A Hunger With No Name by Lauren C. Teffeau: Review by Jake Casella Brookins

A Hunger With No Name, Lauren C. Teffeau (University of Tampa Press 978-1-59732-207-2, 156pp, $28.00, hc) September 2024. Cover by Madeline M. Eisele.

Lauren C. Teffeau’s novella A Hunger With No Name might take place on a far-future Earth, or in a similar secondary world; regardless, it’s told by a people who have survived some vast disaster, a ‘‘Great Scatter’’ that has receded into a mythic past. The Astravans have formed a new and vibrant culture in a semi-arid desert climate, their survival tied to herding goatlike creatures called lucerva and trading with neighboring communities. In recent years, though, life has become harder, with the river and foraging grounds they depend on becoming less and less reliable. Thurava, our protagonist, worries that her family’s lifestyle is in danger. When her village opts to relocate to Miravat, the nearby ‘‘Glass City’’ that has offered them refuge, Thurava finds that cultural survival is a complicated thing, and that Miravat may not be innocent in her people’s struggle.

The love of the desert, and of the night sky, shines through A Hunger With No Name; Thurava’s herding journeys have a lovely feel for landscape and atmosphere, and the Astravan beliefs and practices around stargazing and con­stellations is well-crafted. Miravat’s light pollution hides the stars, and the city forbids the Astravan refugees from bringing their lucerva inside; these two simple elements allow Teffeau a tidy way to examine themes of cultural displacement. The novella feints towards one solution – Thurava attempting to become a ‘‘lorist,’’ preserving her people’s stories – but, interestingly, ultimately refocuses on the importance of actual lifeways and practices.

There’s a pleasant resonance with Le Guin’s shorter fiction in the novella’s gentle anthro­pological approach, though Miravat’s robotic automatons and mysterious ruler take the story in a rather different direction. With its interest in permaculture, in an environmentally sustainable society struggling to resist assimilation by a colo­nially coded power it’s tempting and plausible to slot A Hunger With No Name into the solarpunk tradition, despite the fact that the only futuristic technology in the novella is essentially villainous. I’m fascinated, though, by some of the stranger and bleaker ideas peeking out around the edges: Its weird watery desert city and clockwork figures prompted me to pull Nike Sulway’s Rupetta off the shelf, and the slowly drying, slowly dying backdrop of the novella has a kind of lovely rocky melancholy that reminded me of C.J. Cherryh’s The Faded Sun and others in the dying Earth tradition.

One of the novella’s more interesting environ­mental angles, and the source of its title, is in the Astravan myth of the Great Scatter – the story of a man with a hunger so great that he ate everything around him, almost the entire world, until he burst and scattered the people within him across the land. It is, perhaps, a metaphor for capital­ism, for any ideology of unchecked growth and consumerism, and one that Thurava reflects on as she begins to probe the reality of the Glass City, which itself seems to have a boundless appetite.

It’s heartening, in such a gentle story, to see how directly Thurava eventually confronts her people’s plight: What appears to be a story of adaptation and assimilation instead turns out to be one of resistance, even of liberation, with complicated implications. Thurava’s decision to challenge the mechanical gods of the city is a laudable one – while it’s never called ‘‘AI,’’ it feels particularly apt right now – but the novella is strangely breezy about the human question of self-determination in Miravat, and the human cost of Thurava’s ac­tions. As much as solarpunk might help us think about livable, environmentally just futures, I think it might be even better if speculative fiction could help us think through questions of political will, questions of resistance and transformation – there’s a part of me that finds the pastoralism-over-urbanism here an unsatisfying opposition, and the gentleness of the tone at odds with the violence it does gesture towards.

But that’s a complicated quibble; A Hunger With No Name is still a delightful read, full of interesting ideas and satisfying imagery. The novella may evince a negative view of some kinds of technology, but I think it’s good at gen­tly reminding us that even the seemingly simple Astravan are technologically sophisticated: the technologies of storytelling, the technologies of sustainable cultural practices and knowledge of the land. When moving to the city, Thurava notes that Miravat values only ‘‘tangible products a machine can measure, not symbolism that lives and breathes.’’ Thurava doesn’t reject becoming a lorist so much as she rejects the idea of her culture being reduced to a dead record; A Hunger With No Name might not be a long story, but it does a wonderful job of showing us how its characters have both a past and a future.

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This review and more like it in the November 2024 issue of Locus.

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