I was introduced to Ruthanna’s books by way of The Half-Built Garden. I was talking with some friends about The Dispossessed and this book was mentioned as a book in a similar vein. I’ll write about it elsewhere when I get the chance, but while purchasing that book, I found her other books, Winter Tide and Deep Roots.
There’s also a prequel novella The Litany of Earth available on Reactor, if you want to get a taste of her writing and some of the characters.
These books are part of a series known as The Innsmouth Legacy and are written in the universe of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.
Lovecraft is a problematic character. He strikes me as a man consumed by fear, and that fear leads to racism, homophobia, and misogyny, among other things. His characters are always men who are consumed by fear of the unknown, and it’s always just assumed that the “cosmic horrors” they face are incomprehensible to the point of driving one to madness.
Ruthanna’s books turn this on its head by presenting a protagonist that is one of the “monsters”. Aphra Marsh is the granddaughter of Obed Marsh, the patriarch of the Marsh family who lived in Innsmouth, MA in Lovecraft’s story The Shadow Over Innsmouth. In Lovecraft’s telling, the people of Innsmouth have made a deal with the Deep Ones, an aquatic branch of humanity that worships some of the Old Ones, e.g. Dagon, Nyarlathotep, and Cthulhu, and they use Innsmouth as a spawning ground. In Ruthanna’s version, they’ve always been Deep Ones, and this is just how they reproduce, like sea turtles coming ashore to lay their eggs, which when hatched will later return to the sea.
The unnamed narrator of Lovecraft’s story is horrified by what he finds in Innsmouth, and it leads to a government raid of the town. In Ruthanna’s books, it’s explained that the people of Innsmouth were taken to internment camps in the desert and after the majority die off, being unable to go to the sea after their transformation, the camps are repurposed to house the Japanese Americans during World War II. Ruthanna was influenced here by George Takei’s memoir To The Stars.
Lovecraft’s works are often use as fodder for games these days, since the majority of his work is in the public domain. His “monsters” make easy boogymen, but having read Ruthanna’s books, I find it hard to see them that way anymore.
Recently while I was playing Unfathomable, a reskin of the Battlestar Galactica board game, I found myself defending the deep ones, even though in the game I wasn’t a cultist on their side. “They’re not monsters, they’re misunderstood by our characters who are afraid of their own shadows”.
I think we need to stop being afraid of our shadows. In Ruthanna’s version of events, there’s still dangerous secret knowledge that humanity ought not to know, but it’s not unfathomable or inscrutable. It takes wisdom and care to know the boundaries of what is safe, and what is not.
We’d all be better off if we approached things that way, always first with curiosity and openness, and a healthy dose of caution.