Veris swam out of the darkness already weeping, and for a moment only felt peace, for she did not remember why she wept. Then it returned to her, crashing down like the broken side of a mountain, burying her, and she screamed, and hammered her fists on the grass, and clawed it up in ruts, and when the scream ran out she sobbed as if her heart would break.
Premee Mohamed, The Butcher of the Forest
Happy autumn (or, if you’re in the southern hemisphere, happy spring)! This is my favourite time of year, and I’m really looking forward to the rain and cooler weather that’s typical for my part of Oregon.
This month, I’m going in-depth with a look at the themes of despair, guilt, and resistance in speculative fiction. In particular, I’m looking at two speculative works I’ve been enjoying: Premee Mohamed’s fantasy novella, The Butcher of the Forest, and a surreal science fiction game from indie Canadian studio Sunset Visitor 斜陽過客, 1000xRESIST.
Since these are going to be much more spoilery than usual, I’m flipping my usual format to put the writing update first—if you don’t like spoilers, I heartily recommend checking both works out for yourself, as both are fantastic! (But be warned that both pieces touch on some pretty dark themes.)
Head Back to Pelican Town with Stardew & Chill
Changing seasons always puts me in mind of Stardew Valley, which has calming, soothing music to go with its cozy farming community vibe.
In Stardew & Chill, artists DJ Cutman and Coffee Date revisit iconic Stardew Valley tracks like Wild Horseradish Jam and A Stillness in the Rain, giving them a lo-fi spin that makes them even more enjoyable. Check it out below!
Writing Update
This month’s update is a new co-authored piece of interactive fiction!
A Death in Hyperspace, a game I co-wrote with Phoebe Barton, James Beamon, Kate Heartfield, Isabel J. Kim, Sara S. Messenger, Naca Rat, Natalia Theodoridou, M. Darusha Wehm, and Merc Fenn Wolfmoor, is out now as part of this year’s IFComp competition.
Here’s the teaser and cover image (created by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor):
When your captain dies suspiciously halfway through a hyperspace transit, you know you’re in trouble.
Not because you need a captain — as an embodied AI spaceship, you can pilot yourself just fine — but because, as an aficionado of mysteries and detective stories, you know there’s only one explanation: murder most foul.
Gameplay is approximately 1-2 hours, and the game is free to play, so give it a try if that sounds intriguing!
Spotlight on The Butcher of the Forest and 1000xRESIST
Before we dive into a discussion of resistance in speculative fiction, let’s take a quick look at both these recently-released works and where you can find them. The text below is from publisher or developer blurbs.
The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed
At the northern edge of a land governed by a merciless foreign tyrant lies a wild, forbidden forest ruled by powerful magic.
Veris Thorn — the only one to ever enter the forest and survive — is forced to go back inside to retrieve the tyrant’s missing children. Within its depths await traps and trickery, ancient monsters, and hauntings of the past.
One day is all Veris is afforded. One misstep will cost everything.
1000xRESIST by Sunset Visitor 斜陽過客
1000 years in the future, humanity is all but extinguished and a disease spread by an alien occupation keeps the survivors underground.
You are Watcher. You dutifully fulfil your purpose in service of the ALLMOTHER, until the day you learn a shocking secret that changes everything.
Despair, Guilt, and Resistance in Speculative Fiction
The Butcher of the Forest and 1000xRESIST work in very different genres and with very different tropes. The first is a sort of twisted Hero’s Journey in a secondary world fantasy setting, with a heroine whose return from the realm of the supernatural brings her no real closure. The second, a far-future science fiction narrative involving clones, half-truths, and betrayals layered like a palimpsest.
Both, though, have a lot of commonalities: an all-powerful, autocratic ruler, a protagonist ridden by guilt over events from their past, and a healthy (unhealthy?) dose of body horror and weird. Both are also great examples of resistance in speculative fiction—and how our feelings of guilt and despair can drive us to keep fighting even when we don’t want to.
(One last warning: Spoilers abound from here on out!)
Betrayal and Guilt in 1000xRESIST
1000xRESIST, as noted above, takes place 1000 years after the arrival of an alien race called the Occupants unleashed a deadly disease that is transmitted by breathing and that kills everybody who is infected by it. Everybody, that is, except a young woman named Iris.
Iris is co-opted by a group called The 50, who take her to an underground bunker called The Orchard where they extract her DNA and carry out experiments, ultimately creating clones of her who also have immunity. Iris eventually kills the members of The 50 after deciding to collaborate with the Occupants, leaving her and her clones the sole surviving representatives of humanity. You learn all of this fairly early in the game when you play Watcher (one of the game’s two main protagonists), who is one of Iris’s clones and is tasked with the sacred duty of observing her memories.
Watcher is one of many clones, in fact, all referred to as “Sisters,” who still live in the Orchard and who worship Iris as their god, the ALLMOTHER. None of the Sisters know anything about the past and our own time, except in what little bits and pieces Iris has told them. Some Sisters, like Watcher, have been given special duties. The rest, called Shells, are back-ups.
One of the game’s pivotal plot points is a conflict between Iris and her first clone, called Youngest, several decades after the death of The 50. The Sisters in the game’s present are made to feel that they share a collective guilt over Youngest’s actions, which are framed by Iris as “the ancient sin.”
All is not as it seems, though. As you progress through the game, you learn that there are layers of half-truths, lies, and misdirection. The game pushes and pulls you in various directions, at first casting Iris as an unrepentant villain who mistreated Youngest and the other early clones, and then calling that into question and making you think that Youngest might be the villain after all.
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Early in the game, Watcher is tricked into reporting her closest Sister, Fixer, for heretical comments that suggest she believes the ALLMOTHER deserves death. Ultimately, Watcher’s report leads to Fixer’s execution and sets into motion Watcher’s eventual assassination of Iris.
This close, personal guilt itself has several layers: at first, Watcher believes that Fixer deserved execution; as she communes with her fellow Sisters, though, doubts creep in; ultimately, it’s revealed that Fixer was completely blameless and that everything was a set-up by Youngest.
Throughout the game, Watcher’s guilt—both personal and collective—affects how she observes and interprets her world, and how you observe and interpret it with her through her “communions” with other characters that reveal parts of Iris’s distant past, her parents’ roles in protests in 2019-era Taiwan, Youngest’s attempts to get closer to Iris, and even (eventually) parts of Watcher’s own life to other characters.
It’s a neat bit of storytelling that lets the game’s developers mix differing perspectives and narratives together, making for a surreal, unsettling, and deeply impactful ride. And a common theme in all those narratives is resistance—but we’ll get back to that in a moment.
Despair and Guilt in The Butcher of the Forest
Compared to 1000xRESIST, The Butcher of the Forest is much simpler—at least from a narrative perspective.
The novella follows Veris, a woman in her middle years whose only wish is to live out the rest of her life without attracting the attention of The Tyrant, a brutally expansive ruler who invaded her home valley decades before and made it the site of his own castle.
Of course, that wish is never going to happen. When The Tyrant’s children go missing in a dangerous forest called the Elmever in the middle of the night, he sends his men to her home to threaten her family and force her into retrieving them. This isn’t Veris’s first trip to the Elmever—in fact, she’s the only person who’s ever successfully entered it and left alive again, and she did so with a child in tow.
From the moment The Tyrant’s men hammer on her door in the middle of the night, Veris struggles with despair that borders on nihilism. This despair, like Watcher’s guilt, is both generalized and deeply personal.
A portion of Veris’s despair is shared by all her people: despair over the Tyrant’s rule, his brutality, and his seeming invincibility. Although the book personalizes this despair—in taking over her valley, his forces killed many of the people Veris knew and loved—including her mother—it is a second despair, which is much more deeply personal, that drives Veris to keep moving through the book.
That despair is only hinted at to start with, through Veris’s bitter, brief asides about the fate of the first child she rescued from the Elmever years ago. Later, when she finds the Tyrant’s two children and they join her, the book starts to let out a few more hints. By the time Veris reveals that the child she returned with on her previous trip to the forest was her daughter, and that her daughter died a very short while after from an unnamed sickness, most readers will have already guessed.
This misdirection is itself a measure of Veris’s despair: she refuses to let herself dwell on the past whenever she can help it. It also plays a role in a pivotal scene, and is Veris’s tragic flaw—the one weakness in an otherwise practically-minded woman who gets the job done.
The pivotal scene comes late in the book, when Veris tells a malicious fox creature about her father’s death after he asks for her “worst memory” so he can “eat” it. She goes into grueling detail about her mother’s sudden accidental death at the hands of the Tyrant’s men; her father’s refusal to eat afterwards; his slow decline and sickness; and his eventual death.
Just like when we see Iris’s memories through Watcher’s eyes in 1000xRESIST, we observe Veris reliving her own memory as she describes it. We observe the other characters living it with her—mostly through the actions of the fox creature, as the Tyrant’s children hear her story.
Veris, though, is lying. Her true worst memory (revealed shortly afterwards, but only to us readers) is of her own daughter’s death. Veris carries this despair with her at all times, and it illuminates all her previous actions and thoughts.
This despair—like Watcher’s guilt—brings us back to the idea of resistance.
Despair, Guilt, and Resistance
Both Watcher and Veris suffer from varying levels of despair and guilt over their pasts. These traits aren’t just arbitrary—rather, they tie into how, when, and why the characters resist the oppressive nature of the worlds they find themselves in.
And both worlds are definitely oppressive. Veris must deal not only with the supernatural dangers of the Elmever, but with the Tyrant’s promise to destroy her entire village if she fails to rescue his children. Watcher’s entire purpose for existence is dictated by the ALLMOTHER’s long-ago ideas, layered on with various other forms of rigid order and duty and the ever-present threat of the Occupants.
What keeps Watcher moving throughout the story, what keeps her from giving in to the forces that would destroy her and those she love, is her guilt over her part in Fixer’s (apparent) death. This guilt drives her into obsessive re-examination of her own past as well as Iris’s, and it keeps her starting communions with other characters in an effort to drive them to further resistance.
In one of the game’s later chapters Watcher is imprisoned by forces sympathetic to Youngest after her assassination of the ALLMOTHER. She is tortured, lied to, and drugged for several years, and eventually has her eyes gouged out for failing to cooperate and release a statement supporting the Provisional Government (Youngest’s attempt to replace Iris as the new ruling power of the Sisters).
Even then, Watcher does not give in. She does not give up. Driven by mistakes from her past that she cannot undo, she keeps fighting. The game brings in memories from our own time to reinforce this, showing us memories of Iris’s mother and father meeting during the 2019 Hong Kong protests and after. After witnessing many of their friends and compatriots arrested and worse, Iris’s parents flee to Canada.
There, they, too, suffer from survivor’s guilt. In a powerful scene from after Irir has left home, Iris’s mother despairs over the failure of those long-ago protests. Her husband replies that winning and losing was never the only purpose. Another, equally important, was to make their voices known. To ensure that the oppressive government they protested against could not simply say that everyone had always been happy and supportive. The purpose of protest, he argues, is in part to show future generations that resistance is always an option.
Resistance in Speculative Fiction
One of the things I enjoy the most about science fiction and fantasy, no matter its medium, is how its creators use imaginative setups to explore real-world issues.
The theme of resistance is no different. By showing us characters who keep standing up and keep fighting for justice and freedom and joy, speculative fiction stories teach us the importance of our own fights and how they can improve not only our own lives, but the lives of everyone around us.
That’s all for this month. See you next time!