The Silt Verses and the Bombing of Gaza

The uncomfortable relationship between fantasy and reality

In the horror-fantasy podcast The Silt Verses, the Ignathian Peninsula started bombing the Linger Straits before Israel started bombing Gaza. However, in broadcasting Episode 34 ‘Some Day There Shall Be None’ on 19 October 2023, co-creator and writer Jon Ware clearly recognised that listeners might draw parallels between the fictional and real atrocities and so chose to provide a content warning at the start of the episode proper:

Although the episode was written and recorded a very long time ago now, over the spring and summer of 2023, the storyline does very unavoidably centre around military airstrikes as experienced by civilians on the ground, which I expect is a topic that for many of us hits all too close to home right now.

In our show, the nature of those airstrikes is heightened, fantastical and absurd, the events follow on organically from what you’ve already heard in the season, and in short, we don’t believe there’s any way of misinterpreting what you’re about to hear as a deliberate attempt to sensationalise, trivialise or exploit the atrocities of the past two weeks conducted upon innocent people in both Palestine and Israel, nor specifically upon the devastating and horrific air bombardments now being inflicted upon Palestinian civilians.

However, we know that some of our audience members may very understandably want to avoid this kind of storyline altogether right now, and our duty of care to you is the most important thing, so we wanted to give you that additional warning in advance.

The Silt Verses is set in a world in which Gods and Saints are real. Gods feed on/ are fed on human sacrifices, though the degree and nature of these sacrifices vary. Saints are people who have been transfigured by Gods, often into Lovecraftian abominations, but just as often into parts of a city’s infrastructure (a train conductor melded into the front of a train like a ship’s figurehead; a perpetually electrocuted human conduit that functions as an interactive visitor display for a power station) or the natural world (crustacean saints; the Elk of Birch and Bone). In the capitalist hellscape of the podcast’s setting, Gods are often used as commercial mascots, with employees laid-off from businesses sacrified to these Gods in a bid to maintain profit margins. Jon Ware and Muna Hussen are both highly talented at grimly parodying neoliberal and corporate jargon that puts a clean gloss over acts of brutal institutional violence.

However, intentionally or not, Ware’s content warning surely ensures that any listener to The Silt Verses now reads the government officials of the Peninsula if not precisely as the Israeli government (and, in turn, its military as the IDF) then certainly as those governments, including the UK government, that with our money (writing as a UK citizen) provide the aircraft and bombs that have blown many thousands of small children into bloody pieces.

In Episode 37, Val, a human weapon used by the Peninsula government, comes across a Linger Straits town, Sutler’s Weald, flattened by recent bombing. Ware and Hussen give her a speech addressed to the government officials who are audio linked to monitor her homicidal progress, as follows:

You, now - the ones listening to my idling progress from back home in Glottage - you’re telling yourselves; Val cannot possibly be growing angry over something like this.

How dare she? The hypocrite. 

How can this thing, this monster, this battle-saint, possibly find any kind of righteous anger in her twisted and repurposed heart for the lives of the fallen foe? 

How does our terrible Val think she can justify any kind of anger at the sight of the flattened and buried corpses of enemy civilians and enemy children, when we’ve already been listening to her murder police officers, soldiers and townsfolk single-handedly in turn? 

[…]

Yes, I am culpable. I am dreadful. I have been responsible for great atrocities and I will commit a great many more before I’m done.

And still - I am growing furious, as I walk through the devastation of this town. Because the wound of Sutler’s Weald is not like any wound I would make.

It’s clumsy, it’s crude. It’s thoughtless.

I begin to tell myself, as I walk - I wouldn’t have murdered them like this. I would have been kinder. I would have killed them quickly or gracefully, and there would have been beauty and strangeness in the manner of it.

And even that’s all deception, even if I had been cruel and slow and lingering in the massacre of these innocent people, upon my whim - I would at least have looked them in the eyes, and I would have borne the weight of my cruelty. 

If they’d asked me to, I could have killed this town beautifully. And I’d have borne witness to the horror, and I’d have rejoiced in it - and it would have been considerably less vile and ugly than this.

The ones back home, the ones who are listening in, I don’t think they know what they’ve done here. 

The line of connection between the victim and the victimiser, the sacrifice and the god - it’s long, and tangled, and indistinct.

A god should not be able to avert her eyes.

What a terrible thing it must be, to be monstrous and not even know it.

And even if all of this is lies, even if I am just as bad and just as careless as the people back home who did this to Sutler’s Weald…

…well, then, let me hate them, pure and simply, for being just as bad as me, because people -

-people should be kinder than the gods that eat them.

This idea of people being monstrous and not even knowning it reminded me strongly of Ricky of Council Estate Media wrote the other day about people sincerely defending the Israeli government’s actions:

They’re unbelievably confident in these dreadful arguments in a way you couldn’t be unless you’d been programmed from early childhood. It takes only a second of logical thinking to see the flaws in their arguments and yet they can’t see any flaws. No line of reasoning will get through to them, even though they’re often far from stupid.

And, of course, it is most likely that both Ricky and myself would think in precise the same way if we’d be brought up in Israel.

It is very difficult for me to know which ideologies I cling to that make me monstrous.

But I do know that the Lovecraftian horrors of The Silt Verses are far more palatable than the footage I see from Gaza, and not just because those horrors are fictional. It is also because the satire is less grotesque than our current reality; less cruel.

A lot of the Silt Verses’ second season was about the ratcheting up of propaganda before the Peninsula declared war on the Linger Straits. Many characters knew which way the wind was blowing.

The “pre-war era propaganda” here in the UK makes it feel as though we are back in the 1930s, but I suspect there is even less good faith in our country’s ruling elite than there was in 1938. In the Silt Verses there is revolutionary turmoil by citizens faced with conscription. We will see if the series has been prescient in its hope as well as its despair.