Yes, We'll Gather At the River

A story collection about technofaith, technofauna, and monsters out of Tennessee

Creatures, teach me a hymn that will sing the river clean.

It took me a while to get fully into what Christopher Rowe is doing in his story collection, Telling the Map. The stories aren’t all explicitly linked, but they create an impression of a unified world: shifting among various fantasy and SF subgenres, midapocalyptic. The United States has disunited and the Kentucky-Tennessee border is one of the most contested divisions. You will meet creatures who are various mixes of animal, human, and tech: loyal cars, barns you grow instead of build, giant bugs that collect and transport trash (and have a tendency to drink too much… God bless the Southland). We never see the horses that still race in the Derby every year, under the aegis of the Horselords, but I wouldn’t be surprised if their eyes gleam with microchips.

Post-Christian faith, or Christian faith without Jesus Christ, is a recurring theme and a shattered crystal. At first I was a bit, “Yes, okay, I get it, I’m sorry about your upbringing.” The story about the religion whose missionaries are sent out to “correct” unruly geography so it conforms to the maps in their books displayed some of Rowe’s strengths—intense and specific attention to the land and the way people shape the land, accurate imagination of differences e.g. Rowe remembers that America’s Protestant South, the Bible Belt, touches the Catholic semitropics on its own southern border. But it’s also didactic and thinly-characterized. I know I sound a bit, “All Appalachian-state writers look the same,” but Michael Wehunt really is the last exvangelical-feeling fantasist I read, and his stories’ oozy religion spoke to me more—grotesque and therefore mystical, where some of Rowe’s stories feel merely sociological and theological.

Still, for a while the collection shifts settings and subgenres quickly enough that I stayed intrigued. There’s a snapshot of a teenage gang, which may also be a riff on “Tam Lin”—if you remember those 1990s urban fantasists, Charles de Lint, Bordertown, this tale will offer a lot of nostalgic pleasure. There are a lot of stories of people making the decision to enact sweeping societal change, which is tough to make convincing in a short story because And then what happened?, you know. But gradually I began to see that Rowe does think about And then what happened. And the final two stories—a short one, and a novella—brought me deep into the teeming ecosystem of his imagination.

In these stories, “The Voluntary State” and “The Border State,” we learn that Tennessee is ruled by an AI who suppresses individual personality—and sends tiny, destructive machines out through the waterways, making every river and creek seethe with malware. There are political rebellions against the incursions of the Voluntary State. The story by that name depicts a rebel strike against the AI, Athena Parthenos; it’s an immersive plunge into a world of crow-feather cloaks and merchant monkeys, where everything might be sapient and everyone might be weaponized.

But there is also singing. A preacher has found a way to purify or pacify the waters with hymns. “The Border State” centers on his children—I love that it’s his children, the ones who grew up with his ways, the ones who receive the hymns as tradition and therefore have to decide whether to trust them and how to live with them. The haunting, sublime image of the singing also carries a kind of morality with which they have to reckon.

There are a lot of ways of changing someone’s mind, and maybe one way to talk about this collection is to say it’s about the difference between education and brainworms.

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“A Lot of You Were Gay in the Garfield Dark Ride”

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My best friend sent me this powerful essay from 2017 about the psychological and spiritual aftermath of accidentally causing a death. A lot of essays of this kind include literary or philosophical references in a perfunctory way, or in order to like prove that their topic has depth. By contrast, I thought the late turn toward art, philosophy, and religion here was genuinely insightful and heartfelt. “[O]ne’s history as an agent is a web in which anything that is the product of the will is surrounded and held up and partly formed by things that are not.”

Read Leah Libresco Sargeant on SSI marriage penalties; and check the comments for more explorations of policies that penalize love.

Corporal works of mercy in the news. (The corporal works of mercy listed here.)

A brief (and surprisingly fascinating!) history of “Garfield’s Nightmare.”

And last: “a movie about a nearly unkillable, Instagram-mastering, alcohol-loving sloth murdering an entire sorority house.” IT’S CALLED SLOTHERHOUSE. Apparently it’s somehow… good????

Broken, possibly evil computer photographed by youngthousands, found via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.