Downdrift: A Novel

by Johanna Drucker

Narrated by an Archaeon, a 3.8 billion year old species, the oldest on earth, Downdrift is a work of speculative eco-fiction that describes the impact of ecological pressures on animals that are adopting human behaviors, with droll and sometimes alarming, results. The book follows a year of changes and the travels of a housecat and a lion who are inexplicably driven towards a rendezvous. At first, a few isolated harbingers of change appear, but they quickly escalate. Squirrels take up manic knitting, wild hares steal earth-moving equipment, rats go in for disco music and form-fitting metallic leisure-ware. Data-sorting abilities appear among urban populations of birds, and frenzied domestic pets seek celebrity careers. Droll, melancholic, and poetic, the tale is crammed with witty vignettes and poignant reflections on the ways the pressures on the once-natural world are accelerating mutations in behaviors among the animals. Genetic material alters. The differences between animals blur. Odd mutant forms appear-goat-chicks and dog-flies, fish-birds and flying lizards-as if some mad rush is propelling genetic code to propagate across every form of flesh and living matter. As large-scale infrastructure projects make their appearance, each of the animals takes the role appropriate to its disposition--or not. Melancholic rather than apocalyptic, the book is a celebration of species as well as a mourning of the damage done in our time. Throughout, the emergent voice and character of the Archaeon extremophile records events as well as a slow coming to consciousness about its own identity as a hyper-organism.

Genres: Fiction, Animals, Science Fiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2018

About the author

Johanna Drucker, book artist, visual theorist, and cultural critic, is Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Reviews

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aug 24 2018 update: I've found myself thinking a lot about this novel in these last few days while visiting a friend who had a serious accident this summer and needs a lot of help still. Unnecessary things like yard work have slipped...the squirrels have found the stuffing in the lawn swing pillows and are busy borrowing it for themselves...the raccoons are bolder...and I began to think again about the changes that come across the world in this novel, where events unfold in a very interesting mix of glacial slowness and cataclysmic swiftness. Like evolution itself. I would wish for more people to seek this book out and read it.

Original review:

Downdrift is a book that amazed and delighted me. As the novel begins, organisms in every ecological niche on Earth have begun to experience the intrusion of human-like characteristics into their behaviors. This change is presented as the opposite of evolutionary progress: to behave in a human way is instead categorized as “downdrift.” The story is narrated throughout by “Archaeon,” a unicellular organism that belongs to the Kingdom Archaea, a creature that has (through contact with others of its kind) absolute knowledge of events the whole world over, but that has almost no sense of narrative suspense.

Archeaon explains its sense of narrative timing this way:

Our time scales–yours and mine–are as different as our size and complexity. To me, all of the follies of the animal kingdom are the trivial business of a few seconds of my historical memory. Nearly three-quarters of the earth’s existence has passed in my presence, billions of years. Compare that to the mere millions in which primitive arthropods and other organisms came into being. And you? A blip on the screen, a tweak in the evolutionary chain, a phenomenon of rapid acceleration. I will long outlive you and the changes wrought on this world by your machinations.

What forward narrative momentum there is in Downdrift (and it barely registered with me as I read along) hangs on the stories of a lost cat and a peripatetic lion, creatures that re-appear at intervals in the story, and that seem destined to meet at some point. And they do meet. But that meeting seems beside the point when it happens, because the real delight of the novel is not in narrative at all, but in an accumulation of detail, sentence after sentence, that by the end paints a picture of vast ecological disruption.

Another round of salamander antics is taking place in the autumn woods. A big group outing, comprised of extended families and pseudo-families, is underway at the edges of a pool. They have collected food bright as their red bellies or the stark yellow of their spots. The older ones are picking at a few, very few, highly colored bits of fungus and mixing them with all manner of beetles and flies, worms and larvae, spiders and moths and grasshoppers to make a banquet from an ancient recipe. These traditions may also soon be at risk, but not yet.

In a brave choice on the author’s part Homo sapiens barely signifies in this novel at all. At one point coyotes are stealing human babies; at another point Archaeon wryly observes “an outbreak of human shoaling, seepage into the homo sapiens from the minnows and sardines,” an image that carries with it both the idea of humans under stress, as well as the lack of significance that humans and their problems have to this story.

Because this is not humanity’s story. The subtitle to Downdrift is “an eco-fiction,” and the novel fulfills the goals of this relatively new genre in a significant way. The novel is a metaphor for the way we value convenience over preservation; the way we prioritize the artificial over the natural; the way we focus on our daily worries rather than the long-term problem of potential ecological collapse. For those who have the willingness to let the a story flow past at its own pace, the novel offers a unique and thought-provoking take on the world and our place in it.

Downdrift: An Ecofiction by Johanna Drucker (2018: Three Rooms Press)

[Annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Johanna Drucker’s Downdrift is the first (and probably only) book I’ve ever read that was narrated by a microorganism. Funny enough, this isn’t the strangest thing about the novel. This novel imagines a world in which animals, from lions and house cats to mice and badgers to flies, start to behave like humans. They stop hunting each other (except for some hold out species) and start social networking, data-mining, building homes, breeding hybrid, species, running food stands, suing each other, and other activities. Downdrift is very much a thought experiment and, while it probably didn’t have to be as long as it is, still offers plenty to intrigue readers...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss, for review consideration.

[Brie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a weird, weird book. Absolutely bonkers narration (I've never read a book narrated by a microorganism before, and doubt I will again), and took me the first 50 or so pages to really get into it. But dang it, if it wasn't one of the best books I've read so far this year! There's something captivating about the story, even as it is concerning.

[Story · Rating 4 out of 5]

An imaginative tour de force.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 raised to 4. Fascinating satire on evolution and today's ecological and environmental movements. The part-time narrator is a length of genetic code surrounded by cells, called an Archaeon. The work describes what the Archaeon calls "downdrift", the adoption by non-human sentient species of human behavior, traits and even thinking. The "story" is built on the foundation of the meeting of an elderly lion [coming from Africa] and a calico house cat, Callie, from Boston. Drawn together by some sort of feline telecommunication, the journeys of the two towards each other note the various changes in the animal kingdom; most are humorous: squirrels abandon their storing nuts for the winter and knit frenetically, opening a clothing emporium. They also paint billboards after an election is finished. Many species make music, the giraffes for one species blowing into flutes but jerboas controlling passage of air into the holes. In south Africa, several species control the diamond trade from start to finish, each doing what they are best at. We are given examples of extinction [wooly mammoths] and hybridization [cow-ticks]. Each geographical location brings with it a vignette. From time to time the Archaeon interrupts with its ruminations and telling us how it is fighting off diseases: viruses, bacteria, and prion. It warns how downdrift might begin to work the other way: humans developing animal traits and appearance.

Whimsical, fantastical, and highly original. Recommended. Thanks to LibraryThing for an ARC in return for my honest review.

[Yoonha Hwang · Rating 4 out of 5]

Synopsis: The adoption of human behaviors by other species. Humans would call this phenomenon 'uplift.' They are especially eager to notice unusual acts of cross-species compassion and are quick to label this uplift of animal creatures as an advancement of that animal species. From the perspective of an Archaeon, this is seen as downdrift, the seepage of traits across species. An Archaeon is the most ancient creature on Earth - approximately 3.8 billion years old - a living network of individual cells containing genetic code. It is a creature that has existed far longer than any other creature on Earth, including humans, and one that will all other creatures on Earth. Many humans remain oblivious to the existence of this ancient creature. Yet it exists everywhere and anywhere, all at the same time, in the urban landscapes, in the rural fields, seeing, listening, observing. The Archaeon absorbs information and energy, processing it, filtering it, adapting, and replicating. It is aware of the multiple systems and habitats of the Earth and all of its intersections, from the forces at work to shape the conditions of the Earth to the agents inhabiting the effects of those forces. It notes that the social forces of communicative exchanges are at work. The rules of social decorum have changed. The downdrift has begun.

Opinion: At first, it felt odd and almost academic to be reading a book of fiction with nearly non-existent dialogue. However, it was intriguing in the way the tone of the text at times felt like the narration for a nature documentary, only to break this tone with reminders that the narrator is a 3.8 billion-year-old ancient creature with insight and experience exponentially beyond my years. This Archaeon narrator was fascinating to experience, and the sociocultural environmental changes reported by it were even more interesting to read - these reports were simultaneously both amusing and concerning to read in the way that they were beyond imagination or expectation yet presented as plausible possibilities that result from careless pollution and the spread of bacteria. Particularly with the current political climate and biased discrediting of scientific positions on climate change based on misinformed ignorance, this text was especially thought-provoking to read. The structure of the book, distributed into several separate passages for events that occurred in a specific month at distinct locations over the span of a recorded year, was especially successful in making the text more palatable and less intimidating to read while also having the effect of promoting the omniscient and omnipresent quality of the Archaeon.

Appeals: This book is non-linear in the way in which the focus of the text shifts from location to location and from main character to main character - the Archaeon, Callie, and an unnamed lion. While the text generally has a varied pace to match the tone of events, the voice of the Archaeon provides a layer of reserved melancholy as if to remain a third party observer of the species of Earth. It is heavily based on description and reflection, at times highly thought-provoking and almost philosophical - as expected of a 3.8 billion-year-old creature - and almost entirely narration. Due to the observation-based format of the narration and the shifts from location to location, the text often resembles the format and tone of a traveler's tale. Although the story is very narrative-based without much character development of the Archaeon, the observations of Callie, a calico cat, and the unnamed lion, noting the ways in which the two feline's journies parallel and contrast, allow the reader to possibly empathize with the two characters and at the very least focus on a specific narrative journey rather than a chronological jumble of character events.

[eLPy eLPy]

I can't rate this book because for now at least it's going in my DNF pile (well corner?). I got this book through a giveaway in exchange for an honest review and I have given it a serious chance. I'm about 50 some odd pages into it. In the hopes that the pace might pick up or there actually be a real story I kept reading. But no. Maybe it's just not for me but I wanted so badly to love this book, I was so excited to receive it given the blurb. When I actually started reading it however I was beyond disappointed. The story, IMHO, just never got going and there are so many books I want to read that, i feel bad but, this is a waste of time given I don't find this interesting at all.

Mind I like the subject matter a lot, animals taking on human behaviors and characteristics like reading newspapers, taking up sewing and fashion, business and politics, and so much more. It sounds grand right? Plus the author implants real science into the book, clearly she knows a thing or two. And yet it reads to me like zero effort was put into the actual story. It feels more like an underdeveloped concept than a fleshed out story. We follow this house cat that leaves the house and wanders out into the wild traveling far and wide to follow this calling or yearning. Meanwhile there's a lion in Africa doing the same thing except he's heading more into civilization. Naturally we assume then that they are ultimately going to meet. Along they way we hear about all these other animals and their strange human like behaviors. But they're hardly interesting in their entirety. Some are funny, some are clever but they're just blips of story about oh this animal's reading the paper while others gather round to listen and yet it's a goat eating the paper at the same time and they're hearing about all these disturbances happening around the world with the animals. The narrator (and ancient organism from the beginning of time) tells us about the other animals the cat sees there and the weird behaviors they're engaged in. The cat steals some food and moves on. Oh and there's some politics surrounding eating other animals blah blah blah. There's no story. There's no real characters if you ask me. There's nothing there to follow. The cat or lion's journey I suppose but there's nothing interesting to grab hold of. Imagine a movie where we keep passing strange intriguing scenes but that's all we do. Then we get some thoughts from the cat, lion, narrator that don't mean much when we don't know what's happening other than yeah animals are changing. But even their changes get boring. I think this would work better as a picture book because that's what I saw. Again, I wanted to like this book. I didn't like it from the get go but I kept reading because I don't like to quit reading. Instead I picked it up again and again like a text book in high school. I even skipped ahead to the near end of the book to see if maybe it still deserved a chance, after all I signed up to read it and I take that seriously. It did not, it did not appear anymore worth reading later in the book.

So it is with a heavy heart that I DNF this book because it is not worth my time to slog through. I will pass it on and maybe someone else will find it interesting, I hope so because even as a science nerd myself, I couldnt.

[Brett Milam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mebbe. Mebbe not. And with that, my new life mantra has been certified by Johanna Drucker’s 2018 eco-fiction, Downdrift. That’s the only bit of vocabulary the pandas of Bhutan know and utter to a lion on a quest to meet a housecat in the United States. In Drucker’s, admittedly often over-my-head, novel, where “downdrift” is occurring among the animal kingdom; they are taking up the behavioral and collectivist traits of human beings, trying to organize bureaucracies, collect their histories and languages, and end the slaughter of animals among their kind. Along with that, though, are hybridization is occurring among animals, like goat-dogs, cow-ticks, and other abominations that don’t survive the evolutionary cycle (except for the goat-dog, I believe). Drucker’s novel is like George Orwell’s Animal Farm, but with more whimsy, humor, and dare I say, melancholy. Although, both share the fact that pigs remain the great orators able to bend people to their will (perhaps Drucker’s homage to Orwell or not?).

Hyenas are libertarians because of their scheming ways, dogs maintain boundaries with marking, crows enjoy their “murder” moniker, whales are trying to move onto land with no luck, elephants are deeply melancholic, which seeps down to the poor earthworms, jellyfish naturally help with electricity, and none of the animals understand the concept of privacy, given that they’re all naked, have unabashed sex in front of each other, and a sense of “home” doesn’t register. Oh, and the are rather futile efforts to bring parasites, bedbugs, lice, and other gross insects to heed in the new civilizational order. Mice, spiders, fish of all kinds, racoons, squirrels (which dogs try to build a bureaucracy around, hilariously), foxes, chickens, sloths, geese, ostriches, and more all have roles within this society, sometimes owing to what would seem their obvious and natural talents. Bats have disputes with other animals over hygiene, and owls are the language-keepers and (literally) above the fray of it all. Dogs are still loyal to humans, who I’m not sure of their place in this emerging downdrift-led ecosystem. There’s also a blue-eyed social contagion spreading among the animals: narcissism, with some ending up viral and famous on talk shows. After all, if the non-human animals get the “downdrift” of civilization from humans, then they get the negatives, too. It’s an interesting through from Drucker, too, because social contagion is a real thing, and spreads without cross-blood contamination, air, bacteria, viruses, etc. It’s a byproduct of socializing.

I also found it amusing that the hogs, for example, fomented their own revolution and formed their own Free State of Hogs (or some such) in Florida, and obviously, the other animals are trying to secure rights, equalities, and securities, but also, the subtext is that they all are going by names given to them by humans! I found that amusing. One cannot be liberated from all of their chains.

Two additional points of amusement to me: Killing is largely outlawed, although of course there are coyotes, gators, and such who don’t obey such laws, and as the lion notes, who would stop him if he wanted to eat warm flesh? But they still eat plants! I’m sure the plant life would have something to say about this new order! Also, I’m shocked octopuses didn’t make the cut! To me, primates aside (who are treated in amusing fashion by Drucker, largely showing their butts in rude gestures to other animals), octopuses have to be considered one of the smartest non-human animals on the planet. I would have loved to see how Drucker handled them. Nonetheless.

As I previously mentioned, the reason we come into contact with all of these animals is that Callie, the housecat from Boston, feels some sort of feline synergy with an old lion (who seems like a lion of the Before-Downdrift period) in Africa, and they’re both on a quest to meet each other. Toward the end of the book, the lion is caged by humans for no discernible reason other than that’s what humans do to other animals. Still, Callie finds him and liberates him. And darn if I didn’t feel some emotion at them finally meeting after a year of journeying toward each other!

All the while, the book is narrated by an Archaeon, a 3.8 billion-year-old species, the oldest on earth, and what I think is a microorganism that exists everywhere on Earth and in any conditions on Earth, seemingly the most inhospitable for other lifeforms. The Archeaon’s point and “character” arc is that it will survive because it has always survived, but because of the Downdrift, it’s developing a sense of self and placement within the wider ecosystem and that troubles and terrifies it, by my reading. Which, I think is also the overall point of the book: Everything is connected, everything has “downdrifts” on everything else, from the biggest mammals to the smallest of insects, the wisest and the stupidest (poor penguins get that billing, here).

Like I said, the book is a bit over my head, to say the least. For example, there are literally animals and words I didn’t recognize, but that’s okay because I still weirdly found Drucker’s book compelling (I did largely read it on in one day), even though it’s unlike anything I’ve ever read. Not to turn my ignorance into a positive (although ignorance is a positive in that, of course we don’t know everything!), but I think that’s also the point of Drucker’s novel; we are so ignorant and unattuned to the rest of the animal kingdom, often to our and their peril, and it’s a point Drucker’s alludes to often.

That said, I’m not sure I can even recommend Downdrift to someone unless they are really into biology, ecology, climate, and so forth. Because otherwise, as a work of fiction, I’m not sure it would resonate with more readers. In other words, it doesn’t read like, here’s Act One, Act Two, and Act Three, despite there being a journey at the heart of the story, propelling the “action” (observances) forward.

But if any of what I’ve described sounds like your kind of book, then give Drucker’s eco-fiction a whirl! Just watch out for those cursing, smoking crows.

[Sian Lile-Pastore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a strange, almost plotless book that talks - kind of cutely - about animals taking on human characteristics and activities (otherwise known as the down drift). Charming descriptions of squirrels knitting, pandas having bamboo breath, crows smoking, dogs driving etc etc, but also with an underlying sadness and commentary on climate change and humans destroying the world.

the super vague plot is of a cat and a lion travelling around the world observing other animals and eventually meeting - I found parts towards the end profound, sad and touching. it made me cry.

while I ended up loving this, it did take a while to get into and it definitely worked best reading big chunks at a time, that way the writing became almost dreamlike and hypnotic.

[Madison · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was truthfully very excited to read this book. It caught my attention on the "new books" shelf at the library and the premise was too interesting for me to pass up - I mean, a book from the perspective of a 3.8 million year old Archean about the genetic seepage of human social qualities into the animal kingdom? Of course I'm gonna pick it up. However, I think a lot of it unfortunately went over my head. There were definitely funny moments, usually quick witty bits that made me appreciate Drucker's genius. The moments that lost me included the Archaean's existential ramblings and philosophical analyses of the "downdrift."

This book wasn't particularly plot or character driven, and really just advanced with the passing of time. While I can appreciate that sometimes, in combination with the confusing philosophical word vomit it just caused more confusion for me. I really had to motivate myself to finish this book (and I'm glad I did) but I think the anti-climactic absence of a traditional ending (the result of the absence of a traditional plot) was pretty disappointing to me. I definitely understand the praise and appreciation for this book, it just definitely isn't the type of writing that I digest easily.

[Jennifer Collins · Rating 2 out of 5]

For the first thirty pages or so, I couldn't get enough of this book--I loved the focus, the characters, the style, the writing, everything. And then, at some point... I realized it was all hitting the same note, and I needed more.

There's no doubt that Drucker's writing is clever and lovely, and I kind of adored the few characters she focused in on, but in large part, this novel felt more like an experiment than a cohesive story. There just wasn't much of a plot, and what plot there was felt like something which had been overlayed onto the ideas in order to simply be able to Say there was a plot running through. And simple as that plot was, it still felt incredibly forced and a little unclear (in reason/motivation).

Animal lovers might still enjoy this work, and get a kick out of the cleverer moments while enjoying the author's clear love of animals and nature. Certainly, I'd give another of her books a try to see if it really was just an experiment that overtook a story here. But, when it comes right down to it, this isn't a book I can recommend to any reader but animal lovers who'd just perhaps want to wander through it.

For me, there just wasn't enough story here.

[Bailey Steele · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to love this book so much - reading from the viewpoint of an archaic amoeba on how the “down drift” is effecting all life was intriguing. All of a sudden, animals have bylaws, rules, codes to live by. They transform into communicative machines and take on humanistic behavior that go against their animal instincts.

I found the mini stories witty and creative - after a couple. To have the whole book take on a rambling narration with no clear plot and no end was honestly exhausting. The book could have easily been cut down by at least half and I think the reader would’ve gotten the gist. The last 30 pages was it’s saving grace from a 2.5 star rating to a 3. I thought it was very insightful and a good look into what’s next in store for civilization.

[Geoffrey Skinner · Rating 2 out of 5]

The satirical episodes that comprise this story began to sound all the same soon after the book began. I ended up skipping through most of it.

[Wendy Lu · Rating 5 out of 5]

so urgent and funny

[Anna Richey · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book takes place in the near-future, when non-human animals are mysteriously adopting human traits (the "downdrift") and the mutual psychic desire of a housecat in Boston and a lion in Africa to meet. On their journeys they pass many comical scenes of animals acting human, though the tone of the overall book is somber. Not written for climate-change deniers!

The comic scenes were a little too silly for my taste, and the somberness a little too intense for me to enjoy.