Beneath the Rising is a 2020 science fiction/cosmic horror novel by Premee Mohamed. It was first published by Solaris Books.
Beneath the Rising is a 2020 science fiction/cosmic horror novel by Premee Mohamed. It was first published by Solaris Books.
When teenage super-scientist Joanna "Johnny" Chambers invents a clean energy generator in 2002, it draws the attention of malevolent extradimensional gods. Now, Johnny and her childhood best friend Nick Prasad must travel the world in a desperate attempt to find and close the Gate before a cosmic alignment allows the forces of evil to return.
Beneath the Rising was a finalist for the 2021 Aurora Award for Best Novel, [1] the 2021 Locus Award for Best First Novel, [2] and the 2021 Crawford Award. [3]
James Nicoll lauded Mohamed's depiction of "the vexed relationship between Johnny and Nick", and observed that her portrayal of the Ancient Ones as "highly invested in preventing anyone anywhere from enjoying long-term happiness" made them the equivalent of "inter-dimensional griefers". [4]
At Strange Horizons , S. Qiouyi Lu emphasized that, despite the many positive outcomes of Johnny's inventions, Johnny is still a "villainous mad scientist" who "channel(s) great evil", and commended Mohamed for not romanticizing the codependent nature of Nick's magically-enforced love for Johnny which, Lu felt, made Nick a slave; ultimately, Lu found the novel to be "near-flawless", with a "brilliantly constructed narrative" that also serves as an "extended metaphor" in which "Johnny's covenant, and Nick's role as her 'companion,' are tools to critique the legacy of colonialism". [5]
Lu further explored the novel in an essay at Tor.com , in which they described Johnny as "a symbol for coloniality", and noted that Indo-Guyanese-Canadian Nick's identity as a self-described "brown" man in the medium-term aftermath of 9/11 (even if, in the world of the novel, the attacks on the World Trade Center narrowly failed when both jetliners crashed into the Hudson River) "is not an incidental part of the narrative — it drives the narrative," and shapes not just Nick's internal voice but also "how he reacts and makes decisions". [6]
Mohamed wrote the novel's first draft in 2002, but did not begin submitting it to publishers until 2015. She has stated that the tensions between Nick and Johnny, who differ significantly in both race and class, are based on her own late-teenage relationships with friends "who were in different social classes to me and who were mostly white". [7]
Jo Walton is a Welsh-Canadian fantasy and science fiction writer and poet. She is best known for the fantasy novel Among Others, which won the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 2012, and Tooth and Claw, a Victorian era novel with dragons which won the World Fantasy Award in 2004. Other works by Walton include the Small Change series, in which she blends alternate history with the cozy mystery genre, comprising Farthing, Ha'penny and Half a Crown. Her fantasy novel Lifelode won the 2010 Mythopoeic Award, and her alternate history My Real Children received the 2015 Tiptree Award.
James Davis Nicoll is a Canadian freelance game and speculative fiction reviewer, former security guard and role-playing game store owner, and also works as a first reader for the Science Fiction Book Club. As a Usenet personality, Nicoll is known for writing a widely quoted epigram on the English language, as well as for his accounts of suffering a high number of accidents, which he has narrated over the years in Usenet groups like rec.arts.sf.written and rec.arts.sf.fandom. He is now a blogger on Dreamwidth and Facebook, and an occasional columnist on Tor.com. In 2014, he started his website, jamesdavisnicoll.com, dedicated to his book reviews of works old and new; and later added Young People Read Old SFF, where his panel of younger readers read pre-1980 science fiction and fantasy, and Nicoll and his collaborators report on the younger readers' reactions.
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