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).
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.