Like anything else that was created to benefit only a small group of outrageously privileged individuals, certain universities in America divide people into stratified categories of belonging. Higher education of this sort can be a social minefield defined by microaggressions and gatekeeping, where the smallest slip-up can get you labeled an outsider.
When I got into a fancy graduate program, I felt like somebody had made a mistake in letting me be there. My fellow students didn’t know where the food bank was. Their parents drove Porsches and collected rare books. A professor loudly made fun of me in front of my colleagues for holding a wine glass the wrong way—holding it like I was afraid to break it because it seemed expensive. The director of graduate studies omitted my associate’s degree from my bio at a departmental reception as if she were helping me hide something shameful.
In her new sci-fi novella We Speak Through the Mountain, scientist and speculative fiction author Premee Mohamed imagines a world where the subtle and overt ways that universities mark who is “in” and who is “out” become a matter of life and death. In her first novella set in this same fictionalized near-future Canada, 2021’s The Annual Migration of Clouds, protagonist Reid Graham receives a letter inviting her to attend Howse University, one of the last remaining domes of protection in a world that is otherwise ravaged by pandemics and climate-driven disasters. Reid spends most of that story navigating the expectations of her plague-ravaged community, especially those of her mother, who is convinced that the domes and the university are some myth or scam.
Like young people from small rural communities in America who have to make similar decisions, Reid has to choose whether or not to go to college in the face of her community’s concerns that she will never return, either because life back home will no longer seem appealing, or for a more insidious reason. That her body is also a host for Cadastrulamyces – a deadly, incurable, and possibly sentient fungal parasite – complicates Reid’s choices.
Reid’s college plans are settled at the beginning of We Speak Through the Mountain, which features her perilous trek to the university. It is a journey that admitted students do not always survive. Howse University is attended mainly by students who grew up inside the protective dome and have no frame of reference for understanding the nasty, brutish, and short life experiences of their peers who, like Reid, are literally outsiders.
Near the beginning of her experience at Howse, Reid tries to ascertain whether or not the dome inhabitants have a name for people like her who grew up outside, and she eventually realizes that the most frequently used term is similar to the phrase “you people”. This tension—which, again, closely mirrors the collision of privileged and underprivileged experiences in real universities—sets Reid on a course wherein she attempts to get her peers to see the value of sharing resources with those who live outside the dome, especially the medicinal injection that keeps her parasite at bay.
Between the invisible dome barrier, the semi-sentient fungal infection, and the Star Trek-style food approximation machines, there is always something to remind the reader that We Speak Through the Mountain is set in a speculative world. Still, once Reid survives her perilous journey, the novel adopts many straightforward qualities of going to college stories that we’ve seen in realist works like Elif Batuman’s The Idiot (2018) and in more speculative college stories like R. F. Kuang’s Babel (2022) and Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House (2019). We Speak Through the Mountain also shares some overlapping character types and plot points with Seth Rogen’s television series, Gen V (2023), the college-set show spun off from Eric Kripke’s The Boys.
Because of this reliance on school story tropes, some of Mohamed’s characters come across as relatively one-dimensional, as they have appeared in so many similar iterations across so many other fictional colleges: there are already dozens of variations on Clementine, the empathetic and quirky best friend, St. Martin, the will they/won’t they love interest, and Dr. Cardinal, the welcoming but untrustworthy administrator. Clementine is a fellow sufferer of the Cadastrulamyces infection and has shared enough of Reid’s life experiences to be put off by the snobbishness of the other Howse students. She is more socially adroit but less adventurous than Reid, so the two characters often play off of each other, pushing each other into experiences that neither would have been willing to engage with on their own.
However, Reid remains a compelling protagonist, as her various attempts to get the university to share the wealth are stymied in believable ways that closely reflect the resistance to change that universities in our world often demonstrate. In one of the most compelling statements on her position relative to her dome-born classmates, Reid says, “I had worried that coming here would make me a Morlock slouching into the garden of the Eloi, but I’m something worse – I’m the time traveler, human enough in appearance that they have all inadvertently given me too much credit.” As a novel about all how so-called impostor syndrome is not an individual pathology, but an inevitable outcome of the modern university’s culture of gatekeeping, We Speak Through the Mountain is unequivocally successful.
As a work of climate fiction, the problems that Mohamed imagines in her speculative vision of late 21st-century Canada are quite plausible, which also means they are discouraging. As they ought to be, since reflecting our present-day mistakes to us is the point of the best “cli-fi”. Reid fruitlessly tries to start a student group dedicated to sharing food and other resources with communities outside the dome. Still, she encounters a lot of unhelpful teachers and administrators who are quicker to imagine problems than offer solutions. For example, Reid is told that it is impossible to share the serum that neutralizes the horrible parasite with sufferers on the outside because of a lack of refrigeration, and no one on the faculty is willing to consider what it would take to make portable refrigerators.
Like Catherynne M. Valente’s 2021 cli-fi dystopia The Past Is Red, Mohamed envisions a world where adversity pushes people to cling to anything that they perceive to be an advantage, which only exacerbates the problems that created the dystopian conditions in the first place. As Reid discovers the varied and even sinister reasons why people never seem to come back home after enrolling at Howse, readers are encouraged to question what supposedly immovable barriers in our world are simply waiting for someone with the courage to move them. While such stories can be inspirational, this focus on the moral uprightness of a strong, individual protagonist sometimes strikes a discordant note with Mohamed’s larger, more collectivist goals.
This duology, which it is easy to imagine continuing further, has been referred to as “hopepunk” by some readers (and, in The Annual Migration of Clouds, by the publisher)—an awkward portmanteau that should be jettisoned in favor of something more meaningful, like speculative optimism. It may not be accurate to call We Speak Through the Mountain a work of speculative optimism because it presents a case in which many of the bad elements of our present moment don’t get better. Instead, it makes the most sense to categorize this novella as a dystopian narrative about a society that could be on the verge of something utopian if people can move past self-preservation in favor of collective preservation. In We Speak Through the Mountain, Mohamed imagines a world where our penchant for constructing social hierarchies outlives our planet’s ability to sustain us, which is less a fictionalization of the future than a damning reflection of how we are behaving in these times.