Premee Mohamed

Welcome, friend! Today is publication day for The First Thousand Trees, the concluding book in Premee Mohamed’s The Annual Migration of Clouds trilogy. Ariel and I had so much fun reading and discussing this series together, and we are thrilled to celebrate its release with something special: an interview with the author herself. Premee graciously joined us to talk about the trilogy and her creative process, and what it means to bring this story to a close. Let’s welcome her!

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Get to know the author: Premee Mohamed

Hi Premee! Welcome to Armed with a Book. To start us off, can you introduce yourself to our readers?

Hello and thanks for inviting me onto the blog! I’m a scientist (I keep saying ‘former’ scientist, but they haven’t actually come to take my degrees away) and writer based out of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, where I live with my two cats and a ton of books. I debuted very inauspiciously in March 2020 with my novel BENEATH THE RISING but luckily it didn’t end up killing my publishing career – I’ve had four novels and seven novellas out so far, plus two story collections. I’ve also won a handful of awards, most recently a Locus Award for a novelette and two Aurora Awards for novel and novella.

For our friends who haven’t read this series yet, let’s give them some background. What is the The Annual Migration of Clouds series about?

I’ve been referring to it as ‘post-post-apocalyptic fiction,’ because it’s less about the apocalypse and more about the rebuilding afterwards – basically, it’s the story of a community surviving in the aftermath of climate disaster and the collapse of industrialized society in Alberta. The three books focus on longtime friends Reid and Henryk as they come of age and decide what to do with their lives – how to better themselves, how to give back, and how to keep their people together. There’s also an ongoing pandemic of an incurable disease, a kind of hereditary symbiotic fungus that may affect people’s thoughts and behaviour. Crucially for the series, Reid has this disease and so does her mother; Henryk does not. 

What was the inspiration for this series?

Definitely the disease itself – I invented Cadastrulamyces but it’s based on a lot of real-world diseases, parasites, and symbiotes, including Cordyceps and Wolbachia. Initially, I really wanted to tell a short story just about the disease itself, specifically about its effects not just on individual characters but about society as a whole. What effect would it have on caretaking, demographics, reproductive rights, welfare, labour, migration? How would the world change if there was a mass disabling, mass sterilizing, and mass killing event like that – appearing late in life, difficult to test for, and no idea how it was transmitted? So at first what I wanted was a disability and chronic illness story, which I also thought might help me through my own journey through new health conditions that were limiting what I could do. But when I got the idea to set it in the future – where it would still be incurable – the story idea changed to one of eco-fiction, or eco-disaster.

The setting of the first book is the Biological Science Centre at the University of Alberta. Why’d you choose this university campus for Reid’s story? Do you have any personal memories associated with this building in particular?

Yes! OMG. So first of all I love this building – it is really hideous, and even the ‘new’ additions really only changed the ground floor (they are very nice, but very spatially limited). The urban legends we were told early on were about architects and designers who were fighting over how the building should look, so you ended up with lots of weird-shaped and sized rooms, electrical outlets and fountains in strange places, one-way doors that can trap you in stairwells, stairwells that also don’t go all the way between floors… it’s just a mess. But it’s also very sturdy. It feels safe in there. I spent a lot of time there in both my degrees, and never learned every corner of the building (although I did once get trapped in one of those stairwells with one-way doors for almost an hour). I did labs there, found spooky preserved and taxidermied animals, lost archives, file rooms covered in dust… it was just strange. A strange place. I always used to joke with friends that if the zombie apocalypse happened, we could go hide out in that building, because there was no way the zombies would figure out where we were, and no way they could break in. It seemed like a good place to ride out the worst things in the world. I also liked the idea of people finding safety there – a little city within a city – because it’s by the river. It felt like a natural place for people to gather and rebuild.

Many books have featured viruses that gravely affected the population. How is Cad different? 

I think the main thing about Cad is that it acted as a kind of accelerant on everything that was happening in the world already (I mean, the world of the story) – the first novella was written before Covid (it was completed in late 2019 and acquired in January 2020) so I didn’t know how Covid would affect the world when I was writing it. But any pandemic is going to have major effects depending on the disease itself – for Covid we were seeing not so much mass mortality as mass interruptions, as people got sick, got better, and it spread very rapidly and in a known fashion. So supply chains were disrupted, there were shortages, price gouging, reselling, inconvenience. But fundamentally, and partly because of the speed with which vaccines reduced transmission and illness, the world didn’t change. With Cad, though, you would have something that very often caused early death, was difficult or impossible to test for, and was passed from parent to child – or in other ways – and caused debilitating pain as well as behavioural and mental changes, and also (like Covid) affected non-human animals. The thinking was that while Cad was exploding throughout the world, it would make it very difficult to deal with things like drought, fire, major storms, political or civic upheaval, conflicts, migration – it would just make everything so much worse and so much more unmanageable. And of course all of those things would draw resources away from managing the spread or finding a cure – so they kind of feed off each other (in the book) and that’s how everything ends up collapsing.

The first two books are from the point of view of Reid while the third follows Henryk. What made you change your perspective?

I wasn’t sure I wanted to at first! I think the main thing was – by the end of the second book (no spoilers!) Reid is set on a certain path, but there were still things in the world of the story that I wanted to explore. Narratively I felt it wouldn’t be logical, or fair, to grab her and drag her around by the scruff of her neck to do so. However, I kept thinking about Henryk – left at home while Reid goes on her big adventure – and wondering what he would do now. In the first book, he actually fakes a letter to say that he’s going to have an adventure of his own, more or less to make Reid feel better – to assure her that he won’t be sitting there moping – but also to kind of make himself feel better, more proactive. He’s going to go do his own thing, he claims, and he’s certainly not going to follow her – not after spending his whole life living in her shadow. And the more I thought about it the more appealing Henryk’s story became to me. I could send him exactly where he lied about going, and then he could see what the world looks like where it’s not his safe little campus, and it’s not futuristic Howse University either. 

What would you like readers to take away from the series as whole?

I hope they take away the idea that ‘the end of the world’ is a complex idea, and speculative fiction is a hugely varied place to explore it! And also that rebuilding is something humans intuitively do – it’s how we came together into villages and then cities, how we learned to live with one another, how we pick one another up when we fall. Nothing stays a wasteland forever. People hit and roll, and then they get up again.

We loved the names of each of the books. How did you come up with them?

Aaaaa thank you, titles are my nemesis! The first one felt really true and right – partly because it plays with an image that Reid mentions a few times in the book, joking with Henryk about how some clouds ‘look familiar,’ so they must be migratory and it’s the same clouds coming back to campus every year. But it’s also a book about how things that seem like they’re trapped in a pattern really aren’t – clouds, of course, just look a lot like other clouds – and how sometimes things that seem fixed on a track are free to move around however they want. And that’s Reid, knocking herself off her tracks to go do something impossible. The second two titles kind of play with that idea of impossibilities as well – the idea that you can speak through a mountain, the idea that you can’t see a difference in the world until after the first thousand trees. Who’s to say what’s true and what’s being perceived?

Of the three books, which one was the hardest to write?

I would say by far the second book, mainly because I was so resistant to the idea of writing it – I told my editor that I was firmly anti-sequel but she talked me around to it (shout-out to Jen Albert, who is great). I didn’t want to write the same book twice, but I also didn’t want it to be something unrecognizable from the first book, and I had all these unknowns to deal with in the world that I hadn’t even considered while writing the first one (plus, it had been a couple of years). I ended up writing a kind of dark academia quasi-thriller in the end, and I felt like it worked quite well, but it was so, so hard to get a handle on what Reid might do in this ‘strange new world.’ 

Do you have a favourite quote or scene from amongst all the books that you find yourself going back to?

I have so many favourite scenes (oh noooo) but I think I keep coming back to a quote from the first book – where Reid thinks about her and Henryk’s friend Nadira, who died of Cad a few years before:

“What mars today is that the person who would have been proudest of this is not here. We are bereft of the beloved dead.”

I was thinking of a particular friend of mine, who passed away very young some years ago and never got to see me publish a book. But those of us who loved her always know she’d be proud of us no matter what we do, and Reid is feeling that absence the same way – the same love, the same emptiness.

For readers who enjoyed this series, what should they pick up next?

I would hope they’d pick up Waubgeshig Rice’s (so far) duology, Moon of the Crusted Snow and Moon of the Turning Leaves, which are just absolutely fascinating character studies in a small community in Ontario that’s kind of cut off from everything after society starts to fall apart. It’s a much more immediate, visceral apocalypse, and yet it’s quiet too, it’s mysterious – for one thing it makes you think about how we get news and how we know how to trust it, who it’s coming from, what biases and prejudices they might bring with them when they bring the news. They’re beautifully and thoughtfully written – you can really see his journalistic background.

How are you celebrating the end of this story arc—and what comes next?

I don’t know that I’m celebrating quite yet, haha – I feel like I’m still mourning the end of my time with these two kids, I guess. It feels a bit like sending them off to college and being like “Okay, I won’t know what you’re doing any more, but I trust that you’ll do your best!” I have a couple more novels coming out in 2026 and 2027 – not announced yet! – and some short fiction, including in New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine and the anthology Roots of Our Fears, edited by Gemma Amor. I also have some teaching coming up, including at the Banff Institute for their first-ever science fiction literary residency in September 2025.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

I think I would like to shout-out our incredible cover artist for this trilogy, Veronica Park – she worked very closely with me, my editor, and our art director to create the illustrations for these books and I am blown away by all three. You can tell how much she loves and respects nature by how much work she put into ensuring the birds were accurate and lifelike – sharp-eyed readers may even spot that it’s two different subspecies of whiskeyjack on the cover of the second book, representing the eastern and the western side of the Rocky Mountain population.

Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us and share with our readers.

Thank you so so much for giving me the space to chat about the book!

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Thank you for joining us! Learn more about Premee and her books on her website.