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Agents of Dreamland
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Agents of Dreamland, Whole Book, Spoilers Thread (Oct 2018)
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You know, I can't really imagine what it would have been like to have read this Novella without having read Whisperer in the Darkness (and the rest of the canon to be honest) first, since the whole story is in a way a reference to it.And you have to wonder -- was there an H.P. Lovecraft in the world of Agents of Dreamland?
I suspect Dreamland in the name is also a reference to the dreamland of Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, but that story seems to have very little to do with this one. So maybe not.
It also seems to be a time for new views of the Mi-go. Deep Roots by Ruthanna Emrys, the second book in her series that started as an answer to H.P. Lovecraft's The Shadow over Innsmouth, has a more sympathetic and less alien version of the Mi-go that I actually liked better than than horror-style take in Agents of Dreamland.
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I'm looking forward to hearing what people unfamiliar with the story thought. I think it's still cohesive, but certainly demands a few more fill in the blanks. For example, when Drew says that he and Meredith will be traveling by a different route, with the metal cylinders present. I think the discovery of their brainless corpses would have been even creepier without the foreknowledge of Whisperer in Darkness.
And you have to wonder -- was there an H.P. Lovecraft in the world of Agents of Dreamland?.
I was thinking not, since the purpose of the fictional James Whale film seemed to fill in for the original story. Did you think there were hints one way or another?
I suspect Dreamland in the name is also a reference to the dreamland of Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath
Knowing nothing about this before I started, I assumed it was going to take place in the Dreamlands as well. I think Kiernan got multiple use out of the title, with it's reference to Area 51, the X-Files, and to H.P.
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Ooh, I'll have to check it out. I read her short story "The Litany of Earth", which was probably the precursor to Deep Roots, as it was about how the people of Innsmouth were victims of xenophobia and propaganda. Sounds like Deep Roots expanded it to include more mythos critters? Have you been following the Lovecraft reread with her and Anne M Pillsworth on Tor.com?
Actually, Deep Roots is the second book of the Innsmouth Legacy which starts with "The Litany of Earth" -- in-between is Winter Tide.I read their Lovecraft reread somewhat erratically (which, to be fair, describes pretty much how I read Tor.com), but usually enjoy it when I do.
I read AoD to extend my reading beyond the genres I typically choose. Objective accomplished. I have no background with H.P. Lovecraft and have never read Kiernan before. I loved the time travels and mysteries of the universe. The book seemed too short but not incomplete. I guess I don't know what I didn't know while reading it. I feel that Kiernan has fantastical dreams at night and I'm glad she communicates these in writing. Yes Whitney, it was creepy! I usually read time travel in the context of a romance.
I started this late last night and finished at lunch today. It is certainly a fast read. I liked it. It feels like a primer for what is to come. You know, like you prime a wall before painting it. I enjoyed it but I wanted to know so much more. It was more like a story than a novel.
Chose to read along on this one because it looked "different" - objective accomplished. Initially did not like jumping around in time and having to figure out where each chapter fit into the story, but in retrospect I think puzzling out the storyline made for a more memorable book. My Lovecraft background was minimal and Kiernan experience zero; looking forward to checking out the Lovecraft backdrop story to AoD and maybe chiming in again.
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Did you enjoy your foray into less visited territory? Do you think you'll seek more like it out, or was it more like a halloween funhouse? Enjoyable when the season is right, but once a year or so is plenty?
The book seemed too short but not incomplete.
I suspect that most writers of novellas would be very happy with this. Leave them wanting more, but not feeling like there was too much left out.
I feel that Kiernan has fantastical dreams at night and I'm glad she communicates these in writing.
I love this description.
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I wonder if Kiernan has some idea of making The Signalman and Immacolata Sexton recurring characters.
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I am horrible at keeping track of timelines in books that jump around, I confess to writing down the dates to keep track of when everything happened. I agree it was more memorable the way she did it, starting with the shellshocked Signalman, then building up to what had happened.
Looking forward to your thoughts after reading Whisperer in Darkness!
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Whitney wrote: "Does anyone have any thoughts on the future Immacolata visited? One reviewer described it as a possible future. Did anyone else think it was only one possible future, or did it seem like a done dea..."That's a hard one. The original material (Lovecraft) had a, if not fixed, an inevitable and known, future. But it's not that particular one shown in this story. So we're left knowing only what the characters know, and they can't know.
Certainly modern physics tends to be split on the subject of whether the passage of time is a real thing or not (with entropy tending to be the sticking point on it not being an illusion), and whole question if the future is fixed or not is fraught (and hard to test). Mind you, if time-travel is possible, it tends to imply that causality is illusionary, or at least a local circumstance, which would seem appropriate for this genre which centers around a view of the universe as incomprehensible and uncaring.
So, like the characters, we can't be sure.
I think it was a probable future but with a chance it could be changed. I base that on what Immacolata told Signalman when he called her.
I finished this over the weekend and I'm starting the Lovecraft story now, so I will comeback once I finish that one too.It is such a short book with so much packed into it. Since I wasn't familiar with the Lovecraft story I didn't know about the previous incidents, but it was still very intriguing and suspenseful read and I feel that at least the incident in this book was well explained.
I also liked the way Kiernan played with the timelines, it made it more interesting for me to see the whole picture in the end. I recently read Last Night in Montreal and it reminded me of how that one is written as well.
I would also like to see this expanded as there's so much more I want to know about the characters and the future Immacolata saw. For my, I think it is an almost sure future that is going to happen, but that might be just my defeatist view of our current world situation hehe.
Whitney wrote: "Sarah wrote: "I read AoD to extend my reading beyond the genres I typically choose. Objective accomplished. I have no background with H.P. Lovecraft and have never read Kiernan before. I loved the ..."Did you enjoy your foray into less visited territory? Do you think you'll seek more like it out, or was it more like a halloween funhouse? Enjoyable when the season is right, but once a year or so is plenty?
I enjoyed this book immensely! Looked up other works of Kiernan but nothing really stood out. Would you have suggestions for my next escapade? Halloween fun throughout the year is a good thing
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The Red Tree seems to be Kiernan's most praised book. It's the only novel of hers I've read and it is excellent, but very different from Agents of Dreamland. Ignore the cover that makes it look like a gauzy romance, it is no such thing.
Many of her short stories are in anthologies of Lovecraftian fiction. They are like AoD in that they riff on existing Lovecraft stories. Her Alabaster stories look good as well, I've only read the Dark Horse comics based on them (picked up at random in my library before I'd ever heard of Kiernan). I think those are next on my Kiernan to read list.
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Just finished this after having started it yesterday--obviously, I found it quite engaging and hard to put down. Having not read "Whisperer in the Darkness" and having only a little experience with Lovecraft, I feel like I missed a ton in this brief book, although I still somehow felt like I had enough pieces of the puzzle to make some sense of it, or to enjoy the process of putting the border pieces together.
I like the way Signalman was almost written as a noir crime or hard-boiled detective (essentially, the old, hard-drinking, washed up kind). The voice and writing style definitely appealed to me. Will probably read "The Whisperer in the Dark" (online version) before commenting much more.
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Yeah, that was interesting, wasn't it. Looking back into that section, there's this, implying a fixity,
"But she kindly doesn’t tell him about the streets she’ll walk in a ruined L.A. only twenty-eight years farther along, or the battalions of winged fungoid monstrosities skimming low above shattered skyscrapers, or the black ships."
But there's also this, implying there may be at least a little wriggle room:
“If it’s any consolation, you did the best you could. And you may have bought us all a little more time.”
Another thing that made me think that time was fixed is the use of the phrase "So it goes", which seems to come from our narrator, whoever that might be. In Slaughterhouse-Five, the phrase is used following descriptions of whatever horror has just been catalogued. It made me wonder if Immacolata was like the Tralfamadorians of that book, seeing all time laid out like we would see a landscape in front of us.
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When you say her name aloud, it also sounds a lot like "immaculate conception" ...
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Pg 82: “Time is the navigator, and we are only hitchikers… For a handful of seconds, she’s back in that booth in Winslow, smoking & listening to Signalman… then she blinks, and now Immacolata walks the streets of a city that once was Los Angeles… There are signposts in the future, just as there are signposts in the past. A traveler can get lost here, too, easy as pie.”
When Signalman and Dunoway are discussing Immacolata in chapter 5: "One good thing [Signalman] can say about Barbican Estate, you don't hear all this skeptical, rationalist jumbo from the agents of Y." There's also another line I can't track down about her/them cooperating and sharing info in '78 (I think). Anyhow, this gave me the impression she was working for a competing "company"/faction, but that she had vaster resources/powers (of her own, if not also, institutionally).
Whitney wrote: "Sarah wrote: "I enjoyed this book immensely! Looked up other works of Kiernan but nothing really stood out. Would you have suggestions for my next escapade? Halloween fun throughout the year is a g..."Thank you, great suggestions! I was put off by the covers
"I wonder if Kiernan has some idea of making The Signalman and Immacolata Sexton recurring characters" - I'll hope this comes to fruition
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They definitely are working for competing creepy and shadowy agencies; Albany Versus London (aka Barbican Estate, aka Y). I assumed the "Y" was another nod to X-files.
Weren't most the mentions of cooperation referring to the current case? There's also a reference to how Albany was caught short by the events in Vermont, which Y had kept from them. I want more!
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“There, there, Little Buckaroo. We’re not talking doomsday. Not just yet. Anyhow, where would we be if Y hadn’t shown a little mercy and left us the prize back in ’78? Not like they had to. Credit where credit’s due and all that.”
“Credit? We should have nailed them to the wall just for showing up in Rhode Island, never mind sending two of our agents on a wild goose chase so Barbican could snatch the right of first refusal."
Two other events that would probably make good stories or novellas.
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Winslow and Salton Sea are places decimated by "progress"...dead zones where life continues to desperately hang on..."
Which leads directly to the future world that Immaculata visited! Great observation.
21st Century Literature
Books mentioned in this topic
Slaughterhouse-Five (other topics)The Red Tree (other topics)
Alabaster (other topics)
Last Night in Montreal (other topics)
Deep Roots (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Ruthanna Emrys (other topics)Ruthanna Emrys (other topics)
Mysterious agents from shadowy organizations, one of whom travels through time. A cult turning themselves into fruiting bodies. A prophetic film viewed on late-night TV. A probe that loses it's signal as it passes Pluto. A future Los Angeles on an earth ruled by winged fungoid aliens. What's not to love?
First, some reviews:
This is gushing review from tor.com, (NB - Tor is the publisher of the novella).
On the Cosmic Scale: Agents of Dreamland by Caitlín R. Kiernan
This review from Strange Horizons focuses on the idea of conspiracies and conspiracy theories that inform the book.
http://strangehorizons.com/non-fictio...
And this, from the NY Journal of Books, which mentions some simlarities with Kiernan's other works.
https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book...
Did anyone else know that "Dreamland" was a term for Area 51? I didn't, despite the X-Files episode that took place there called "Dreamland". Fun fact, that episode specifically took place at Groom Lake, which is where The Signalman interrogates Chloe.
I expect everyone has heard about the cordyceps fungus and zombie ants, but here's a picture anyway. Because, zombie ants!
Here's an artist's conception of the fungoid aliens from Whisperer in Darkness and Agents of Dreamland, called Mi-go in WiD, but never mentioned by name in AoD.
What did people think of Agents of Dreamland?
A lot of things were packed into this short book. What do you think of the way Kiernan handled it? Was too much left unexplained, or just enough to let your imaginations fill in the blank? How about the structure? Moving around in time was initially confusing (at least for me), but also seemed to be an integral part of the jigsaw puzzle that this narrative presents.
Were people familiar with the Lovecraft story The Whisperer in Darkness before reading AoD, or did anyone read it afterwards? What do you think of the way the source material was incorporated?