El Arbol Viene

Munir Hachemi dares to try his hand at speculative fiction - aren't all fictions speculative? - and manages to articulate in The Tree Comes a device that is as unusual as it is mind-blowing. Through the story of the Archaeologist, who intersperses the narrative with fragments of his diary and the reports he writes after a period of living with the Mulai, readers will delve into the history of a civilization that emerged by accident, the result of a space mission that fell into oblivion. The Mulai have not only managed to survive and perpetuate themselves in extreme climatic conditions, subject to unpredictable seasons, but they have also developed a way of relating to each other that has some of the most inspiring characteristics: each individual works when and on what they want, there are no social hierarchies, there is no property and they always group together in threes. The god they pray to, Dog, can only be an object of gratitude, never of supplication, and the end of their prayers is always ternary: "The tree comes, the tree comes, the tree comes." For them, the vague memory of a leafy land functions as that of a lost paradise. Like the great classics of the genre, and using knowledge as diverse as linguistics or philosophy, Hachemi approaches our most pressing concerns - the ecological emergency that threatens us, the excesses of consumer dynamics that condition almost all facets of human beings - aboard a playful, poetic artifact with an overflowing imagination that forces us to look at the world we inhabit with new eyes.