From Another Corner of the Universe Why Not

Decreation, Roberto Segrov, Corona/Samizdat, 2025.

The first origin story—

“…one cannot dismiss the possibility that those beings from beyond time arrived many times before—only to perish again and again, leaving behind their bones as silent witnesses to their vanishing dramas. It will be asked, then, how such beings could have crossed the infinite, desolate ocean of the cosmos, only to find themselves stranded here…”

…and there was no technology behind it, “they were simply cast into this world by forces beyond understanding.”

Adam and Eve were not so much refuted by the bones of hominids, the not-quite-humans, as confirmed by them, having arrived many times over, spawning races of not-quite-apes from their loins who then went about and did what they did before laying themselves down in the earth.

Adam and Eve’s last arrival produced the final (terminal) race, the self-named sapiens, and here we are.

Or perhaps Adam and Eve never even left their cavern in some distant world. It was only a dream they had which produced the multiple wreckages (the spawnings and extinctions) of hominid life on earth. These dream-consequences (our entire existence) would amount to nothing more than “the shifting layers of an illogical reverie”.

—this account of our origins, speculates Roberto Segrov, is not implausible.

And so it is, four stories into the collection Decreation, a book introduced by the now impossible hand of Rick Harsch (dearly missed), these fictions establish their zones of operation. They Will precisely what they wish as they pluck themselves from the cosmos. Perhaps this is what produced that “excess of amazement” Rick Harsch suffered so he said in the introduction to the book.

One might imagine a small corner of that universe disintegrates, decreates, to make way for each story within this collection—for why not within the realm of this little book of fictions, why not imagine that the cost of a creation, the cost of each of its additions to the universe were not an annihilation of another set of atoms, so arranged.

It would make the act of writing blindingly heedless, insanely insistent on its own arrival into that world. These would be Segrov’s writerly acts of minor cosmic maleficence against which one might only hope that the costs wrought by the act of creation in each case (every story but the last is entitled by a *) were not paid for on some corner of the earth. Please do not let us pay for these stories by disintegrating parts of our world, but out there, far out there, beyond the very reaches of any human feeling or remorse.

I shall create my decreations, Segrov might have said, and an unthinkable thing beyond the thinkable reaches of my imaginary will fall to pieces.

The second origin story—

There is “a dark space… At its center, or at least at a place assumed to be the center, for it is the locus of both perception and the articulation of this hypothesis—there is a sentient being… This being knows nothing of its own nature, nor of the nature of things, yet it supposed the room, the enclosure.”

That enclosure is perforated, a sieve, and there is another sentience beyond it although its existence might be another projection. Either way the first sentience “remains—stunned, unsettled, lost—like a blind, white worm, damp and writhing”.

—this second hypothesis, Segrov’s second creation story, is as obscene as the first, so Segrov declares it—and together they form a somewhat pregnant engrossment.

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Ansgar Allen is editor-in-chief at Erratum Press and author of books including a short history of Cynicism, and the novels, Black Vellum, Plague Theatre, The Wake and the Manuscript and The Sick List.

[image: Decreation through a glass © Ansgar Allen]

Sheffield, UK