Notes on "The Oneiromantic Sheep"

Image: "Sheep." Nicolaes Pietersz Berchem. National Gallery of Art. Public Domain.

My new story, “The Oneiromantic Sheep,” is out in the June issue of Radon Journal!

The story takes place in the far future on a colony planet of Earth. An aging shepherd and his apprentice granddaughter escort a flock of sheep to an annual gathering of villages. Solar storms have destroyed electronic technology, but the planet hosts an extra-dimensional terraformer (called the ‘godplanet’ by natives) devised long ago by sophisticated machines back on Earth. After it lost contact with Earth, the terraformer acted to intensify the interdependence of living things, including humans. The antagonist is a man who does not respect that principle.

Radon publishes science fiction and work involving anarchism. I didn’t start meaning to write an anarchist story. I just forgot to conceive of any central government. The writer’s brain works at different levels of consciousness; I’d guess the forgetting was purposeful. After drafting this story, I read The Dawn of Everything by ‘anarchist anthropologist’ David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow, in which they reassess every common assumption about 40,000 years of human society and inequality. Comparatively little of that history involves states. Because of my anthropology background, I guess I find it easy to imagine complex social institutions and economies and moral codes without a state.

Unlike humans and livestock or even humans/pets, whose are of property and owner, relations between my sheep and human protagonists are grounded in voluntary association and mutual aid. Technology helps overcome obstacles of neurology and language as when the shepherd uses a modified hallucinogenic plant to take conferences with the sheep in dreams.

My stories usually come from two places: The ‘what-ifs?’ (what if domesticated species were partners?) and the academic literature I read (when I can). A few years back when I taught in a creative arts therapy program, I became interested in multispecies relations, which conceives of humans and non-human interaction in a way that is not human centered. Ethnographic research on dogs and dog training shaped my story well before I wrote it.

I wondered: What if sheep and humans also had a more direct way to know each other despite their different biologies? So my shepherd uses mind-enhancing drugs but also falls back on bodily movements, tone of voice and relationships, all of which exist in the real-world repertoires of people who work with non-human animals.

So anyway, if you think you might enjoy a story involving pastoralism, village life, genetic engineering, the nature of sentience, a bit of space opera, artificial intelligence, and of course, ovines, check out “The Oneiromantic Sheep.”