. In spite of your reservations, I'll definitely give this one a try. Especially as it's short! (Even though that may be one of its deficits.)
I hope you enjoy as much of the novella as you may! The parts described here, I loved and wished it had been willing to afford more time and attention because potentially haunted mines are just about everywhere, but characters like Fragment are a lot thinner on the ground. I find him believably alien in ways that have nothing to do with the colonial organism question and I like that some of the characters find themselves treating him nonetheless like a slightly odd specimen of humanity while others are constantly aware of his nonhumanness and the reality falls between the two: he is not at all human, which does not mean that for the time being he is not a person, whatever his feelings about it. I would have introduced him a lot sooner.
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--the story will be entirely worth it for this: I love this.
PS
I also really just love this: It has hibernated there ever since, sealed and dreaming within a nacreous, impenetrable shell.
Re: PS
It is! Over the last week and change, I have been playing a lot of both the Dropkick Murphys' For the People (2025) and Desperate Journalist's No Hero (2024). I was listening to the latter and the lyric struck me as exact.
I also really just love this
Thank you. The image comes from the novella.
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I was actually thinking left-wing activists rather than SFAuthors (and way before I got to that speculation), but same thing. And drawing parallels with people convinced disabled folks need to be fixed* and finding how much we shove that down the priority list, or reject it entirely, as totally alien.
* And don't vet analogies open that up in disturbing ways!
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(I suppose the right-wing activists would merely want him dead. One of the human characters in the novella does for most of it, but at least he's coming from a place of grief and trauma as opposed to knee-jerk disdain of the Other and more importantly he gets over it. Then he has to cope with the fact that Fragment who can thin himself down to a self-directed biofilm is more of a lifesaver than a nineteenth-century sawbones will ever be. It is not how Fragment proves his worth to humanity: the novella doesn't fall into that trap, either. It's just wryly going to haunt a human doctor for a while.)
It matters so much to me when an alien character is allowed to be alien and not after all Just Like Us™, especially when Us™ is so often a rather exclusive category of human. Fragment has virtues that align normative-human, resourcefulness, courage, and compassion foremost among them, which he does not particularly seem to recognize as such—he is demoralized to think that he could have gotten himself a real skeleton if it had only occurred to him and has to be reassured that actually it is the ethical thing not to kill other people in order to steal their bones. None of his drivers are human at all and the narrative ultimately supports him in following them and so I respond to his character arc even when it is crunched into the last third of a novella of which it should have been the main substance.
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I did quite like that the meaning of the mine name is left as an exercise for the reader.
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Nice! I have not read her full Kingfisher catalogue. What makes them your favorites?
Weirdly the whole thing with Fragment reminded me a lot of Someone You Can Build a Nest in, where the monster is also stealing objects to shore up her insides. Except like Sentry she's stealing bones, and also internal organs.
I have not read Someone You Can Build a Nest In, but I have seen the animate/inanimate fusion in other Kingfisher works. Fragment's stick-skeleton and reverse-engineering of the mammalian eyeball with pond water for vitreous humor felt extremely on brand of him. (And totally consistent with his rescue of Alex—breathing for kan, functioning as a sort of combination hemostat and wound sealant, making his own substance someone else's scaffolding. It really is important to me that Fragment rejoins the wholeness, but an AU version of him would be a hell of a field medic.)
I did quite like that the meaning of the mine name is left as an exercise for the reader.
I can imagine some local reasons for hollowed elk, yes.
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I am glad they work so well for you!
(I personally would have put something with more chromatophores on the cover of this one, but maybe it would have been considered a spoiler.)