Introduction

Even among readers of The Locked Tomb series, Tamsyn Muir’s debut tetralogy notoriously resists description. The first novel bears on its cover a Charles Stross quotation proclaiming that within it ‘lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!’ (Muir 2019). Muir herself describes the second novel as ‘over five hundred pages of God eating biscuits’ (@tazmuir 2020). Aesthetically as well the series runs the gamut, as Muir ‘thinks of John 3:16 the same way [she] thinks about none pizza with left beef’ (Grady 2021).¹ On its most fundamental level, The Locked Tomb is a space opera speculative fiction series about readers who wield the magic of multimodal media literacy. In a distant future, the remaining humanoids inhabit nine planets, each governed by a House united under the rule of an immortal emperor, and each responsible for safeguarding a specific medium. These range from architectural ruins and paper archives to confessions, sacred relics, and trauma as media.² Representatives of each House leverage expert, specialized knowledge of their respective medium as they compete for sainthood through a series of trials designed to test their readerly dexterity. As the series progresses, characters realize that the ultimate manifestation of media literacy requires a level of multimodal omnicompetence which they achieve by physically combining into composite beings. As they do so, they reveal the kinship their ultimate vehicle bears to another novel in which eclectic and clandestine reading practices consummate in a preternaturally gifted reader: Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein.

In its original form, Frankenstein centers on experiences of reading and storytelling which, as I will demonstrate, prefigure Muir’s digital sensibilities. Whether conveying the philosophies of life that haunt both Frankenstein and the Creature or their individual desires, expectations, and know-how, Shelley depicts characters mediated through their putative readings of such authors as John Milton and Cornelius Agrippa. As these and other characters explain their experiences both in person and through their letters, readers encounter a story that depends fundamentally on layers of reinterpretation facilitating the suspension of disbelief. Readers can dismiss elements they find too preposterous as exaggerations made by Frankenstein to Walton, to his sister Margaret, or to us. One of Frankenstein’s initial readers, Walter Scott, explains that due to the story’s indirect framing and genre, ‘the probable is far from being laid out of sight’ in the novel, ‘even amid the wildest freaks of imagination’ (1818: 614). Still, while nineteenth century readers could overlook the supernatural elements, the Creature’s prowess as a reader strained their credulity; ‘the self-education of the monster’ remains even for Scott ‘improbable and overstrained’ (1818: 619). Voicing his disbelief that the Creature ‘should have become acquainted with Werter, with Plutarch’s Lives, and with Paradise Lost, by listening through a hole in a wall,’ Scott critiques Shelley’s intertextual archive by drawing on his own experiences as a reader to imagine what body of works could have inspired ‘the train of ideas followed by the author of Frankenstein’ (1818: 619). In doing so, he demonstrates how references to media in novels facilitate participatory readings, then as now.

Following Paul de Man (1979) who famously demonstrated how authors theorize media through fictional depictions of media consumption, this essay contends that Muir modernizes in various ways the symbolic functions of media intrinsic to Frankenstein. Specifically, Muir illustrates the communal properties of reading, by which the reader superimposes their consciousness over those of author and characters, through depictions of combinational, hybrid readers and alternative scenarios. In so doing, Muir challenges readers to play an active role in their digital media cultures, to see and then renegotiate authorial intent and biases, and to value unrealized potential; she invites readers to choose their own bibliographic encounters, providing more possibilities than any one reader is likely to pursue. Moreover, by supplementing the remediation of the masterful, hybrid reader by Shelley’s monster on the fringes of society with that of her own venerated saints, Muir portrays literacy as the only true form of immortality and demonstrates how memory and recognition can preserve cultural experiences through chains of remediation.

To tease these theorizations from their narratives, this essay first considers the ways in which The Locked Tomb’s structures more closely resemble classical theater and video games than novels. Staged as a series of sets, The Locked Tomb borrows from theater an architecture that facilitates activity behind the scenes, while its video game aspect underscores moments of choice readers make in their interpretive practices (Tor Presents 2022). This dual structuration provides fertile sites for counterfactual imaginings, stories that ‘pertain to, or express, what has not in fact happened, but might, could, or would, in different conditions’ (OED).³ Meanwhile, it encourages a participatory mode of reading that invites readers to pursue literary side quests to gain readerly experience. Intertextual references represent side quests for Muir in such media assemblages as her mad scientist John Gaius’s evocation of the Galatea myth when assembling his creature (Muir 2022: 409). Assembled creatures, and specifically assembled creatures endowed with magical reading abilities, provide both Shelley and Muir with powerful vehicles for their allegories of reading; allegories that in Muir’s case theorize leading digital preservation methodologies. By inhabiting her story world with traumatized and fragmentary characters doomed to spend eternity nearly alone, Muir renders the preservation of memories, identities, and physical ephemera as paramount.

This essay considers Muir’s and Shelley’s referential styles as emblematic of the collaborative ethos central to fanfiction, which I understand broadly to include works of biblical fiction such as Paradise Lost and The Divine Comedy (the latter of which represents a 14^th century example of the self-insert genre). Not only do Muir and Shelley engage in a collaborative ethos through the use of metatextual archives within their novels, they also dramatize this hybridity by depicting the readers of fanfiction and other media as likewise compositional in nature. While Scott both contextualized and demonstrated Frankenstein’s collaborative aspect by imagining a counterfactual library, contemporary readers interpret complex mediascapes through modern frames of reference (1818: 619). In order to analyze the way Muir and Shelley mobilize chaotic information systems, I anachronistically describe this ethos of collaboration as a Tumblr aesthetic–a phrase which encapsulates the phenomenon with considerably more specificity than was available in the early nineteenth-century. As a digital microecology, Tumblr presents a randomly ordered procession of multimodal artifacts—including, for example memes, fanfiction, and literary quotations—that constitute a media chaos which users alternately tame and exacerbate through highly referential tagging practices. The Tumblr aesthetic, then, contains elements of what one might term fanfiction and meme aesthetics, while emphasizing the dialogic relationships between media artifacts and readers; it attends to readerly participation in novel contexts and helps explain Muir’s use of unexpected encounters. Like card catalogs once did, works in the Tumblr aesthetic provide a discoverability technology connecting readers and media ‘with the same conversational shorthand’ which memes and fanfiction use to generate a ‘unique mode of communication and, most importantly, the key to recognizing other people like you’ (Zutter 2021). The Tumblr aesthetic most departs from previous discoverability technologies in terms of predictability, its seemingly random nature contrasting with the reassuring organizational competency that technologies like card catalogs present.

Counterfactuals and Video Games

Recognizing counterfactual fictions as powerful sites of media theorization, Muir teaches her readers that, even in the digital age, other media forms not only persist alongside digital media, but also inform its construction. As literary historians such as Catherine Gallagher have recently begun to detail, fictionality always entails some measure of counterfactual narration, and many fictional genres explore ‘what if’ scenarios, imagining alternative realities that elide historical events or retelling familiar tales to dramatic effect.⁴ By attending to alternative realities, work in narratology reveals the ways these narratives contain hidden possibilities, question fate, and highlight the fragility of the worlds we think we know.⁵ We see counterfactuality at work in Muir when she structures her novels like video games, with multiple playthroughs offering parallel possible outcomes, each in some way counter to the others. Moreover, Muir gestures toward a traditional legacy for counterfactuality when she frames her narratives as multiple dramas that unfold, like Greek tragedies, from parodoi that provide stable initial situations for the chorus. Each book begins with an incomplete dramatis personae that recalls a player character selection screen; later in the novels, readers encounter additional surprise characters, as well as recurring characters represented in different genres, outfits, or skins. One character, for example, appears in the first novel’s dramatis personae as ‘Coronabeth Tridentarious, heir to the house of the third, crown princess of Ida’, and again in the third novel’s dramatis personae as ‘Blood of Eden: Crown Him with Many Crowns’ (Muir 2019: 8; Muir 2022: 7). This leeway to present characters in ways designed to appeal to readers while also facilitating the plot allows an ancient rogue saint to infiltrate the narrative by simply assuming a name listed on the dramatis personae as her alias. Cytherea, incognito as ‘Dulcinea Septimus, heir to the House of the seventh, duchess of Rhodes’ spends her time draped elegantly across furniture, reading romance novels (Muir 2019: 9). ‘Dulcinea,’ Muir explains in the paratext, ‘is the famously illusory persona assigned to the prostitute Aldonza in Don Quixote: a case of a woman you want to exist, but who really doesn’t’ (Muir 2019: 473). When Cytherea appears as such a quixotic readerly creation—and when she perishes in a final boss fight that concludes the novel—she personifies the kind of counterfactual remediation in which Muir revels, rendered in the temporality of an infinitely repeatable game.

Named for the side doors through which the chorus makes its entrance, in classical tragedies the parodos, or first chorus song, serves as a framing narrative, orienting readers by informing them about, for example, the Trojan war (as in the case of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon). Simultaneously a metafiction device and a literal passageway, the parodos exists as a liminal space within a narrative. By framing Harrow the Ninth around a series of parodoi, Muir not only demarcates the limits of her narrator’s perception, by alluding to the possibility of a backstage world, but also configures theoretical architecture by which figures can enter and exit the main narrative, be they ghostly chorus members or secret, unlockable characters. In these moments of narrative destabilization when the parodos doors open, an ominous and overpowered secret character enters with the ghostly chorus of people murdered previously in the series. Likely inspired by Sigourney Weaver’s character Ripley (Alien 1979), this figure most often appears wearing a spacesuit and a bandolier full of hand-crafted, god-killing alien bullets. As readers progress through the novel, she becomes increasingly active, beginning as a menacing presence ‘incognizant’ in a ‘crystal coffin,’ and progressing to a violent apparition with a ‘huge two-bore gun’ (Muir 2020: 112, 414, 313). Although Muir scatters clues throughout the novels hinting at this ‘Sleeper’s’ identity, she sets up the boss fight for readers who have not yet unlocked the level. ‘The Sleeper was not, in the end, of any great height or breadth,’ Muir explains, ‘and the voice that had emerged … was not inhuman… it was a woman’s voice’ (Muir 2020: 422).

Readers attentive to messages Harrow hallucinated on fragments of paper and ancient white boards might already know all this and more. By attending to the distinction between ‘our civilization … [and] yours,’ readers can infer that the Sleeper, ironically named Commander Wake, hails from somewhere beyond the nine Houses (Muir 2020: 403). Hell-bent on eradicating all traces of the God-Emperor and his Houses, Wake promises to ‘burn and burn and burn and burn and burn until there is no trace of you left’ (Muir 2020: 205). Finally, she decides to bear John Gaius’ child as an ultimate act of revenge and blasphemy: ‘The eggs you gave me all died and you lied to me so I did the implantation myself’ (Muir 2020: 134). By demonstrating the important role seemingly irrelevant fragments of counterfactual media could play in one’s reading experience—and by locating this demonstration within a recognizably ludic context—Muir assures us that a secret exists and can be unlocked with experience gained through readerly quests signaled within the novel by inset archives such as these imagined messages.

Muir’s formal accomplishment here recalls how Mary Shelley’s references to Paradise Lost function within Frankenstein. Both narratives depend on ways a counterfactual reader’s main quests map together with side quests performed by actual readers. Before writing the Locked Tomb series, Muir cut her teeth on short stories that self-consciously find a model in Mary Shelley’s work. These stories use the most recognizable genres of counterfactual fiction: those of ambiguously alternative space-time, in ‘The House that Made the Sixteen Loops of Time’ (2010) and counterfactual history, in ‘Chew’ (2013), a World War II zombie story about a boy who reanimates a corpse through the power of Juicy Fruit chewing gum. This latter story dramatizes ‘the idea,’ Muir explains in an interview, ‘of post-war rebuilding connecting to rebuilding the body of the zombie; a Frankenstein who once rebuilt doesn’t act as planned or desired’ (Kelley 2013). While these early works flirt with counterfactuality mainly as a literary device, Muir returns to Frankenstein years later on a thematic level, when she elaborates a complex, counterfactual theorization of media practices mediated through allegories of reading reminiscent of those central to Shelley’s novel.

In Frankenstein, Shelley outlines a counterfactual life trajectory for Victor Frankenstein, one that could have been possible had he simply identified with a different, less eccentric author. Recalling a time when his father described ‘my favorite Agrippa,’ his beloved renaissance author, as ‘sad trash,’ Victor surveys a path not taken, imagining what could have been:

If, instead of this remark, my father had taken the pains to explain to me, that the principles of Agrippa had been entirely exploded, and that a modern system of science had been introduced, which possessed much greater powers than the ancient … under such circumstances, I should certainly have thrown Agrippa aside, and … should probably have applied myself to the more rational theory of chemistry. … It is even possible, that the train of my ideas would never have received the fatal impulse that led to my ruin. (Shelley 1818: 24, emphasis added).

Instead of complying with his father’s rational, normative tastes, Victor’s ‘first care’ was to ‘read and study the wild fancies’ contained in ‘treasures known to few beside myself’ (Shelley 1818: 24-25). He shared ‘these secret stories of knowledge’ only ‘under a promise of strict secrecy’ (Shelley 1818: 25). Thus, Victor’s encounter with Cornelius Agrippa occasions the creation, not only of the creature, but also of a counterfactual figure who demands readerly speculation as to how the story might differ had the actual characters pursued different bibliographic quests. Such figures remind us of the power reading quests have over personal narratives and encourages us to pursue our own side quests to explore and learn from the referential materials encoded in novels such as Frankenstein and those comprising The Locked Tomb series.

To better demonstrate how Muir sets readers to interpreting counterfactual situations as a literary game, let us examine a specific passage about Frankenstein from The Locked Tomb. Situated in conversation with Shelley, Muir’s fiction asks the question: what if, instead of a tortured, reclusive creator, Victor Frankenstein was a fraud who wanted to be God? Chronologically, her story begins ten thousand years before the competition for the ultimate prize in media literacy discussed previously. In roughly the year 2020, a personification of the soul of the Earth allows John Gaius to access the power of life and death to heal climate related damage. Unfortunately, the Earth places her faith in an egomaniacal chancer. When Gaius runs out of research funding, he ‘spends hours and hours a day playing Jesus’ by healing the sick, but a nun reminds him that attention ‘was Christ’s whole problem!’ (Muir 2022: 98, 190). Unwilling to maintain a low profile, Gaius next becomes a YouTuber, where everyone mistakes his corpse-reanimation streams for deep fakes. Eventually, he caves: if ‘they want to call us a cult, let’s be a cult. It only takes a little bit of eyeliner and a couple of capes’ (Muir 2022: 281). Gaius decides the only way to establish himself as god—or, as he likes to see it, save the planet—is to trigger a nuclear extinction event, so he can resurrect select people after removing their memories. But one soul remains to bear witness in John’s new dominion: the Earth herself. He accordingly removes the Earth’s spirit from the planet and creates, for her prison, the mockery of a humanoid body:

He said, From my blood and bone and vomit I conjured up a beautiful labyrinth to house you in. I was terrified you’d find some way to escape before I was done. I made you look like a Christmas tree fairy … I made you look like a Renaissance angel … I made you Adam and Eve … Galatea. Barbie. Frankenstein’s monster with long yellow hair.

He said, As the world went up … I became God. (Muir 2022: 409)

Gaius eventually immures this monstrosity, the immortal embodiment of both his crime and his shame, in the titular locked Tomb, where she is ‘meant to pass into darkness’ and be lost to time (Muir 2019: 320).

Muir’s aesthetic of excess in such passages reveals a counterfactual aspect of the reading experience, for it leads us to imagine a reader who follows these ambiguous signifiers more intuitively than we do ourselves. Such a (perhaps entirely fictional) reader knows in their bones the definitive relationship between these seven contradicting figures (fairy, angel, Adam, Eve, Galatea, Barbie, monster) and the seven equally distinct media (tinsel, paint, clay, rib, ivory, plastic, cadavers) of which they consist. This conjectural reader encounters phrases like ‘Renaissance angel’ and recalls past knowledge—saved memory, if you will—of, for instance, Raphael’s putti in ‘The Sistine Madonna,’ and can connect this memory with the other memories elicited by this assemblage. In such passages, for the rest of us (for readers in our world rather than some possible world where such erudition might be expected) Muir emerges as a quest giver, inviting us to pursue unfamiliar references—to combine them with our memories of familiar references—and return to her novel once we have, to borrow a term from game parlance, ‘leveled up.’ The myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, for example, presents a third creation story that helps tie together Muir’s odd assemblage while highlighting the undertones of gendered violence. A sculptor from Cypress, Pygmalion decides humanness represents not only a grievous, but a wholly insurmountable flaw in women. Accordingly, he sculpts for himself, the perfect ‘simulated body’ (simulati corporis) with which he falls in love (Salzman-Mitchel 2008: 301). Matters escalate when, at the next festival for Venus, Pygmalion prays for the goddess of love to breathe life into his ‘statue-bride,’ now known as Galatea. The oil painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme (Figure 1) depicts the moment when Pygmalion, having returned from the festival, triggers the metamorphosis with a kiss. Although we never learn if Galatea thinks, or speaks, or expresses herself in any way, she is at least human enough to bear children.

Figure 1

‘Pygmalion and Galatea’ by Jean-Léon Gérôme, c. 1890. This painting is in the public domain. https://web.archive.org/web/20250217144611/https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436483.

At this point, readers must, once again, choose their own adventure. We might shift our attention from the kernel of Gérôme’s painting, the transformation, to the various satellites in Pygmalion’s workshop, such as Athena’s shield, and thence embark on a new side quest in pursuit of Medusa myths. Perhaps we have had enough of both Pygmalion and John Gaius, and embark on a new activity altogether. Or, we might eagerly return to Muir so we can review the passage in light of this contextualization, and in doing so, log our progress in the readerly game. Engaging once again with Muir’s above assemblage—‘Christmas tree fairy … Renaissance angel … Adam and Eve … Galatea. Barbie. Frankenstein’s monster with long yellow hair’—we can now see some ways in which the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea might control its chaos, concerning as that myth does a figurine, a putto, a creation story, an intentionally unattainable standard of femininity, and monomania rivaling that of Victor Frankenstein. More to the point, the problematic question of Galatea’s capacity for consent reminds us that the conquest Muir narrates is ultimately the entrapment and exploitation of the Earth. Each new layer of understanding makes Gaius feel less trustworthy, and we remember the narrative voice distancing itself from Gaius’ testimony by repeating the phrase ‘he said’ (Muir 2022: 409).

These books, as we have been supposing, articulate interplay with actual readers—with their actual skills, knowledge, and experience—and with counterfactual readers who embody alternative, virtual skill sets. For an allegory of Muir’s concept of a group of counterfactual readers, we need only return to her representation of Gaius’ friend circle, the people he resurrects for their future role as all-powerful saints, or as Muir terms them, ‘Lyctors.’ Muir repeatedly lists these characters in terms of the perspectives they would bring to a text: ‘Two scientists and an engineer and a nun and a lawyer and a banker and a cop and an artist … that’s a cop and six different kinds of nerd’ (Muir 2022: 191). Gaius chooses these characters because ‘they were my friends and they loved me … and most of them had multiple tertiary degrees.’ Yet refusing both to name and to disambiguate them, he elides ‘my scientists, my engineer, my detective, my lawyer, my artist, my nun, my hedge fund manager … my diehards’ into the fantasy of a singular readership assembled from, and disassembled into, diverse parts (Muir 2022: 271, 220).

Combinational Readers and Digital Preservation

Thanks to countless visual adaptations, the word ‘Frankenstein’ evokes images of attachment technologies—from unnecessarily coarse, high-contrast facial stitches to protruding neck bolts—emphasizing the Creature’s status as an artificial hybrid, consisting of materials scavenged from ‘charnel houses, … the dissecting room and the slaughter-house’ (Shelley 1818: 36). While the ‘infinite pain and cares’ Dr. Frankenstein took to ‘select [the Creature’s] features as beautiful. Beautiful!’ did not pay off, he nevertheless, inadvertently assembled from human and non-human remains, a Creature with supernatural reading abilities (Shelley 1818: 38). When the Creature flees Frankenstein’s rooms, he hides in a pigsty owned by a family engaged in teaching French. Eavesdropping on these lessons from his place of concealment, the Creature first realizes that ‘people possessed a method of communicating… by articulate sounds,’ and, in a matter of months ‘comprehended and could imitate almost every word that was spoken’ (Shelley 1818: 80-81, 93). Before his first birthday, the Creature exhibits a deep and nuanced understanding of his favorite books: Paradise Lost, Plutach’s Lives, and The Sorrows of Werter.

Shelley’s creature himself operates within a readerly imaginary to which Shelley’s readers can juxtapose counterfactual alternative narratives in ways that anticipate the energies of future fanfiction. Why would the Creature, who ‘learns the use of language,’ as Scott observes, ‘much more successfully than Caliban, though the latter had a conjurer as his tutor,’ demand a wife from Victor, instead of crafting one for himself? (1818: 617). Instead of yielding to external classifications as a monster, the Creature might have maintained his identity as a scholar, read Agrippa, and thus replicated his genetic code, not biologically, but rather in the data preservation sense of storing multiple copies of the same information in different locations or, in this case, different embodiments. Yet if, within Shelley’s story world, the written word mediates the power of creation, granting this ultimate power not to gods, but to readers, then perhaps an identity mediated exclusively through Milton’s Adam condemns the Creature to a dependency on his maker, while the identity readers bestow on the Creature make possible his multifarious afterlives. Where Shelley’s re-animator merely behaved as a god, Muir’s re-animator declared himself one. When Gaius reincarnates his friends, he once again follows Frankenstein who ‘tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay’; Gaius divides them into pairs and burns the souls of one to ignite and power magical abilities in the other (Shelley 1818: 36). This becomes known as the Lyctorhood process which prepares these people for eternal servitude as saints or ‘Lyctors as in “lych,” but also as in Lictor, the [Roman] Emperor’s guards’ (Muir 2019: 475). Additionally, ‘Lyctor’ can be taken as a portmanteau word combining the churchyard ‘lychgate’ with ‘lector,’ the Latin word for reader; an interpretation that renders Muir’s Lyctors as supernatural readers poised between life and death.⁶ Like Shelley’s Creature, we must consider the Lyctors as similarly composite beings with supernatural reading abilities. ‘As a Lyctor,’ Muir explains, ‘you could read a human body’s thanergy [death force] and thalergy [life force] like a book—but a picture book with helpful arrows pointing at places of interest’ (Muir 2020: 177). Although Gaius describes Lyctorhood as ‘the indelible sin,’ he nevertheless demands the procedure be carried out exactly as he specified; as something predatory that damns and consumes one of the souls. I am most interested in the readerly characters who variously manage blasphemous combinational unions outside of traditional Lychtorhood (Muir 2020: 43). In what follows, I explore Muir’s novels as sites of digital preservation by focusing on three pairs of rebellious characters who preserve (rather than destroy) within their corpus, the ephemera of their cavalier’s life and identity.

Muir explicitly connects her referential aesthetics to preservations of the digital, hoping her series will come to represent a ‘snapshot’ of internet culture (Three Crows 2020). ‘The novel will date,’ Muir explains while discussing her use of memes in the series, ‘it will date horribly; then it will at some point go all the way around to “What a wonderful period piece,” unless we have all died due to climate change’ (Three Crows 2020). Theorizing how the digital might survive such a crisis, Muir allegorizes the three leading techniques of digital preservation: replication, migration, and emulation. Specifically, I read Gideon/Harrow as representing a version of digital ‘replication,’ in which many copies of the same file (contemporary content encapsulated in a contemporary medium) exist in multiple places as failsafes; Paul, a composite character who combines the archivists Palamedes and Camilla, as representing the digital preservation technique of ‘migration,’ which preserves content by remediating it in a new, often updated medium; and finally, Pyrrha Dve, a cavalier who spent thousands of years dormant inside a now-dead Lyctor, as representing ‘emulation,’ where outdated content remains encoded within an outdated medium, but which becomes newly re-accessible through preservation technology.

When Gaius needs to replenish his supply of Lyctors, he invites the necromantic scions of each House and their ‘cavalier primaries’ to compete in seemingly innocent academic trails without divulging the end goal or requisite body count. The ‘psychometrical challenge’ for example, requires contestants to divine a life story from a single molar, while a trial located in the ‘Transference/Winnowing Datacenter’ demands the team ‘overlay’ their consciousness, to emulate the process of reading by relaying the cavalier’s sensory perceptions in the ‘Imaging’ room, to the necromancer’s cognition processes occurring in the ‘Response’ room (Muir 2019: 157, 180, 365). ‘Winnowing,’ Harrow exclaims when she figures out this latter test, ‘it wants the wheat from among the chaff–or the signal from the noise’ (Muir 2019: 163). Unfortunately, these trials quickly devolve into chaos; the novel culminates in a desperate battle and Harrow’s resulting sainthood which, as she recalls later, ‘was not my intention, at the end’ (Muir 2020: 382). Unable to save Gideon in the moment, Harrow compartmentalizes her brain, ‘backing up,’ as it were, Gideon’s soul in various locations concealed from the ravages of Lyctorhood by false memories; a procedure which, as I will explain, positions much of Harrow the Ninth as counterfactual narration.

Muir also details the negative effects of digital replication: the memory issues that can result from such redundancies. Each time Harrow falls unconscious in the second novel, she and by extension, the reader, watch the aforementioned ghost chorus perform fractured and falsified memories on ‘a stage’ (Muir 2020: 384). Like digital media, Muir treats Gideon’s soul as a material that may be ‘potentially immortal, but it may also be ephemeral;’ something that ‘will not disappear completely if a library burns’, with ink that ‘will not fade over time’ but is nevertheless vulnerable to inevitable change (Abiteboul 2018: 228). Harrow appears to follow Serge Abiteboul’s advice to approach digital preservation by constructing ‘digital shoe box’ repositories for her most treasured memories, small enough ‘we can keep several copies of this virtual box and check from time to time that enough of them are functional,’ and although Gideon needs to be re-introduced into the narrative at the end of both the second and the third novels, this approach works well enough. Among the most intentional, intimate and labor-intensive methods of digital preservation, Gideon nevertheless objects to this treatment; ‘you put me in a box and buried me,’ Gideon complains when she re-emerges from Harrow’s subconscious at the end of Harrow the Ninth (Muir 2020: 391).

Former head of the Empire’s Special Intelligence, Pyrrha has been ‘out of commission for ten thousand years,’ during which time she broke the monotony of life as ‘leftover cavalier parts’ by periodically taking control of the shared Lyctor body and pursuing a forbidden love affair with Commander Wake (Muir 2022: 30, 465). In this way, she dramatizes a retrospective preservation practice in which new technology emulates obsolete information environments, allowing for the rediscovery of media that more or less happened to survive its own era. ‘We compartmentalized from the Eightfold Word’ that results in Lyctorhood, Pyrrha explains to Gideon, ‘just like you and your girl–though I’m an accident and he took more from me than got taken from you’ (Muir 2020: 494). Criticized for being ‘unrealistic and focused too heavily on narrow aspects of the problem’ for most use-cases, emulators may nevertheless be best suited for preserving complex hypertext, since they simply emulate past technologies to access historical media without updating either the medium or its content (Demers and Samek 2020; Fitzpatrick 2011: 123 et al.). As ‘a ten thousand year old James Bond MILF with attachment issues,’ bearing also the corresponding ‘antique’ talismans of pistols and cigarettes, Pyrrha, like emulation, appears ostentatiously dated within her story world (Zutter 2022). Her presence, however, brings attention to Muir’s decision to create a ‘snapshot’ of internet culture by fully remediating digital artifacts as text within books that, if only when closed, resemble traditional novels (Three Crows 2020). Ultimately, Muir demonstrates through her characters Harrow, Gideon, and Pyrrha, the limitations of replication and emulation respectively, choosing instead the third option of digital migration; preserving content by changing its medium. Often envisioned as an update, such as transferring cassettes to CDs, migration can also occur laterally by, for example, exporting a Word document as a PDF file.

We see this sort of migration preservation practice with Pyrrha’s housemates, the ‘Master Warden of the Library’ and his archivist cavalier. These characters, Palamedes and Camilla, exist first as two people, each with their own bodies, then as two people with distinct mannerisms cohabiting the same body, and finally as a fully combinational person who goes by the name of Paul. Preeminent information professionals who ‘found the idea of dying inconvenient,’ they study past combinations, and manage to substantiate ‘the love that is perfected by death’ (Muir 2020: 385; Muir 2022: 424).

Bibliographic Encounters and The Tumblr Aesthetic

Before Palamedes combines with his cavalier, he lives a counterfactual existence inhabiting a bubble in the space-timestream. Real or imagined, one of Cytherea’s romance novels, The Necromancer’s Marriage Season, inexplicably appears in the bubble as well. ‘Thank god I had a pencil in my pocket,’ he explains to Harrow, ‘I’m in the process of crafting the sequel on a section of the wallpaper’ (Muir 2020: 310). Here, Muir illustrates a nested bibliographic encounter in which Palamedes engages deeply with a random novel while Harrow perceives the same novel and its fanfiction without interest. Palamedes’ discursive process of reading and writing typified by fanfiction reflects Muir’s own literary practices. Muir grew up enmeshed in participatory narrative traditions, from writing fanfiction to appearing in New Zealand film and television productions as a child extra (Myman 2020). In the acknowledgments of her debut novel, Gideon the Ninth (2019), Muir describes her brother as ‘the guy who believed in my writing even when I was eleven and publishing turgid Animorphs fanfiction’ (492). Reflecting on her literary pursuits prior to this pre-teen Animorphs era, Muir recalls: ‘one of my earliest memories is writing [proto-fanfics] on Post-it notes’ (Myman 2020). As a child, Muir’s librarian mother would ask her to read and review books and, upon reading the books, Muir would write new endings on Post-it notes about the characters dying horribly. ‘Writing and reading came hand in hand for me,’ Muir explains ‘because I’d read, synthesize it into somebody getting hit by a car, and write about that’ (Myman 2020). A recent ethnographic study reveals fanfiction communities as loci of ‘sophisticated informal learning,’ facilitating a robust system of mentorship that helps aspiring authors learn their craft (Aragon and Davis 2019: 1, 3). While Muir acknowledges the role fanfiction communities played in her development as a writer, she also learned through these fan engagements, how to foster the sort of generative, participatory fanbase that would allow The Locked Tomb to become the fourth most referenced series on Tumblr in 2022, and ranking first place only a year later (Fandometrics 2022; Fandometrics 2023).

Conceived as an ‘alternative world, where disparate people come together over mutual passions and desires in a queer, carnival-like atmosphere that distinctly dispenses with normality,’ Tumblr is a social media platform that rejects the formal rigidities characteristic of its competitors (McCracken et al. 2020: 17). A collection of microblogs encouraging users to generate, circulate, and remix any digital medium (and digitizations of tactile media such as photographs of book pages), ‘the magic of Tumblr,’ according to founder David Karp, ‘is that we let you put anything in and get it out any way you want’ (McCracken et al. 2020: 23). Accused of ‘writing books like they’re everything-burritos,’ Muir avails herself of this magic, drawing from Tumblr many of the ingredients discernable in her novels (Tor Presents 2022). Thus, what I call Muir’s ‘Tumblr aesthetic’ emerges as something alternative, non-normative, disruptive, anarchic, and queer—as a conscious and excessive inclusion of inherently referential media designed to introduce a level of interactivity into the reading process. Faced with such an overwhelming archive, readers begin to see alternative reading experiences and may consciously choose their reading strategy. Although written in 1818, Frankenstein in many ways prefigures a Tumblr aesthetic, as it indiscriminately draws upon the ridiculed Gothic, the venerated Milton, the forbidden Agrippa, the popular Coleridge, the pagan Ovid—here a poem, there a painting, here a romance there a treatise—stitching together an unholy tapestry of radically defiant remediation.⁷ Through this material heterogeneity ‘Frankenstein acquires an anti-formal monstrosity’ that reveals, for Daniel Cottom at least, ‘the novel itself …[as] the ultimate monstrosity, a transgressive discourse that apparently obeys no literary rules’ (qdt. in Brantlinger 1998: 452-453). Before critics realized the anonymously published Frankenstein was written by an unwed teenage mother who would, later in life, write of her bisexual longings, an initial reader less sympathetic than Scott describes the work as ‘a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity’ (Book Marks 2017; Riddell 2019).⁸ Writing on the verge of the twenty-first century, Patrick Brantlinger argues that ‘the discursive excess of Frankenstein can simultaneously be identified as sublimity, as insanity, and as literary deformity’ (Brantlinger 1998: 452).

Those familiar with the leading ontologies of the digital age will recognize in such encounters with Frankenstein slippages between concepts of technology and organism, and between science and storytelling, of the sort that interest Donna Haraway. Best known for transfiguring ideas of the cyborg into feminist conceptions of where mankind fits into the animal and digital realms, Haraway reminds us that ‘scientific practice is above all a story-telling practice’ (1989: 4). Specifically, ‘biology as a way of knowing the world is,’ for Haraway ‘kin to Romantic literature, with its discourse about organic form and function’ (1989: 4). Conceptualizing the world as a series of cells—some of them foreign, as in the case of multimodal references—stitched together with chains of radical mediation that form and deform them in ways akin to literature, Haraway’s theories illustrate how referential novels might indeed represent such ‘ultimate monstrosity’ as Cottom finds in Frankenstein (qdt. in Brantlinger 1998: 452). Sometimes denigrated for its excessively referential style, Frankenstein in many ways literalizes the Romanticist project of reanimating the past through the perhaps ill-advised assembly of fragments. As critics like Sandy Stone observe, with particular reference to Frankenstein, when Haraway challenges ‘the Fall’ and posits alternative origin myths for women to ‘seize the tools to mark the world that marked them as other,’ she gestures towards what roles cyborg approaches to technology can play in reclaiming ownership of one’s reading experiences—reclamations such as we see in The Locked Tomb—and, we might add, offers an explanation for why Shelley might have crafted the Creature to be so tragically preoccupied with Paradise Lost (Haraway 1991: 175; see, for example, Goodeve and Stone 1995).

Understanding the book as a media technology reveals similarities between highly referential novels and bibliographic interfaces such as card catalogs; the Tumblr aesthetic introduces a characteristic unpredictability. Whereas traditional bibliographies help readers discover, locate, and access specific works, bibliographies situated within a Tumblr aesthetic inundate readers with an absurd array of possibilities—readerly side-quests best pursued in the moment as they will be difficult to locate again without re-reading the entire novel. As a result, the Tumblr aesthetic shifts responsibility from authority figures such as librarians (who traditionally maintain card catalogs) to individual readers. It presupposes that every reader (including fictional servants and real-world children) can make relevant, valuable interpretive contributions based on their unique life experiences, that every reference merits such attention, and conversely, that no single expert can hold all the answers. Participatory engagement has value in itself. As Haraway remarks in her trailblazing manifesto, ‘unlike the hopes of Frankenstein’s monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it’: just so, readers with multimodal media literacy thereby become active and autonomous (1991:151). This dynamic also plays out in The Locked Tomb; while the Lyctors who rely on Gauis’ omnipotence die when they demand restitutions from him, those who trust their own interpretive abilities preserve their counterpart’s soul, and in so doing strive for a better future. Harrow’s media quests allow her to compartmentalize Gideon’s consciousness within her own; likewise, we readers of Harrow the Ninth can, through our own media quests, identify Gideon’s posthumous narration.

In some cases, such as the queer bibliographic encounter, these media quests help readers discover their identities and communities, thus representing a touchstone of queer memoirs and coming-of-age stories as well as an undertheorized aspect of media history (McKinney 2018). For ‘bibliographies, card catalogs, and reference texts,’ are, as McKinny reminds us, ‘some of the most common interfaces through which coming into one’s self is narrated, though they are rarely remarked on as media’ (2018: 55). The bibliographic encounters mediated through Muir and Shelley’s novels fall roughly into two categories: references to external media such as Paradise Lost and encounters to counterfactual media existing only within the story world. The former introduces real works to a potentially new audience while introducing additional layers of meaning and context; the latter directs readerly attention inwards to gain a greater understanding of the work at hand, and perhaps even of themselves. When Gideon and Harrow ‘look at each other with a wild surmise,’ for example, readers who recognize the reference to John Keats interpret Muir’s ‘bluest of blue conflagrations’ as the Pacific Ocean (Muir 2019: 66, 69). The protagonists of the series, Muir positions Gideon and Harrowhark awkwardly between the various power players, torn by Gideon’s lineage as the child both of god and Commander Wake, and further complicated by Harrowhark’s desperation for mental, political, and interpersonal stability. Deprived of stability, Harrow retreats into cozy, counterfactual scenarios during a psychotic break. The strain of archiving Gideon becomes too great, and while corrupt memories have leaked bi-directionally from the onset of this preservation attempt, Harrow’s brain dissolves the box, leading to Gideon’s re-substantiation. In these chapters, an alter ego named ‘Harrow Nova’ trades jobs with Gideon, attends a fancy party to impress Gideon, and finally, joins the army to spend time with Gideon who works as a ‘hotshot new BARI star’ in the barracks cafeteria (Muir 2020: 367-379; Grady 2021). Riffing off popular alternate reality (AU) fanfiction genres—Role Reversal AU, Party AU, Coffee Shop AU—Muir provides a moment of levity while dramatizing ways in which bibliographic encounters can represent a ‘coping mechanism for processing … trauma’ and mediating one’s identity (Zutter 2021). Perhaps also inspired by Cytherea’s romance novels, these counterfactuals allow Harrow to take control of her narrative while sharing inner-world imaginings with her now-dead friends. ‘Are we stable?’ Harrow asks the ghostly chorus when she emerges from the fanfiction section and finally recognizes these interludes as counterfactual; ‘I hope so’ they reply (Muir 2020: 379). For Muir elaborates a world in which reality does not necessarily equate stability and instability need not garner shame.

Coda

Even as representations of digital media within novels become increasingly prevalent, Muir’s Tumblr aesthetic remains remarkable in that it gathers materials from all dimensions—past, present, future, real, delusional. Elaborating an anachronistic world in which swords are commonplace but guns are ‘goddamn ancient,’ Muir delights in irreverent, multimodal juxtapositions; she might include a meme, a bible verse, a literary quotation, or a classicist joke in any given sentence. Meanwhile, she encodes a sense of nostalgia within this aesthetic of excess that extends to bygone internet epochs, and also to analog media. Now, more than two centuries after its publication, Shelley’s media representations may feel dated to contemporary readers, yet they too retain ‘an uncontrollable, irrational excess of signification that transcends the boundaries of normal, comprehensible discourse’ (Brantlinger 1998: 452). While Shelley may not, as Daniel Cottom suggests, ‘image the monstrous nature of [all] representation,’ she provides allegories of reading, and indeed of mechanical reproduction, through which Muir can imagine her story worlds (qdt. in Brantlinger 1998: 453). Writing in Shelley’s image, Muir updates her media theorizations for the twenty-first century.

Frankenstein dramatizes reading as a powerful force of social connectivity by illustrating the consequences Frankenstein incurs when he ventures beyond acceptable authors. Unable to discuss his readings of Agrippa with the scientific community, he processes this reading experience and his resulting emotions through a solitary and secretive act of creation. The Creature thus emerges as a physical manifestation of Agrippa fanfiction, a being who most strongly identifies with Paradise Lost, itself a sort of biblical fanfiction. Fortunately, systems of media reproduction today allow writers of fanfiction to connect without the need to materialize wrathful monsters. Muir’s indifference towards any stigma surrounding fanfiction allows her novels to reach a more general audience while engaging with that community through her generative Tumblr aesthetic (Three Crows 2020). To wit, The Locked Tomb series has sold over 500,000 books and garnered more than 5,000 story entries on Archive of Our Own (AO3), one of several online repositories of fanfiction (Jackson 2022; Archive of Our Own).

A final exemplar, I have saved Muir’s most recurring and strangest piece of counterfactual media for last: a ‘skin mag’ called ‘Frontline Titties of the Fifth,’ which is ‘not even a real publication’ (Muir 2019: 18; Muir 2020: 23, 504). Its reader Gideon, who also represents a Tumblr user and contributes heavily to that aesthetic, objects to the description ‘illiterate’ since she reads ‘dirty magazines,’ ‘pinup rags,’ ‘comic books,’ and other ‘stupendous work of a titty nature,’ specifically, as she claims, ‘for the articles’ (Muir 2019: 15, 20, 59, 126). The narrative alludes to highbrow readers but we only see Gideon and Cytherea reading for pleasure; the only counterfactual books Muir names come from their collections as they are the only books shared or offered to other characters (Muir 2019: 18; Muir 2020: 310).⁹ Like The Necromancer’s Marriage Season, Frontline Titties of the Fifth crystallizes Muir’s preoccupation with modes of storytelling and their circulation. Rendered all the more necessarily imaginative because the Fifth House historians never appear on the frontlines, this potential medium encapsulates the community-building power of counterfactual narratives as mediated through a Tumblr aesthetic. Harrow the Ninth concludes with the reintroduction of that same conjectural magazine, still counterfactual but now located within the locked Tomb itself.

Acknowledgements

My undying gratitude to Samuel Baker and Duncan Milligan for reading various drafts of this article.

Competing Interests

The author declares that they have no competing interests.