Killer Cyborgs Meet Poetry

The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits
Ben Berman Ghan
Buckrider Books/Wolsak and Wynn Publishers
May 21, 2024
$24.00

The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits imagines what would happen to our world if a terraforming alien appeared on the moon and grew a magnificent garden. Ben Berman Ghan’s debut novel invites you to imagine lunar colonies overrun with a fungus that brings the dead back to life, advertisements gaining consciousness, a travelling troupe of undead cyborg actors, interplanetary love stories spanning centuries and lifetimes, and a dozen more trippy sci-fi ideas.

The narrative is built around Daisy, a cyborg controlled by Toronto’s Mother-AI. Our protagonist has no memories and limited free will, a girl/machine hybrid built for the violent protection of Toronto’s citizens. She’s sent to the moon to investigate the strange organic threat taking over the lunar colonies and to prevent its spread on earth.

But Rabbits is really about how life and consciousness can’t be controlled, and how easily the lines between life and machine are blurred. “Death is not the end” is how Ghan described his book in one sentence when the Ontario-based publisher organization Open Book profiled him. It’s one of a few tenets that Ghan repeats throughout the book to reinforce its themes of emerging consciousness and the cycle of life. Another is “You should not have come.” The anti-colonial messages are overt — it doesn’t go well for the godlike Gardener who grows a forest on the moon where no forest should be, or the people who come to the moon and attempt to bend the new nature to their will. Without wishing to spoil anything, the time-travelling whale might be the biggest disaster in going where you should not.

Born in Toronto, Ghan previously authored a collection of short stories titled What We See in the Smoke, published in 2019, and the novella Visitation Seeds, published in 2020. The latter is a prototype of this very book, sharing a premise, characters, and plot line. It’s clear Ghan’s been cooking this story for a while, and the work shows. The subject matter is complicated, the setting dream-like and ethereal. Ghan deftly guides us through this world, knowing when to drop hints and when to leave you in momentary confusion.

Ghan’s tone is literary, poetic, and serious. A couple short chapters are written entirely in verse. Sometimes we’re in the third person, sometimes the first, and occasionally in the second person “you.” It works for the plot and characters whose identities are ever-changing. You’re always just hanging on to the plot thread, forced to interpret and read carefully. But the plot is never truly lost; things follow logically from one beat to the next, and every wild scene, every apocalypse has a purpose in the story.

In fact, if you take a step back and look at what’s actually happening on the page, it can be almost camp. Ghan is not afraid to turn it up to eleven — like when the shiny golden embodiment of Toronto’s Mother-AI reemerges for one final showdown, “torn and bruised and damaged, the left arm missing entirely just below the shoulder, half the faceplate ripped away to reveal the ugly squirming mass of constantly moving nanites within.” She proceeds to snap a kid’s neck — don’t worry, death is not the end — before delivering a speech worthy of an anime villain from the 1980s. “‘You will die, Daughter! You will be nothing!’ it vocalizes, voice coming out of tune, full of errors, transforming into a shrill mechanical scream. ‘You are nothing!’” It’s a testament to Ghan’s literary skill that the Dragon Ball Z-esque robot punch-up that follows doesn’t feel out of place. These over-the-top scenes work in this world of violence, dreams and death. I wanted more of them.

The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits is relevant to anyone who’s wondered if they should include “please” and “thank you” when they prompt ChatGPT. The book makes a clear argument that life can happen anywhere. It could emerge quietly and unnoticed among the crowd of its artificial siblings. In Rabbits, the differences between the organic and the mechanical are superficial, showing us that when life does emerge, it has as much of a right to exist as anything else.