Review: Multitude by Marie Vibbert

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in return for an honest review.

‘We float to the surface, and we see that there is more to the world than the ocean. We see stars.

‘Then one day, we hear a song from far away.

‘It could be nothing, a new dance of energies made by stars muttering to themselves… but it could be everything. We pull tight to your direction in the hope that the universe may gift us a conversation. A banquet.

‘In Australia, a SETI Technician asks her colleague, “A fake from 44 parsecs?”

‘In Nevada, a soldier flinches as unidentified craft fly overhead.

‘In Beirut, a mathematician pets her cat and thinks about language.

‘We are coming. For the hospice orderly with open arms, the seamstress in her alleyway shop, the lawyer angry at her neighbor’s sloppy garden. For you are many, and cannot speak as one.

‘And yet we see you communicate without words. We see you organise and build.

‘We see you killing us.’

In Multitude, by Marie Vibbert, a delegation of octopus-like creatures who share a hive mind land on Earth, seeking knowledge of, and communication with its inhabitants.

They’re baffled and disheartened to find that humans are so different from them: communicating through speech and only when they choose to; speaking a dizzying array of different languages; and hurting one another with what appears to be casual abandon.

For their part, most humans feel threatened by the extraterrestrial visitors – it doesn’t help that the aliens accidentally kill a few people in their efforts to learn about them. Others, though, are more curious and conciliatory, attempting to translate the message the aliens sent ahead of their arrival, and standing up for them as living beings. Can the two species reach an accord?

Multitude is a delight! Considering its length (it’s a novella that I read in less than a day), it packs in a world of details, characters, and ideas.

The chapters written from the point of view of the alien hive mind are highly imaginative, with a lovely ethereal feel. We learn how the cephalopods live, work, and raise their young: there are some clear commonalities with humans, but their telepathic connection means they conduct themselves in a more cooperative and empathetic way.

The author makes brilliant use of defamiliarisation to emphasise why the visitors find human behaviour so inscrutable, and come to despair of ever establishing cross-species communication. They’re quick-to-learn and resourceful, though, using found materials to fashion protective vehicles for themselves, and eventually hitting upon an experiment that advances their understanding in leaps and bounds.

Physically and psychologically, the cephalopods aren’t unlike Doug Johnstone’s Enceladons, but as they’ve come to Earth for discovery rather than refuge, their focus is rather different, and global in scale besides.

Accordingly, the interesting and often humorous human stories that wind through the book come from across the world. Through distinctive voices and details, Vibbert makes each character memorable in the restricted space of the novella format, so that when they reappeared in subsequent chapters, I would get an “aha!” moment of recognition. I especially liked it when two or more disparate characters from earlier in the book were brought together in some way, often as a result of the aliens’ influence.

Without giving too much away, the visitors ultimately change Earth, and the lives of individual characters for the better, so I finished the book feeling uplifted, however unlikely it feels that things would go that way for real! But each story of hope, where the scarcely-possible happens, keeps a better future within the realms of the imaginable and serves as a message not to give in to the darkness.

Multitude is an entertaining and gratifying first contact novella.