The Mulai
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 16 Jul 2026
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- £6.99
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- Pre-Order
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
An archaeologist travels to a distant planet to spend time among a mysterious community: a people who live in temperature-controlled domes, worship a deity called Dog, and repeat an elliptical phrase from which they draw their name: mulai, the tree comes. The descendants of a long-forgotten space mission, the Mulai have abandoned the social norms that once bound them to Earth. Over centuries of isolation, their language has become more about change than stability, and the ways they eat, write, reproduce, bury their dead and understand gender have all transformed into something almost unrecognizable. As the archaeologist records his attempts to understand their world – a strange negative of our own – questions of translation, meaning-making and the ultimate precarity of civilization come to the fore. Drawing on Borges, Le Guin and Calvino, The Mulai is a mind-bending work of metafiction whose interlocking puzzles resound with Munir Hachemi's singularly playful and eclectic style.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A meditation on the mutability of identity and language, this heady, experimental sci-fi tale from Hachemi (Living Things) is presented as an anthropological study of an extraterrestrial colony cut off from Earth for many years. Earthling Nahum Cordovero, embedding himself among the long-stranded Mulai on their barely hospitable planet, finds they have developed an idiosyncratic culture built around a libertarian manifesto that refutes their original terraforming mission. They still cling, however, to some outmoded routines from their earliest days as a colony (such as dehydrating fresh produce to replicate stored rations). Through journal entries, Cordovero observes how their manifesto has been altered based on revelations from a visionary trek back to their parked starship (called the ‘Temple,' perhaps originally as a joke) and through translations of a surreal terrestrial travelogue they cling to: Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. The Mulai never lose the respect of their observer, even as he learns of their lack of age-related sexual taboos and cannibalistic diets. Among other bizarre flourishes slyly digging into human belief systems, there's also a Mulai prophet, Flukeh, who follows a god called Dog. It's a wild, insightful, and impressive work.
