Sleeping through her alarm—not for the first time—Yekini dashes for work. She is a “Mid-level” Analyst in the Pinnacle, the tallest and last of five towers known as “The Fingers,” constructed off the Nigerian Coast as a refuge for those fleeing the rise of the ocean waters. She arrives only a minute late. But that seems enough for her to immediately receive a message that she is to be sent on a field assignment, an undersea assignment to the Lower levels—the kind of task given to someone who deserves “a bit of a lesson.” Issued a firearm, she is prepared and sent downwards.
On the Upper level, Ngozi, an ambitious bureaucrat, is sent down to investigate a “breach alert,” and stops at the sixty-sixth Level to pick up the COPOF (Commission for the Protection of the Fingers) agent who will accompany him. She is identified as Yekini, an analyst, clearly a novice, which annoys him. He objects to the clumsy and unattractive protection equipment he is given to wear, but she overrules him and he dons it.
Down in the Lowers, Tuoyo, leader of a mechanic team, is woken with a report that something has torn a hole in an airlock on Level nine, deep under water. Her tech team repairs the damage and she is about to end her shift when two officials from above turn up. What exactly is the reason for a response to something that she had eventually flagged as not “critical”?
“Did they think it was Children?”
We learn shortly afterwards that Tuoyo is “that Tuoyo Odili,” whose wife was lost on an expedition which was attacked by the so-called “Children of Yemoja.” The novella continues to explore the nature of the “Children” and our three protagonists’ growing understanding of the nature of the “Fingers,” once a utopian project (“Making home in the heights is the future of luxury”) and now a crumbling society in which the Office of the Pinnacle Leadership warns the Tower citizens against “enemies from within who look, talk and act like you, who may even be your family members” and also the “devilish abominations the sea has brought forth from the depths of debauchery that was Old Lagos.” We learn more about the past, too—through, for instance, Ngozi’s blurred memories of he and his sister being part of an exodus braving the journey over the sea, paying bribes to be smuggled into the Tower refuges, “each one living every day in the fear that they would be discovered and thrown back out to the mercy of the sea.”
There is much in Lost Ark Dreaming which is the kind of generic dystopian SF we have read before—a stripped-down version of an often-used trope, a more-than-twice-told tale. The towers in which “level” signifies class is an easy metaphor, and even the post-climate apocalypse is, nowadays, difficult to write about with any degree of conviction. What makes Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s version of this interesting is the way the story is told. The novella form demands a difficult balance, but the author is in command here. The “plot,” told from the viewpoints of the three main characters whose personal histories gradually allow us to construct a bigger picture, alternates with extracts from the archives of the “Office of the Pinnacle Leadership” in which the “Diekara Atlantic Community” is shown developing and decaying. This process occurs in the context of the social and ecological wreckage of the Lagos megapolis which in our real-world present is already happening. Between these are poetic, mythic extracts, which illuminate the plot development that positions the “Children” as some sort of evolutionary or spiritual being/process belonging to “Queen Conch,” who “reached into her treasures and pulled from it the Quickening, from which we have been gifted this life that was once denied us.”
The novella form’s need for brevity compared to that of the novel-length work prevents Okungbowa from going into significant detail about how what happened to the project actually happened, although there is a strong argument for suggesting that “how” might be the wrong question. That this thread draws the story into other realms is precisely what prevents Lost Ark Dreaming from being yet another class-based dystopia: we have a focus upon the real-world (our present-day) ecological catastrophes that build this dystopia (which might be less a dystopia than a better response to the situation than some others); and we have the story of how this history is understood by the characters within the story, and a mythology which underpins it.
The novella’s first page contains a number of mythological “flood” references which are part of Yekini’s upbringing. Some of them seem to refer to propaganda broadcasts that justify the existence and status quo of the towers using a religious gloss; others come from the fund of stories possessed and told by Yekini’s grandmother, which express “flood” stories from the perspective of a number of cultures. There is also a strong focus upon the kind of indirect detail which illuminates a setting, and it this is one of those elements which helps raise this story above the average.
Detailing such examples would undermine the point that they are presented in context, and would end up telling the story instead of allowing the reader the pleasure of discovering them, so two will suffice. Our early encounter with the dishevelled Yekini rushing to work notes the “dash of colour”—a patch of dye in her hair, a fancy pin on her suit—by which she tries to establish her individuality. Likewise, Ngozi keeps within a pendant a small piece of orange peel—a strange possession which we later learn is a kind of token of memory, a recollection of how he and his refugee sister were reduced to “sucking on orange rinds for sustenance.” There are also glancing references to Christianity which seem to see it as a half-remembered ingredient in a much richer cauldron of story. The sense of community even within this failing dystopia is marked by such evidences of self. For instance, in Level sixty-two, some levels above Yekini’s
Each unit had its own distinctive look, almost every owner doing something to mark the territory as theirs. In the way of many Midders, like those on Yekini’s level, most had pinned their names to their doors, or had some sort of marker or identifier or decoration. No one wanted to be Unit 6201 or Resident 09385. They wanted to be Sunday two units down or Minna around the bend.
These easily overlooked pauses to notice telling details of his invented world are what make Okungbowa a writer to watch. His novella’s braided layers establish the world of the “Fingers” but also tell us where that story is coming from—and, perhaps less concretely, where it may go. The image of the “Fingers,” those five towers built upon an artificial island that are now five protrusions above the rising water, occurs to the reader like the hand of a drowning person desperately trying to attract help. It is not clear, to this reader at least, whether what is offered is help. But in the end, it is not the story which is told, but how the author chooses to tell it, which makes Lost Ark Dreaming something to be read.