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Oct. 12th, 2025 09:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsWhile I'm talking about Books That Surprised Me, The Mune is a book with a killer premise and some interesting speculative ideas that I don't think really comes together but did take Several turns! that I did Not expect!!
The killer premise: a group of 'surplus' pregnant Victorian women sourced from asylums and workhouses, en route to the colonies, get shipwrecked on a island with their newborn infants and develop their own society with the limited resources available. Also, there is Something Weird About the Island; also, there are monsters in the water; also, although most of the women are learning to thrive in their new circumstances, Depressed Betty Keeps Causing Problems! !! !!!
I was really excited about this book because I have some friends who love Robinsoniads and this was the most interesting-looking Robinsoniad I'd hit in a minute, so I was hoping to recommend it to them ... as for me I don't tend to gravitate towards a solo Robinsoniad particularly but I do love a collective Robinsoniad, when a bunch of people are stranded in a Situation together and have to make a community happen. I didn't end up fully convinced that the society that comes about on this island was a plausible outgrowth from the socialization that the women bring to it -- I needed some more steps on the ladder to show how this group of people not only decide to communally raise their children without gender distinctions but name them all things like 'Lightning' and 'Rainbow' -- but it is certainly doing something new with lonely island survival tropes and I also quite like the interspersed bits of Pastiche Victorian Science Fiction that counterpoint the island events and ring changes on the themes, mostly in the mind of Betty.
Betty simultaneously feels like a bit of a caricature and like the only actually Victorian person in the book. She's a thirteen-year-old kitchen maid who was favored and given some education by her master before he raped her, and she cherishes dreams of going back Exactly to the way life was before All That Unfortunate Business. She's not only the only person on the island who's still concerned about maintaining the rules, religion and mores of the mainland, but after a while the only person who thinks about being rescued at all; while everyone else dutifully do their various survival tasks, she sits on the shore optimistically next to rescue flags and whispers stories to the children about the paradise they left behind on the mainland. She also has a real eugenicist streak. Midway through the book, as the kids start getting older, Betty starts Making Choices
First, Betty tries to drown her least favorite of the children in their only source of fresh water. When that doesn't pan out, she tries to drown herself in the same freshwater source --
and finds! beneath the well! a secret lab with future scientists?? who have been watching the community?? and when Betty's like 'I just want to go home' the future scientists are like 'oh, okay, sure, but watch out! time got weird!' and give her nice clothes and a bag full of gold coins and send her back out through Another well into Normal England, where Betty discovers that although it's been long enough on the island for a whole generation of kid to become teenagers, only two years have passed back at home.
Betty makes her way back to her old household and rapist boss, pretends for a while to be Betty's Hot Older Cousin, and eventually spills the beans about everything that happened to her; then she and her rapist boss go back through the teleportation well and back to the island. By the time she returns, several of the most prominent characters from the early part of the book have already died. Betty's reappearance prompts some of the now-grown children to investigate the teleportation well themselves, where the future scientists give them an ultrasound scanner and the names of some Real Life Victorian Feminists to look up and tell them that they have to move the community back to England because the island is about to blow up. They also, briefly, befriend the island monsters that they've previously been fighting, but then leave them behind on the volcanic island, along with Betty's rapist boss? who has decided it's his duty as a Victorian man of science to stay and study the monsters, despite the fact that the island is about to blow up??
I left the book feeling a.) somewhat confused about the import of all of this and b.) somewhat unconvinced by the character beats (and also by the dialect choices) but despite this I didn't actually have a bad time. Maybe it's just that the book feels like it's reaching for a flavor of 70s Literary Feminist Science Fiction for which I have a fondness. It's nice to read something written in 2025 that's this unabashedly weird! I appreciate it!
The killer premise: a group of 'surplus' pregnant Victorian women sourced from asylums and workhouses, en route to the colonies, get shipwrecked on a island with their newborn infants and develop their own society with the limited resources available. Also, there is Something Weird About the Island; also, there are monsters in the water; also, although most of the women are learning to thrive in their new circumstances, Depressed Betty Keeps Causing Problems! !! !!!
I was really excited about this book because I have some friends who love Robinsoniads and this was the most interesting-looking Robinsoniad I'd hit in a minute, so I was hoping to recommend it to them ... as for me I don't tend to gravitate towards a solo Robinsoniad particularly but I do love a collective Robinsoniad, when a bunch of people are stranded in a Situation together and have to make a community happen. I didn't end up fully convinced that the society that comes about on this island was a plausible outgrowth from the socialization that the women bring to it -- I needed some more steps on the ladder to show how this group of people not only decide to communally raise their children without gender distinctions but name them all things like 'Lightning' and 'Rainbow' -- but it is certainly doing something new with lonely island survival tropes and I also quite like the interspersed bits of Pastiche Victorian Science Fiction that counterpoint the island events and ring changes on the themes, mostly in the mind of Betty.
Betty simultaneously feels like a bit of a caricature and like the only actually Victorian person in the book. She's a thirteen-year-old kitchen maid who was favored and given some education by her master before he raped her, and she cherishes dreams of going back Exactly to the way life was before All That Unfortunate Business. She's not only the only person on the island who's still concerned about maintaining the rules, religion and mores of the mainland, but after a while the only person who thinks about being rescued at all; while everyone else dutifully do their various survival tasks, she sits on the shore optimistically next to rescue flags and whispers stories to the children about the paradise they left behind on the mainland. She also has a real eugenicist streak. Midway through the book, as the kids start getting older, Betty starts Making Choices
First, Betty tries to drown her least favorite of the children in their only source of fresh water. When that doesn't pan out, she tries to drown herself in the same freshwater source --
and finds! beneath the well! a secret lab with future scientists?? who have been watching the community?? and when Betty's like 'I just want to go home' the future scientists are like 'oh, okay, sure, but watch out! time got weird!' and give her nice clothes and a bag full of gold coins and send her back out through Another well into Normal England, where Betty discovers that although it's been long enough on the island for a whole generation of kid to become teenagers, only two years have passed back at home.
Betty makes her way back to her old household and rapist boss, pretends for a while to be Betty's Hot Older Cousin, and eventually spills the beans about everything that happened to her; then she and her rapist boss go back through the teleportation well and back to the island. By the time she returns, several of the most prominent characters from the early part of the book have already died. Betty's reappearance prompts some of the now-grown children to investigate the teleportation well themselves, where the future scientists give them an ultrasound scanner and the names of some Real Life Victorian Feminists to look up and tell them that they have to move the community back to England because the island is about to blow up. They also, briefly, befriend the island monsters that they've previously been fighting, but then leave them behind on the volcanic island, along with Betty's rapist boss? who has decided it's his duty as a Victorian man of science to stay and study the monsters, despite the fact that the island is about to blow up??
I left the book feeling a.) somewhat confused about the import of all of this and b.) somewhat unconvinced by the character beats (and also by the dialect choices) but despite this I didn't actually have a bad time. Maybe it's just that the book feels like it's reaching for a flavor of 70s Literary Feminist Science Fiction for which I have a fondness. It's nice to read something written in 2025 that's this unabashedly weird! I appreciate it!
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Date: 2025-10-15 06:06 pm (UTC)This sounds absolutely bonkers in a way that I would probably not like if I read it, but I very much enjoyed your review of the bonkosity.
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Date: 2025-10-15 10:01 pm (UTC)Here it is: The Mune: a speculative feminist utopia beyond the gender binary
You can download the thesis (in Word format) but the actual novel portion is embargoed. It's still 175 pages.
Dawes, Susannah Laisa (2023) The Mune: a speculative feminist utopia beyond the gender binary. Doctoral thesis, University of Essex.
Item Type: Thesis (Doctoral) Divisions: Faculty of Humanities > Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, Department of Depositing User: Susannah Dawes Date Deposited: 17 Feb 2023 15:25 Last Modified: 06 Mar 2023 12:26