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🇬🇷 Greece /Culture & Society

If We Rebuilt the World

From Kathimerini · () Greek

Translated from Greek and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

In-depth Named sources Context piece
  • The review examines Munir Atzemi’s science-fiction novel “The Tree Is Coming,” centered on humans who have lost contact with their past and created a new society on a distant planet.
  • The Mulai live under unusual social rules: they form triads rather than couples, have no leaders or private property, and continually reshape their language and stories.
  • The review identifies the book’s changing language as its most compelling idea and presents the novel as a philosophical exercise in imagining society from scratch.

What would happen if humanity woke up one morning having forgotten everything it knew about how the world worked? Would it rebuild the same world, something similar, or something entirely different?

Those questions run through Munir Atzemi’s “The Tree Is Coming,” a strange, engaging work that sits somewhere between a novel and an exercise in thought. The Spanish author places the story in the diary of an Archaeologist, an emissary from Earth sent to a distant planet. There, inside a dome, live the Mulai, descendants of a forgotten space expedition.

Over the years, the Mulai have lost contact with their past and created a society governed by their own rules. They do not form couples, but triads. They follow unusual sexual customs and burial rites. They have no leader or head of state, and no private property. They love listening to stories, then developing and distorting them, just as they continually change their language.

The goal of the Mulai language is language itself. There is no other goal. It serves only to speak.

· Munir AtzemiThe author explains the purpose of the Mulai language in an interview with Spain’s El Salto.

That constant movement of language is the book’s most striking idea. “The goal of the Mulai language is language itself. There is no other goal. It serves only to speak,” Atzemi said in an interview with Spain’s El Salto. “Language is an excuse for itself.”

The review compares the book, in its far more philosophical form, with “Avatar,” Philip Pullman’s “The Amber Spyglass,” Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” Borges, linguistic theories and Ursula K. Le Guin. Yet its central distinction is that the society under examination is not alien. It is human, beginning almost from nothing and choosing a way of life very different from ours. The book is published in Greek by Antipodes, translated by Luis Eduardo Torres and Sotiris Paraschas.

Language is an excuse for itself.

· Munir AtzemiAtzemi’s follow-up comment in the El Salto interview captures the novel’s central idea about language.
About this summary

Originally published by Kathimerini in Greek. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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