When Natalia Theodoridou won the World Fantasy Award 2018 for The Birding: A Fairy Tale last weekend, another one of her short stories came to my mind again: The Eleven Holy Numbers of the Mechanical Soul, first published in Clarkesworld 2014 (you can also read it on Medium).

The Eleven Holy Numbers of the Mechanical Soul drew me in and never let go – a hopeless tale of a man stranded alone in the small confines of a bleak, almost lifeless environment. It is full of despair, decline, and lost dreams, and yet, there is something; life’s incredible resilience even under hostile conditions.

Natalia Theodoridou paid homage to artist Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests (and if you’ve never seen them, visit the webpage; it’s worth it!) They invite story, and they already seem to incorporate the melancholy that permeates The Eleven Holy Numbers of the Mechanical Soul. So mechanics and beauty were embedded in the story’s theme, but the third ingredient is mythological and gently nudges you in the direction of the answer to a question the Strandbeests seem to evoke: man is lonely, and even in end-times builds himself life-like (if strange) companions. What is their place in the cosmos?