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A Novel
by Joe Mungo Reed
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My teachers at school have said that my phrasal dictionary is a fitting tribute to life in the Colony, while my mother, who is laconic, said that the dictionary is yet more proof that I am worryingly precocious. "I was just playing with dinosaur toys when I was your age," she told me. Though later, when she was being sincere, she said that she understands my dictionary, my need to gain a solid grasp of this strange world.
Really, I prefer it when she is being laconic because the sincerity makes me think of her worries for me, of whispered conversations spoken beyond my earshot in institutional settings. She frets for me, for difficulties of mine that she thinks extend beyond those problems that other children of my generation have. Mostly, I think, she is projecting. That is psychological terminology that describes the way that she imagines her own problems to be mine. My Other Mum died in a mine collapse when I was three, and Mum still misses her and expresses loneliness by talking to the child therapist about how I do not have a "rounded home life."
Maybe there is also projection in the way that Mum sees my dictionary. She thinks of it as an attempt to resolve my problems with language, rather than—as it really is—a remedy for the unacknowledged irrationalities of her own generation. What is strangest to me is to be in this place and still be talking as if there is inside and outside, as if there are trees and fields, blue skies, seas, a single moon dragging the tides around the planet. What is odd is not to want to change this way of speaking, but to carry on with it as if it is normal.
When she means to say that she is confused, Mum says that she is all at sea. But what could that mean on a planet on which water is only mined from deep in the rock, pumped through pipes in the Colony, and held in fountains, sinks, baths? She intends to say, as far as I understand it, that she is lost, adrift. But even the word adrift is one that relates to boats, to vessels floating on a large body of water, and there are no boats here in the Colony, no bodies of water for them to float upon. In my phrasal translation, I have decided, she should say I'm all in space. As in, she is free-floating, not subject to the gravity of a planet. She means really that she is lost. But even to be lost is an old concept, because what succession of systems failures would one have to experience to not be able to locate oneself?
"You are dogged," Mum says, when I talk through my latest definitions to her, and I wonder whether I should allow that, because I look up dogged and find that it comes from the stubborn characteristics of the dog, and there are no dogs here in the Colony. I am browsing on the screen in the kitchen, and Mum is heating the noodles that she brought back to the unit on her way home from the lab. I speak my thoughts aloud, and she says that all such comparisons are somewhat mythic anyway, and I ask what she means, and she says, "Even when there were dogs, many dogs weren't dogged."
There were, in fact, once dogs here. Mums bought a dog with them on the Long Voyage. I say, "Was Larry dogged?"
Mum thinks and says, "Yes, actually. Larry undermines my point because Larry was very stubborn."
On the screen I open Pictures, and flick back through the years until I reach the point that I was one year old, and there is Other Mum holding me and Mum sitting next to her with Larry the dog sprawled across her lap. Larry is beige and brown and has a small, wrinkled face. His mouth is turned down in what seems to be an expression of anxiety, his long floppy ears framing his head. His eyes are like shiny brown buttons.
That was all in the Early Iterative Stage, when things needed to be done quickly, and mistakes were made. No one had realised the problems that animals would cause to the first generation of children like me who had no exposure to many bacteria and suchlike. A lot of children had acute allergies to the pets in the Colony, and so it was decided that the animals must be euthanized, which is a word derived from ancient Greek meaning easy or happy death. Mum doesn't really like to talk about Larry, because, like talking about Other Mum, it makes her sad. Euthanasia is a euphemism, which is an indirect way of saying something that might otherwise be too blunt. Larry's death was probably not actually a happy death (though I'm sure the Colony authorities took all the steps they could to make it as painless as possible), and so doubtless it is an unpleasant thing for Mum to recall. But today she must be feeling a little better than usual in this respect, because she says. "You would have liked Larry. I'm sorry you don't remember him."
Excerpted from Terrestrial History by Joe Mungo Reed. Copyright © 2025 by Joe Mungo Reed. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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