Are the Gods Merely Tolerating Us?

An interview with Premee Mohamed

By Sheldon Birnie

Children glow green in the night. Offerings of milk and herbs, baking sweet and savoury, are left on doorsteps for the gods of the hill and green, the gods of the deep waters. Shadows peer from within shadows. A game is being played, the rules unknown to the pawns, perhaps even the players themselves. Eldritch symbols burn phosphorescent, signifying what?

Born and raised in St. Albert, Alberta, Premee Mohamed earned two science degrees before settling back in her hometown of Edmonton. The author of three novels and three novellas is set to release her first collection of short-stories, No One Will Come Back For Us, later this month via Undertow Publications. 

Mohamed’s short fiction runs the gamut between science-fiction, fantasy, and horror, with an element to the cosmic and darkly divine. The thread that connects the 17 stories in her new collection is a sense that ancient gods exist and have always existed, humanity but an afterthought. Do our offerings to the old ones or their usurpers have any impact on how things play out, for us, in the end? Or are we but a dream (or less than) within a dream to the forces around us?

I caught up with Mohamed earlier this month for a wide ranging chat, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me a little about yourself, and your writing journey. Where does that urge to write come from? Were you writing stories when you were a kid or how did that all start? 

I was one of those kids who was writing because I liked doing it. I was always making up stories and thought I could write them down so I could fiddle with them later. The analogy I often use is, it’s like a middle-aged dad who has a hobby that’s doing car repair, where he buys vintage cars and puts them in a shed out back where he tinkers with them. It takes him like 10 years to get to a point where he could resell it, because he doesn’t really want to resell it, because that’s his hobby. He has dinner, then goes out to the shed and messes with the car. For most of my life, that’s how my writing was. It was just my hobby. I did it because I loved it and found it relaxing and you didn’t need any expensive equipment. I had friends who were like, Do you want to come on our ski holiday? I’m like, No thank you! I would rather die. No, but I would rather stay home and write. Nobody ever read my stuff. I don’t think most of my friends knew I wrote as a hobby.

Who were some early influences?

Early on I think it was stuff I could pick up cheap from library sales. It’s funny when you look back at it, how almost random it was. If the hardcover books at the library sale are al 50 cents and the paperbacks are 25 cents, and I’ve got five dollars to spend – this is a true story, by the way – and I’m going for the thickest hardbacks I can find. Some of the earliest ones I can remember are the collected Edgar Allen Poe, with illustrations, the collected Edgar Rice Burroughs, so all the Mars stories and Tarzan stories and Barsoom and everything, and Robert E. Howard, so all the sword and sorcery, Conan the Barbarian stuff and cosmic horror stuff. Those were very early influences that I was just obsessed with, all that horror-adjacent fantasy, sci-fi pulp. As I got older I got into Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series, that was a really big influence. Monica Hughes, Lloyd Alexander, Terry Pratchett. Susan Cooper, for sure, that was my first introduction to folk horror, which I really love. I didn’t know that it was its own genre of horror, because as a kid you’re kind of aware of folk-horror from movies, which I wasn’t allowed to watch. My parents were like, there’s no way we’re letting our seven year old watch The Wickerman. 

It wasn’t until a couple years ago, 2015, that a friend nudged me to submit something to an anthology because he was like, well isn’t this the stuff you read, this cosmic horror stuff? Maybe you should write something and submit it. They pay cash money! Cash money, you say? That was (my story) “The Explorer’s Wife”, which was accepted into the anthology She Walks in Shadows, which won the World Fantasy Award. It was funny, because I hadn’t written a short story since high school, so I threw something together and they bought it. So for a while there, my acceptance-to-submission ratio was 1:1, which of course didn’t last for long. When they sent me the cheque, I was like, you can get paid money to write? Hmmm… I spent a couple years writing and subbing short-stories when I had time, because you never know if someone might buy it. It’s like playing the lottery for free, because I was writing anyway. One problem with writing, as you may have found, is as you write more and submit more and get published more, you become friends with more writers, who start to nag you, like, “We know you have a novel hidden somewhere. You should submit it and try to get representation.” So I did, because I’m very susceptible to peer pressure. That’s how I got into the longform publishing treadmill, where I remain today.

In your story notes to No One Will Come Back for Us, you mention how you find short-stories to be harder to write than novels or novellas, but how do the two forms compare for you? What’s your process like for each?

What I’m finding now is that short-stories are getting a little easier to write, because it’s getting a bit more standardized in process, for me. The last 12 or 15 I’ve written have been solicits, where somebody has come to me for stories for anthologies. They’ll already have the theme already to go. So I had to come up with a way to write a story within their word limit and using their theme, rather than just waiting until inspiration struck and writing stories like that. So now I kind of have a standard process, which is looking at the theme, researching and brainstorming, and then picking out an idea from my brainstorm, then coming up with a structure and format, writing a first draft, editing, then submitting. Whereas with novels, I’ve heard it said, and I don’t know who said it originally, it might have been Gene Wolfe, that “Writing a book doesn’t teach you how to write books, it just teaches you how to write that book.” Originally, I was like, that can’t possibly be true. But it is! Every novel I’ve written has been so different, so I don’t have a standardized process for novels. The one I’m writing now, I don’t think it will ever get done, which is good because nobody’s waiting for it. I’m kind of stalling out on the research, which has never happened before. There’s so much I want to put into the book, because I keep finding so interesting stuff in the research, but if I put everything in here it will be a 500,000 word book, when I was aiming for 125,000. I’ve encountered problems with every book that I have to solve anew, which is fascinating to think about, but also extremely irritating! 

The collection works really well together, whether it’s a space story or one that could be set today, or a historic story. You’ve got these recurring themes of the old gods vs. the new gods, while working within both older and contemporary tropes. Was this intentional, or just how it worked out because that’s what you’re interested in and writing about anyway?

Kind of both, actually. Michael Kelly, the editor, emailed me and my agent asking for a short-story collection. His brief was that he wanted dark fantasy and horror, but nothing overtly like funny or whimsical or light-hearted. No treacly sci-fi, nothing with an unambiguously happy ending. I went back to my stories and sent him 18 that I listed in order of publication. He discarded one of them, we kept 17, and he put them in the order they are in. My only requests were that “The Evaluator” and “Us and Ours” have “The Evaluator” come first, because they share a character and in that order it helps orient you better, and I wanted “Quietus” to come last. Looking back, I didn’t see themes leaping out at me, but I’ve noticed reviewers commenting on only the shared universe aspect of it. I guess I do keep coming back to the same ideas, which are clearly things I’ve been thinking about. A friend and I were talking about this recently, and she said that what she liked about it was that the gods in it, even if they’re not actually featured in the story, like in “Fortunato”, which is a sci-fi story so there shouldn’t be any gods in it, they’re still featured in the background sort of lurking and being divine. We don’t know if our prayers or offerings or acts or anything we do is helping or if it’s an actual transaction, whether the currency we’ve got as human beings is useful to the gods or if they’re merely tolerating us or if there’s something they expect from us. I like to explore uncertainty in my stories, like people definitely not knowing what’s going on. One way that keeps manifesting is that we don’t know what our relationship is with the supernatural.

You’re a scientist by trade, training and education, and you work a scientific angle into many of these stories, as characters, in the background, in the format or structure of some of these stories. How does what you do during the day make its way into your creative work?

Carefully, because I’m trying not to get sued or anything for breaking any confidentiality agreements or anything like that. Aside from the way I research, which I think is not the same as a lot of writers who came up through fiction, there are resources I know I can go to as a scientist. I’m very comfortable reading scientific papers and primary research and crunching that down into plain language. I like to find connections between scientific concepts and papers, and that’s kind of the same process that happens in fiction. The other side of things is that I like to have science as a source of conflict in the stories, and scientists as characters in the stories because there’s this idea that even though we’re all doing research, we can’t be certain about a lot of things and we’re constantly presented with things that we cannot explain. A scientist is a character who is presented with a fantasy scenario, and how do they react. What if you’re a scientist in a fantasy or horror book? It’s that whole asking questions that I, the author, don’t want them to be able to answer and how they respond to it: is it anger? Is it curiosity? Is it helplessness? Is it determination to actually go find the answer? What are they going to do to find the answer, or are they going to give up? Because I’ve spent so much time with scientists, that kind of encompasses that whole spectrum of what do you do if you’re researching something and no answers are coming? I’m in the midst of reading this book by Stanley Prusiner, who was the guy who basically finalized the discovery of how prions work. Those give me nightmares. I hate them. I included them in one of my books, the second Beneath the Rising book. When you look at the timeline for when he first started to think these might be an infectious body that wasn’t a bacteria, a fungus or a virus, he was like, what does that leave? It doesn’t leave anything. When you look at the timeline of when he started to think it to when it was finalized, it was decades. He talks about all the scientists who were working on this along the way, who probably could have discovered the true answer before him, but they were all like, “This is stupid. I’m wasting my funding. I’m going to go do something else so I can afford to eat food.” He just never gave up. That’s so interesting to me, I would have totally given up. But he didn’t. 

Who do you read now who inspires you to keep writing or to try different things in your writing? I’m sure it’s a long list, but are there any who jump out off the top?

Oh boy. Yeah it’s a huge list. But definitely Nick Harkaway is a current favourite. His novels are all so different. It also seems like his editors are allowing him to do things that wouldn’t normally get done. Like, The Gone-Away World is a fantasy and a sci-fi and also a 1970s kung-fu movie, and they’re all in there. His second latest, Gnomon, is a near-future surveillance sci-fi but also an ancient Greek fantasy involving the gods and also a mystery novel involving inexplicable murders. I’m looking at these and thinking he’s obviously a very good writer, and these are structurally excellent books where the prose is very good. I’m obsessed with it, but also want to know how I get to a point where I can give a manuscript like this to an editor and not have them throw it back to me as unpublishable. I find that really inspiring. Possibly because my stuff jumps around, it also makes me think of another author Yoon Ha Lee, who wrote the Machineries of Empire series. God those are fascinating books. Everybody is a villain, nobody is a hero, which I love. They’re also a combination of sci-fi, space opera and fantasy. There are things happening there that look like magic, which is fantastic. There are really too many to list, but those are two who come to mind. Oh, and Claire North is another writer I’m getting obsessed with. I read one of her books a couple months ago and since then I've been trying to get the rest of them. Her prose is very confident, especially in her early novels, you wouldn't think she’s such a young writer. It just scans with this incredible sense of authority. I want for my stuff to scan like that, to never sound unsure.

Having published a number of books now, what advice would you give yourself if you had a time machine, or give other writers trying to establish themselves, maybe from a business perspective?

Well, it was already clear to me not to quit my day job, that making money just off writing was never going to work for me. So instead I’d tell her to get her finances in order very early on. Get everything ready for your taxes, because as you go along it gets progressively more complicated. You don’t want to be sitting there at the end of the year trying to figure out what expenses were deductible and which weren’t. Just set up a spreadsheet early on and don’t wait until you’re six year into your career to try to organize that. If I could go back in time, I’d grab her by the shoulders and shout “Record keeping! Record keeping!” Which is a very boring answer, but I don’t think I’m wrong.

Anything else you want to add while I’ve got you on the line here?

Please order the book! And in case any editors are out there, I have enough short-stories left over for a strictly sci-fi collection, which I would love to do one day. But I’m delighted with the way this collection has turned out. It includes some of my very favourite stories, like “The General’s Turn” and “Willing”. So I definitely hope people enjoy it and pick it up. 

No One Will Come Back for Us is available from Undertow Publications.

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Sheldon Birnie is the author of Where the Pavement Turns to Sand, forthcoming from Malarkey Books