bibliogramma | Entries tagged with g: post-apocalyptic fiction

“Articulated Restraint,” Mary Robinette Kowal. Tor.com, February 6, 2019.
https://www.tor.com/2019/02/06/articulated-restraint-mary-robinette-kowal/
Good. Set in Lady Astronaut universe. Short story.

“The Rule of Three,” Lawrence Shoen, Future Science Fiction Digest, December 18 2018
http://future-sf.com/fiction/the-rule-of-three/
Excellent. A very different first contact experience. Novelette.

“How to Swallow the Moon,” Isabel Yap; Uncanny, November-December 18 2018
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/how-to-swallow-the-moon/
Very good. Forbidden lovers overcome great obstacles. Novelette.

“The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington,” Phenderson Djèlí Clark; Fireside Fiction, February, 2018
https://firesidefiction.com/the-secret-lives-of-the-nine-negro-teeth-of-george-washington
Excellent. Short story.

“Leviathan Sings to Me in the Deep,” Nibedita Sen; Nightmare Magazine, June 18 2018.
http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/leviathan-sings-to-me-in-the-deep/
Excellent. Short story. CN: whale hunting, explicit descriptions.

“Shod in Memories,” M. K. Hutchins; Daily Science Fiction, October 25 2018
https://dailysciencefiction.com/fantasy/fairy-tales/m-k-hutchins/shod-in-memories
Good but slight. Cinderella retold. Short story.

“One Day, My Dear, I’ll Shower You with Rubies,” Langley Hyde; Podcastle, May 1 2018.
http://podcastle.org/2018/05/01/podcastle-520-one-day-my-dear-ill-shower-you-with-rubies/
Very good. Consequences of growing up with a murderer fr a parent. Short story.

“Sidekicks Wanted,” Laura Johnson; Cast of Wonders June 15 2018, original publication in anthology Heroes, editor unknown, October 2015.
http://www.castofwonders.org/2018/06/cast-of-wonders-307-sidekicks-wanted/
Neutral. Predictable. Short story.

“Ana’s Asteroid,” M. K. Hutchins; Cast of Wonders, April 30 2018.
http://www.castofwonders.org/2018/04/cast-of-wonders-301-anas-asteroid/
Good. Heroic child saves the day. Short story.

“The Things That We Will Never Say,” Vanessa Fogg; Daily Science Fiction, May 25 2018
https://dailysciencefiction.com/science-fiction/science-fiction/vanessa-fogg/the-things-that-we-will-never-say
Very good. Uses sf tropes to talk about family dynamics. Short story.

“Strange Waters,” Samantha Mills; Strange Horizons, April 2 2018.
http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/strange-waters/
Excellent. A woman lost in time searches for a way home. Short story.

“The Paper Dragon,” Stephen S. Power; Daily Science Fiction, April 20 2018
https://dailysciencefiction.com/hither-and-yon/sf-fantasy/stephen-s-power/the-paper-dragon
Good. Examination of war and forgiveness. Short story.

Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars takes place in an world that was much like our own, until a massive catastrophe - the fall to earth off the coast of the US of a meteorite last enough to precipitate an extinction level event (ELE) - changes everything. In this iteration of our world, the calculations that show the inevitable changes in climate that will make the planet uninhabitable within decades are accepted as scientific fact by the world’s political leaders, who decide upon a two-pronged approach - to try to ameliorate the effects of the catastrophe to save life in earth, and to colonise the solar system so that if necessary, humanity will have another home.

It’s lucky, in a way, that this catastrophe falls during the early post-war period, when science was respected and economies were still capable of being mobilised to meet goals. If Kowal had chosen to set such a novel today, I suspect no such response to a global catastrophe would have seemed realistic - but this was still the era of potential.

The narrative is focused on Elma Wexler, a former WASP - one of the Women Airforce Service Pilots who, as civilian pilots attached to the military, ferried airplanes wherever needed, including to the front, during the Second World War. Elma, now retired, and her husband, Nathaniel York, a scientist with the Manhattan Project during the war, and later with the fledgling American space program, survived the concussive wave that destroyed most of the east coast, and Nathaniel’s colleagues at Langley, by accident - they were on vacation in the Poconos, having flown out in Elma’s little Cessna - and were able to fly west out of the circle of destruction to reach an air force base that would temporarily become the centre of the immediate response to the meteorite fall.

It is Elma, who is not only a pilot but a calculator - one of the women whose mathematical skills enabled the pre-computer space program to determine how to get an object into orbit and bring it home, whose calculations prove that humanity is facing an ELE. Both Nathaniel and Elma become part of the international effort to reach space, but Elma has a secret goal - to be one of the astronauts that goes into space.

If you’ve read the original novelette that sparked the series, Lady Astronaut of Mars, you know what happens, in the broadest of strokes, in both the race to colonise the system and Elma’s personal quest to become an astronaut. But that doesn’t change the reader’s absorption in the details of the process here, told over the years as it happens.

But while Kowal tells us the story of a successful space program, and the frustrations of a fully qualified woman locked out of her dream of going into space, Kowal also gives us a look at the society of 1950s America that does not flinch from uncomfortable truths. Elma and her husband Nathaniel are Jewish; there are hints of anti-semitism, and echoes, in the deaths surrounding the fall of the meteor, of the devastating losses of the Holocaust. There is ample evidence of the high degree of segregation and the entrenched racism of the time, in everything from the choices made during the post-cataclysmic evacuation not to look for survivors in black neighbourhoods, to the bitterness of black women pilots, who can’t even hope, as Elma does, that they could get anywhere near the astronaut training program. Kowal does not forget the dynamics of the society she’s chosen to place her break in history within.

The novel also deals sensitively with disability. Elma has an anxiety disorder, brought on by the highly pressured and misogynistic atmosphere she faced as an early entrant - and a female ine at that - into a prestigious math and physics program at university. The disorder surfaces when she must take on public relations tasks as a part of her quest to open the astronaut corps to women, and she begins taking sedatives to deal with it - a choice that will jeopardise her position when women are ultimately allowed into astronaut training and she is one of the successful candidates.

The second of Kowal’s “Lady Astronaut” novels, The Fated Sky, takes up a few years after the first novel ends. Having made it to the Moon, and established the beginnings of a colony there, the next goal in the space program is Mars. The extreme climate changes triggered by the Meteor fall are beginning to have demonstrable effects - the temperature is rising, the cloud cover remains thick, adding to the greenhouse effect, and while it is possible that not all the earth will become uninhabitable, still, the need to provide a ew home for humanity is very real, and the Moon is not an ideal location for a self-sustaining colony. But not everyone is convinced that the space program is necessary, and protest is growing, especially among marginalised populations - specifically, in America, black people, who know that if the earth is left behind, they will be too.

Elma has been spending half her time piloting shuttle rockets between colonies on the moon, and half her time on Earth. On one of Elma’s return trips, the rocket is highjacked on landing by a group of black activists protesting the money spent on space that could be better spent on improving conditions on earth. Elma, using her celebrity status as the “lady astronaut” - even though there are a number of female astronauts by now - persuades the activists to release all the other hostages, who are suffering from gravity sickness, which she manages to pass off to the activists as potentially infectious ‘space germs.’ Once again, the lady astronaut makes the news.

To counteract adverse publicity and shore up faltering financial support, Elma is asked to join the the first Mars mission. She accepts, not realising that another astronaut who has been training for the mission with the other crew fir months is being pulled to make room for her. The atmosphere of the mission is compromised from the minute she arrives, and it dies not get any better when the government, suspecting a conspiracy behind the recent highjacking, places pressure on the two black member of the Mars crew, one of whom had been, like Elma, on the rocket when it was taken.

As the novel progresses, we begin to see more and more clearly that Elma, who we are primed by literary traditions to see as the hero, is actually a very flawed character, naive and thoughtless, the perfect example of the white liberal who wants to do the right things, but never actually thinks from any point of view save her own, and ends up making matters worse until she learns to sit back and let those most directly affected by the injustices that anger her take the lead in strategising. She has no idea of how she appears to others, being wrapped up in her own view of herself as both victim and saviour. But the stresses of the journey to Mars become a journey to maturity for her, and by the end of the novel, when she and a handful of other colonists stand on Mars, we feel that she has become something even more important than a hero - a woman who has fulfilled her dreams, and come to know herself in the process.

These are fascinating books, both for their examination of a path to the stars that we might once have followed, and for their uncompromising look at the deep flaws in our society which really have not changed much since the days in which the book is set. We’ve lost the stars, but at the same time, we’ve done little to fix what we have here on earth. It’s this that makes these books a poignant illustration of what might have been.

But at the same time, these are inspiring novels about women in science, and women in space, and my God, I needed to read something like this just now.

I’ve been waiting excitedly for the publication of Rebecca Roanhorse’s novel Trail of Lightning ever since I heard she was writing it. Because based just on the one short story of hers that I’ve read - the one that won this year’s Hugo Award - I knew that I was going to be totally swept up in anything she wanted to write.

And I was totally correct in that.

Trail of Lightning is truly kickass fantasy - think urban fantasy but not in a city, with a troubled female monsterhunter and a serious monster to hunt - that takes place in a post-apocalyptic future where the Navajo Nation, or Dinétah, is now an autonomous region, separated from what remains of a North America ravaged by rising waters and ecological disasters by a wall raised by traditional powers. It’s no paradise - life is hard, technology is rundown and cobbled together, the economic system has reverted to barter, and there are ancient creatures of evil lurking in the hinterlands, and not all power workers have good intentions.

Maggie Hoskie was once almost killed by a monster. She was saved by Neizghání, a legendary, immortal monsterslayer, who took her on as his apprentice, in part because with the wounds she took from the monster, darkness entered her spirit, and only training and discipline could keep her from becoming a monster herself. But he came to mistrust her ability to resist, and stopped teaching her, leaving her alone, mostly trained, with clan powers that enhance her strength and speed, and doubting herself.

Part of her wants to stay away from monsterhunting, without the support of her mentor, but when a family calls for her to find, and save if she can, their daughter, taken by monsters, she does what she can.

The creature is unlike anything she’s encountered before, but with the help of Tah, a medicine man who is like a father to her, and his grandson Kai, she discovers that it’s a magical construct, which means there’s a witch operating in Dinétah, and she sets out with Kai to hunt them down.

The story is complex, with many twists, and unreliable characters who are telling layers on layers of untruths - after sll, Coyote is one of the characters, and you can never trust Coyote. It is steeped in Diné traditions, and - content notice here - brutal in many places. Maggie and Kai and the other humans in this story live in a brutal time, after the end of the world, when all the monsters that were kept in dreamtime have come to life. It’s a very different vision from most post-apocalyptic fantasies I’ve read, and it is absolutely enthralling. Fast-paced, action-filled. And Maggie Hoskie is as real as anyone I’ve ever read about.

I am certain of one thing - the next book is going to be a blast.

Gwyneth Jones’s novella Proof of Concept is a densely packed narrative, weaving multiple thematic threads together into a single coherent story. The protagonist, a young woman named Kir, was chosen from a life of brutal poverty to be the host to an AI called Altair - serving as the biological platform for a software too complex to run solely on inanimate hardware. That brutal life was the result of being an outsider, a ‘scav,’ in a world ruined by ecological collapse leading to a severe population crisis. This post-climate-change earth has dead oceans and limited agricultural land, vast areas of the planet’s are unlivable and most of humanity survives - just barely - in crowded cities known as hives. The dream is The Great Escape - a way out of the solar system, to inhabit a new, fresh world.

Dan Orsted is known as the Great Popularizer. He creates Very Long Duration Training Missions in which groups of potential space explorers simulate interstellar travel conditions - while the world watches, the newest version of reality television. Margarethe Patel is a physicist working on the theory of instantaneous travel.

The Needle is an experimental space travel device built in a deep chasm. Here a group of Patel’s scientists and Orsted’s LDM reality star colonists will spend a year in isolation while Patel’s team works on the problem of directing instantaneous travel. They already know they can send the Needle out, and bring it back - now they need to find out how to find out where it goes, and eventually make it go where they want.

At first, it seems to be working well. There’s some interpersonal discomfort - friction is a bad word in the intensely social society of the hives - between the mostly driven an introverted scientists and the determinedly gregarious media stars, but nothing serious.

Then one of the scientists dies. A few months later, another. And shortly after that, another. All older, with known health issues, but still it doesn’t feel right to Kir. Meanwhile, Kir has suddenly started to ‘hear’ Altair speaking to her. The first thing he does is ask her to check certain offline data, data which, if she understands correctly, means that solving the instantaneous travel problem is much closer than she believed it to be, that they have ‘proof of concept’ - but Patel hasn’t told anyone yet. And then her casual lover, oe of the LDM personnel, is brutally murdered.

Proof of Concept is a heavily layered mystery, tightly plotted, with deceptions and evasions on almost all sides, as Kir struggles to find out what is really going inside the Needle Project. By the time she finds out, it is too late for the characters to do anything except accept the challenge to survive. What’s left for the reader is to consider the morality of certain acts in the face of extinction of not just humanity, but all things on the Earth.

Jones never gives easy answers in her fiction. Proof of Concept is no exception.

Race, Gender and Sexuality in Post-Apocalyptic TV and Film, edited by Barbara Gurr, Assistant Professor in Residence in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Connecticut, is a fascinating collection of essays for anyone interested, as I am, in how these issues are presented in science fiction, and in the post-apocalyptic vision in particular.

I have always been rather a fan of the post-apocalyptic subgenre of speculative fiction, I think in part because it mirrors the worst fears of our society - how the world ends, which of the classical horsemen, or some other, newly imagined devastation, predominates our nightmares - and partly because it offers the opportunity to suggest what might follow if everything we know has been torn down. Will we recreate current social structures, classes, institutions, or will we strike out in new directions?

This is a collection of essays that look at our visual media and try to explore some of these questions. As Gurr says in her Introduction, “The writers in this volume are interested in the ways in which post-apocalyptic fictions interact with—produce, reflect, interrogate, accommodate, and resist—hegemonic notions of race, gender, and sexuality.”

Early post-apocalyptic imaginings tended to focus on the reconstruction of society after a devastating, often nuclear war, or as the result of science gone wrong; such narratives were heavily influenced by the experiences of WWII. The Cold War introduced the apocalypse brought about by stealthy invasion, the infection and spread of disease or mind control agents - The Invasion of the Body Snatchers being the classic film example. Infection of the body, and the body politic, and fears of immigration blend in both alien invasion and zombie narratives, which have become increasingly popular after the events of 9/11. All these scenarios and more are explored from various perspectives in these essays, which address works as varied as the Hunger Games films, Firefly, The Walking Dead, Falling Skies, Battlestar Galactica (the remake), True Blood, the Resident Evil films and others.

What many of these essays make clear is that despite the opportunities for change of all kinds inherent in the post-apocalyptic scenario, many of these works fail to really challenge contemporary gender, race and class relations. Even with the presence of major characters who are people of colour or white women, the societies being recreated remain patriarchal, male-centred, and white-dominated, and perpetuate existing stereotypes about race and gender. Through analysis of the social milieus in series such as Firefly and films such as Hunger Games, it becomes clear that simply having a female action hero does not necessarily imply a break with traditional gender roles - the presence of an exceptional woman serves merely to divert attention from the ways in which the status quo is maintained.

The post-apocalyptic narrative is, above all, a narrative of survival. Its tropes tell us what are the threats humanity fears will threaten its survival, and the parts of our culture that we believe are essential to our survival. It shows us what we fear and what we value, and lets us question whether our fears and values are indeed the ones that will affect whether we as a society will indeed survive.

The first section of Nancy Kress’ novel Tomorrow’s Kin is essentially the same as the novella Yesterday’s Kin. A combination first contact/approaching apocalypse/medical thriller, it’s the story of aliens arriving on Earth, only to announce that they are humans, somewhat altered by tens of thousands of years of evolution on an alien planet, where their ancestors had been settled, seeded by an unknown ancient race, and that they have come to warn their distant cousins that the path of the solar system is about to pass through a deadly cloud of alien spores.

The story focuses on the family of scientist Marianne Jenner, a geneticist who has discovered the existence of a rare and very ancient human haplogroup - one which is almost extinct on earth, but from which all the aliens are descended.

This first section tells the story of the first contact between the humans of Earth and the humans of World - who have been incorrectly called Denebs from the part if space from which their spaceship approached earth. Offering to help a group of human scientists in a frantic search to develop a vaccine against the spores - which have already destroyed two Deneb colonies - the Denebs have not given the inhabitants of Earth one vital piece of information - that the Earth has already passed through the cloud once before, and all human in Earth are descended from the survivors, and hence immune. It is only the Denebs, taken from Earth before the first passage through the cloud, who are vulnerable. And the samples they have obtained from human tissues during the joint search for a vaccine will enable the scientifically advanced Denebs to save themselves before their planet enters the cloud.

Leaving Earth just before it enters the cloud, the Denebs reveal the truth of their mission on Earth, and in return fir the help of humans, they leave the secret of interstellar travel. With them are several Earth humans, all members of the rare haplogroup the Denebs represent, including Marianne Jenner’s adopted son Noah.

The rest of the novel deals with humanity’s reaction to this first encounter with their distant cousins.

Unfortunately, the Denebs had only been partially correct. Most humans were immune - but a mutation in Central Asia had left hundreds of thousands in that region without genetic protection, and their deaths had been horrifying. Several other mammalian species had also lacked protection, including most rodents, and their loss had initiated an ecological collapse. The world is in chaos, and many feel the Denebs were to blame. And they are angry.

Marianne Jenner is now working for Star Brotherhood, an organisation that is attempting to build support for building spaceships and going out among the stars to find their kin again, joining an advanced interstellar society begun by the Denebs, or Worlders as some are now calling them. But most of the people of Earth don’t want anything to do with the Worlders. And some want to go to World, only to destroy it. And Marianne and her family are, as they have been since the first meeting of Earth humans and Worlders, right in the middle of everything.

Like the novella, Tomorrow’s Kin is a compelling blend of first contact and science thriller narratives. There’s urgency - the planet is in ecological and economic collapse - and conflict, and scientific mysteries - children are being born, post spore exposure, with altered brains and vastly increased sensitivity to sounds at both higher and lower frequencies than normal humans. And plots within plots to influence, in one way or another, the future of relations between Earth and World.

Looking forward to volume two of the trilogy.

Kristen Roupenian, "Cat Person"; The New Yorker, December 11, 2017
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/cat-person

An all-too-familiar story about a woman meeting and becoming involved with a man, despite all the tiny warning signals that suggest she should be mire cautious. The scary thing is that it ended in a better way than I'd feared, although 'better' is perhaps not the right word.

Carmen Maria Machado, "The Husband Stitch"; Granta, October 28, 2014
https://granta.com/the-husband-stitch/

One reviewer of this short story has said "It’s a horror story in which the monster is heterosexual relationship", which seems to me as accurate as anything else I could say. It's a powerful story about being a woman in a world made by men, about how we fit ourselves into the spaces in their lives and try to hold onto some small thing that is our own. Until they want that too, and we give it freely because we love them, and we have nothing left.

Maureen McHugh, "Sidewalks"; Omni, November 28, 2017
http://omnimagazine.com/sidewalks/

Ros Gupta is a speech pathologist called in to examine a "Jane Doe" of indeterminate racial identity who speaks only 'gibberish' and is currently being held in an institution because the police feared she might be a danger to self or others. She manages to communicate with the woman, whose name is Malni, and what she discovers changes her entire way of relating to the world she lives in. There are some profound messages here, about the fragility of the things we know and love, about connectedness and change, about actions and consequences, and about living as a woman in the world.

Charlie Jane Anders, "Don't Press Charges and I Won't Sue"; Boston Review, October 30, 2017
http://bostonreview.net/fiction/charlie-jane-anders-dont-press-charges-and-i-wont-sue

A brutal story about a woman struggling to hold on to her identity in a world determined to eliminate it. The real horror is that this world is only a few existential tweaks away from our own, and there are people who would not read this as a terrifying and cautionary dystopic narrative. Powerful, painful.

Kelly Barnhill, "Probably Still the Chosen One"; Lightspeed, February 2017
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/probably-still-chosen-one/

A rather different take on the portal fantasy and the whole 'chosen child hero' trope. Eleven-year-old Corrina finds a portal to a land at war and is identified as the Chosen One by the Priesthood. Her destiny - to lead the people of Nibiru to victory against the evil Zonners. But it doesn't turn out quite the way Corrina dreams it will, or the Priests expect it too. Fun.

C. S. E. Cooney, "Though She Be But Little"; Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/though-she-be-but-little/

Something strange has happened - the Argentum, the sky turning silver - and strange things have happened - people turning into mythical pirates, floating alligators and parrots that can act like cellphones - and things have arrived from somewhere else, many of them monstrous. Emily Anne was a widow in her sixties before the Argentum; now she's an eight-year-old child and a nightmare creature, The Loping Man, is coming to kill her. Where the story focuses on Emily Anne's resourcefulness, courage, and ability to adapt to this new world, it was enjoyable, but I felt as though I'd been dropped into something complex with no explanation and that aspect was not as pleasing. I'd have enjoyed it more if it were presented as straight absurdist fantasy, but presenting it as something that's happened to a real world not unlike our own makes me want at least some clues toward answers to 'how' and 'why.'

Fran Wilde, "Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand"; Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/clearly-lettered-mostly-steady-hand/

This one cut me deeply. It's a horror story about the way society and the medical profession deal with "freaks" - those of us who are visibly different - and how those freaks feel and think. The story is told as a monologue by a tour guide through a freak show, but the tone drips with rage at the 'normal' person, the voyeur come to see the horrifying strangeness of the 'different.' Intense.

N. K. Jemisin, "Henosis"; Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/henosis/

A short story about fame, fans, and legacy. An aging author nominated for a prize that it quite literally intended as the culmination of a stellar career is kidnapped by a fan. Interesting and somewhat savage commentary on what it's like to become famous and to be seen as possessing an artistic legacy.

John Chu, "Making the Magic Lightning Strike Me"; Uncanny Magazine, May/June 2017
http://uncannymagazine.com/article/making-magic-lightning-strike/

What prices are we prepared to pay to become what we most want to be - or think we want to be? This science-fictional story of the proverbial 98-pound weakling who wants to be a muscle man explores this question with sensitivity and compassion. The protagonist has made a heavy bargain - taking a dangerous underground job in return fir extensive alterations that turn his body into the muscular machine he longs to be, but even with all the external changes, it isn't quite enough.

Nicole Kornher-Stace, "Last Chance"; Clarkesworld, July 2017
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kornher-stace_07_17/

A post-apocalyptic story about a young girl who is captured by scavengers and used as a labourer to search for 'Before' treasures in a dangerous ruin. The protagonist's voice is well-developed and consistent, the story interesting, and the ending holds out some hope that taking the proverbial last chance nay bring something good. A good read.

Vina Jie-Min Prasad, "Fandom for Robots"; Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/fandom-for-robots/

Computron is the only sentient robot ever created, by accident, by a scientist who was never able to recreate his achievement. Computron 'lives' in a museum devoted to the history of robotics; it displays its sentience to museum visitors by answering their random questions. One day, a young visitor asks Computron if it has ever watched a particular anime series about a human and a sentient robot seeking revenge for the destruction of the human's family. Computron watches the anime, and discovers fandom. It's a charming story with sone spot-on observations about fandom, shipping, and fanfic. It's also a bit of a parable, about the way that the most unlikely of outsiders can find acceptance and friendship in the online world of fandom.

Rebecca Roanhorse, "Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience (TM)"; Apex Magazine, August 8, 2017
https://www.apex-magazine.com/welcome-to-your-authentic-indian-experience/

Jesse Turnblatt, like most of his co-workers at Sedona Sweats, is a 'real Indian' who sells VR fantasy experiences to white tourists who "don’t want a real Indian experience. They want what they see in the movies." So he gives them fantasies about Indians who never were, until one day he meets a client who wants so much more.

This is half science fiction, half horror, and all about the real Indian experiences of cultural appropriation, the intersection of racism and sexism, theft of land, culture and even identity, and ultimately, genocide. The ending floored me with its parallels to the history of white appropriation of everything Indigenous. Read it.

Malinda Lo, "Ghost Town"; Uncanny Magazine, September/October, 2017 (originally published in Defy the Dark, ed. Saundra Mitchell, 2013)
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/ghost-town/

It's Halloween in Pinnacle, a small town in Colorado with a history of mining prosperity during the 'Old West' and a tradition of celebrating its ghosts. Ty is a young butch transplanted from San Francisco with her family to a place where she doesn't fit in, where there's no real place for a young lesbian among all the Beckys and Chads. When popular girl at school McKenzie invites her to go ghost hunting on Halloween, Ty accepts.

This is a ghost story. A good one. It's also a story about bullying and anti-queer bigotry and the history of violence against transgressive women - and a sisterhood that transcends the grave. It's told in layers, peeling back the events of the evening until the reader finally understands everything, and the impact is all the more because of this. I liked it a lot.

Lavie Tidhar, "The Old Dispensation"; Tor.com, February 8, 2017
https://www.tor.com/2017/02/08/the-old-dispensation/

The short story is framed as the observations of a telepathic ruler (or rulers, or some intermediate being with multiple consciousness) known as the Exilarch torturing one of its trained assassins to determine just what happened on his latest mission, from which he returned somehow changed. It is set in an interstellar theocratic empire based on Jewish tradition and culture, but it's a nasty place indeed, where heresy merits death and the Treif - races outside the rules of acceptability - are freely warred on to the point of extermination. Lavie leaves quite a lot to the reader to work out, including the nature of the Exilarch, the origin of the Empire, and the consequences of what happened to the assassin during his mission. Interesting reading, but I found it unsatisfying despite the suggestion at the end that the Exilarch's reign of terror might be nearing its end.

Yoon Ha Lee, "Extracurricular Activities"; Tor.com, February 15, 2017
https://www.tor.com/2017/02/15/extracurricular-activities/

Lee's novelette is set in the same universe as his novels Ninefox Gambit and Raven Stratagem, and features one of the protagonists from that series, but is more accessible to the casual reader. It is set early in Shuos Jedao's career, and demonstrates the combination of skill, daring and foresight that will make Jedao legendary. The narrative has a light, at tines almost comedic tone, but there are hints of what is to come, particularly in Jedao's consciousness of the number of kills he makes. Yet at the sane time it's clear that he is dangerous, and thinks in terms of threat and violence. For readers of the novels, it's an interesting glimpse into one of Lee's most interesting characters. For those who don't already know Shuos Jedao, it's a finely crafted sf spy story.

Sandra Newman's The Country of Ice Cream Star is perhaps one of the grimmest and saddest dystopias I've ever read. I've been thinking about it a lot, and I'm still not sure I've unpacked all the horror - horror made all the worst because the teenaged, and most unreliable narrator/protagonist never quite understands how many ways she - and the people she claims as her own, her responsibility - have been used and abused and will in all likelihood continue to be.

There will be spoilers in what follows.

Ice Cream Star's country is the Nighted States - which likely includes all of North America - about 80 years after a plague has struck, killing off some unknown proportion of the population and prompting the flight of almost all white people from the continent. Exactly what happened, and how and why, is very vague, because our narrator knows only the barest bones of the tale, passed through the mouths of children.

What Ice Cream Star knows is that North Americans began dying, suddenly and quickly, from a disease called WAKS, which preferentially affected white people. At some point, the uninfected - possibly only the uninfected white - were evacuated to Europe. Left behind was a population of people of colour. All adults left behind seemed to have died of WAKS, but the surviving children were resistant, living long enough to die, in their late teens, from something else, colloquially known as posies, which may or may not be a variant of WAKS. Posies, of course, calls to mind the 'pocket full of posies' - flowers or herbs carried to mask the smell of death - from the nursery rhyme commonly thought to be a reference to the Great Plague (experts on folklore dispute this interpretation, though). But from the symptoms, and from the identification of posies as a carcinoma, I found myself thinking of Karposi's, and wondering if the original disease may have been mutagenic, weakening immune systems even among those resistant and their descendants, leaving them open to opportunistic infections.

So here we have a continent full of children, raising and bearing other children, living only to 18 or 20 then dying from something akin to AIDS, surviving on the remains of a dead civilisation, banding into groups and passing down garbled, half-remembered, half-fantastical memories of a dead culture.

While the geopolitics of this world are hazy, we gather from what Ice Cream Star knows, or learns from others (equally unreliable), that Russia and Europe have a vaccine or a cure for posies, that people live to a normal old age, and that civilization continues in those places. Russia, at least, seems to be conducting wars in various places around the globe, notably South America and Africa. And the Russians ('roos') keep their armies at strength by press-ganging child soldiers from North America. Aside from this, the rest of the world seems content to sit back and let the poor, black and Hispanic children of North America live their short lives of poverty and struggle.

The story itself is set in and around the former states of Massachusetts and New York, and the former District of Columbia. There are several quite different communities of survivors in this area, but the important thing to hold in mind that all the people in these communities are children. No one who is native to the Nighted States lives beyond 20, and many die earlier, from "posies" or from other illnesses, from accidents, from what is essentially gang warfare. Ice Cream Star and her people live in Massa Woods, where they are relative new-comers, having "come up from Chespea Waters." There are three other established communities in the area, the Christings, the Lowells and the Nat Mass Army. The Lowells are the largest community in the area, and the most technologically advanced, having made efforts to reclaim, understand and duplicate the remnants of the pre-plague culture. They live in a partially restored town and have plumbing and radios and they value science and education. The Christings are farmers, with a social order structured around a highly patriarchal reading/remembering of the Bible - organised by households, one older boy at the head with multiple wives and all their children. The Christings were a significant community in the area until recently, but most of the families have moved out, leaving only one Christing household in the area. The Nat Mass Army is a militaristic and male-dominated community. The boys hold the girls in common as nameless servants and sex partners, with one exception, the consort of the leader, or NewKing, who is always a girl given by the Christings, as a peace covenant. Ice Cream Star's Sengles are a small and relatively disorganised group, surviving by hunting, scavenging, trade, and 'thieving.'

Later in the novel we encounter two more cultures, each based in a city, with a much greater retention of knowledge and technology. The first of these is based in Ciudad de las Marias, formerly New York City. The dominant class, largely Latino, have imposed a form of theocractic rule on the black majority, in which the rulers of the city are a "Maria" - chosen in part through her ability to locate a light-skinned boy to serve as her "Jesus" - and a group of 12 "apostles" who witness her acquisition and then act as her counselors and the rulers of the "burrows." The Jesus, of course, is usually killed following the inauguration of the Maria and her sacred marriage to him, at her hands. The other community is a rigidly stratified military culture based in Quantico - formerly Washington D.C. - and devoted to the preservation of the Capitol area.

When Ice Cream Star captures a "roo" separated from his company of kidnappers, and learns from him that his people have a cure for the posies, which her beloved brother and leader of the Sengles has recently contracted, a course of events is started that will disastrously affect the communities of Massa Woods and Quantico, and lead to massive upheaval in Marias.

Fifteen-year-old Ice Cream Star is a disturbingly ambiguous hero. She becomes leader of the Sengles just as the roos have launched a major campaign to collect child soldiers in the Massa Woods area - by deception if possible, force if necessary. Their standard ploy is to offer the posies cure to those who go with them, then turn those they lure or forcibly capture into fodder for their interminable wars around the globe. Pasha, the roo that Ice
Cream Star captures, uses a variation of this ploy first to save his life and gain Ice Cream Star's trust, and later to manipulate her into initiating a war that will destabilise the entire area from Massa Woods to Quantico.

But Pasha is only one of many who use, deceive, abuse and manipulate Ice Cream Star. During the course of the novel, she is manipulated into unhealthy and deceptive sexual relationships, raped, used as a political bargaining chip, forced again and again into untenable situations as she tries to keep her people alive and find a cure for her brother. Her narrative positions her as a leader and active participant in much of this, but as the degree of unreliability of her perspective slowly becomes apparent, it also reveals the degree to which she is unwittingly used by those she encounters.

In the end, she has lost everything and is being taken away to become a pawn in an even larger political game - yet she continues to believe that her sacrifices will bring an end to the suffering of, not just her own people, but all the children of the Nighted States. It's heart-breaking to reach the end and finally realise how much has gone wrong, for Ice Cream Star and her country.

I haven't yet mentioned the thing that most people hone in on at the beginning - the language. Ice Cream Star and most other survivors speak variations of a language that seems partly derived from AAVE, with infusions of French (from Louisiana? From Quebec?), transformed by the powerful cadences of a people dependent on storytelling and oral traditions. I found it easy to read, others have found that it distanced them a bit from the text, making it easier for them to process the brutality of these children's lives thanks to the effort required to read it.

It's a difficult book, a bloody and tragic story, and I can't stop thinking about what it suggests about sexism, racism, colonisation, exploitation, and more frighteningly, human nature.

Carrie Patel's The Buried Life is an interesting, though flawed, debut novel. It is set in a post-apocalyptic world, in which cities have gone underground and technology has regressed to 18th century levels - trains but no cars or dirigible, nothing steampunkish here in terms of a more developed science built on earlier forms of technology. We are not told anything about the nature of the cataclysm, nor of the time that has passed since it occurred. We do learn quickly that what knowledge has survived is heavily controlled - history is a state secret, some literature of the past is freely available while some is fiercely repressed, and science seems strangely absent. In the city of Recoletta, absolute power seems to rest in an unelected Council, and class distinctions, based on wealth and power, are rigid.

This is a cautionary tale about power, secrecy, censorship and corruption, masquerading as a post-apocalyptic political thriller with murder and mayhem in great supply. It is strong on character and the trappings of a ripping good detective mystery, but doesn't quite manage to bind its disparate goals and narratives together. The solution to the mystery arrives too piecemeal and without appropriate emphasis and completeness for the mystery reader to be happy, and the deeper narrative about how power and resistance too often share the same mistakes seems too slightly woven into the story.

And it is disappointing that in the end, one of the characters that seemed to be a hero was seduced by the sweetness of power - though one might hope that there would be a sequel in which said hero regains the moral clarity needed to look beyond it.

Some good ideas and interesting characters, but not quite satisfying. Still, I'd like to see the story begun here developed further.

Neal Stephenson's novel Seveneves starts off with a bang - quite literally - and manages to maintain a quick pace for the first two-thirds of the book, despite massive amounts of what would be terminal infodumping in less skilled hands. The final third is rather more leisurely, the narrative twists perhaps a bit too telegraphed, and the conclusion seems rather unconclusive. But what carries the novel despite its flaws is the humanity of the characters and the magnitude of both the initial catastrophe and the urgency of the action.

The trajectory of the story is established from the very first sentence: "The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason." Within a few pages, scientists determine that as the fragments collide in orbit, they will eventually reach a critical point where millions of small to medium particles will begin to fall to earth in a massive and prolonged meteor shower that will destroy all life on earth. Humanity's only hope is to build a space habitat around the International Space Station that will serve as both as an ark and a base from which surviving humans will be able to build a new civilisation in space that will sustain them until the earth is ready for life again - an estimated five thousand years.

The best part of the novel is the first half, which covers the two years between the destruction of the moon and the beginning of the long death of the earth's biosphere, as a flotilla of mini-habitats, small enough to build on earth and send into space, but large enough to serve as homes to a handful of people, grows around the ISS, turning the station into an orbiting village. Taut plotting, a rollercoaster of minor and not-so-minor catastrophes, both in the lives of the station's inhabitants and in the struggle to make a habitat that can give a reasonable breeding population a chance at survival, lots of near misses and a few real tragedies, drive this section forward. Once the Hard Rain of meteors begins to fall and the station's inhabitants are left on their own, the tension rises dramatically due to internal conflicts, but by the time the habitat is physically secure for future growth and the conflicts resolved, the situation is long past critical in another area.

And this is my biggest problem with the novel. I don't believe - despite all the technical detail that's given us - that the various long-term survival narratives are actually possible, given the situations that the immediate survivors find themselves in. The final third of the novel - which begins under the heading "Five thousand years later" - attempts to persuade us that these narratives are valid, that it could have happened this way, and certainly the cultures and circumstances Stephenson describes are fascinating and fun to think about, but I do not quite believe in them enough to fully suspend disbelief, and that dulls my enjoyment a teensy bit.

Still, it's a decent read, and the sheer excitement of the beginning is strong enough to carry one's interest through to the end.

Paolo Bacigalupi's near-future dystopian thriller The Water Knife is a fast, hard ride through a drought-ridden Southwestern America where what little water remains is under the control of endlessly warring robber barons who live in sealed arcologies while the thirsty multitudes live in a hell where the strong rule and everyone else scrabbles to survive - but only barely.

Bacigalupi's novel belongs to the relatively new genre of what is called "climate fiction" - speculative novels, almost always dystopias, in which the effects of climate change on human life are a crucial part of the work, and as so, it is inherently a criticism of our lack of will and foresight in allowing such a future to be possible. But it is also, and perhaps more deeply, an examination of how far the concept of civil society can be degraded, how much of their dignity, morality and sense of connection people in desperate times will sacrifice to live one more day, how ruthless those with access to a limited power - in whatever sense - will go to hold onto their status. This is a world in which no one can be trusted, because anyone can be broken, and anyone will betray you for the dream of water.

The narrative focuses on water rights - in particular, documentation concerning senior rights to the Colorado River that will put anyone who owns them in the position of controlling the entire Southwest. Every major player is after them, and the list of mutilated bodies of people who someone thinks might know where they are hidden is growing. Angel is a water knife - a man whose job it is to cut through all the niceties to get whatever his employer needs to keep her control over the water she owns. And when he stumbles across the story of these old water rights, he knows it's up to him to get the rights for his boss. But no one knows who has them, and everyone, even Angel, is suspect. Also caught up on the bloody trail is Lucy, a journalist whose friend is seduced and murdered because of what he knows, and Maria, a destitute water peddler whose best friend is the mistress of another man who knows too much.

Toward the end of the novel, Angel and Lucy share a conversation that goes to the heart of the question Bacigalupi is asking. And the answer this novel gives us is grim indeed.

He shrugged. “Maybe people got choices. But mostly they just do what they’re pushed to do. You push, they stampede.” He nodded down at the screen and restarted the video. “And when shit really starts falling apart? Sure, people work together for a while, but not when it gets really bad. I read this article about one of those countries in Africa—Congo or Uganda or something. I was reading, thinking how shitty people are to each other, and then I got to a part where these soldiers, they…”

He glanced at Lucy, then looked away.

“They did a bunch of shit to a village.” He shrugged. “And it was exactly what some militia I worked with did to a bunch of Merry Perrys who tried to swim across the river to Nevada. And that was exactly like the cartels did when they took Chihuahua for good.

“It’s the same every time. All the rapes. All the chopped-off cocks that get shoved in dudes’ mouths, all the bodies burned with acid or lit on fire with gasoline and tires. Same shit, over and over.”

Lucy felt sick, listening to him. It was a view of the world that anticipated evil from people because people always delivered. And the worst part was that she couldn’t really argue.

“Like there’s something in our DNA,” she murmured, “that makes us into monsters.”

“Yeah. And we’re all the same monsters,” Angel said. “And it’s just accidents that turn us one way or another, but once we turn bad, it takes a long time for us to try to be something different.”

A taut, well-written suspense thriller with thought-provoking undertones.

What can you say about a novel that opens with unthinkable revenge - a deliberately-evoked cataclysm that will destroy a civilisation and scar a planet - and the searing grief of a mother at the sight of her brutally murdered son? N. K. Jemisin's latest book, Fifth Season, is a brilliantly conceived and executed novel about the unending cycle of destruction and rebirth that is life, set in a world shaped by apocalypse after apocalypse in which history is unreliable and much of the past is lost.

In this world of brokenness and endings, the earth itself is the great antagonist, the Evil Earth, the cruel Father, venting rage on the peoples living on his surface with earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, sometimes on a scale that nearly brings all life to ruin. The only force known to be able to hold back the damage is the gift of the orogenes, a human-seeming people with the ability to sense and manipulate the energies in stone, earth, and even living beings. They can quell or cause the earthshifts, great and small, but unless their powers are trained and under control, the energy they draw from their surroundings to achieve this can kill.

In the time and place of the novel, the current civilisation has found a way to force control on the orogenes, who are treated as potentially dangerous tools, not people, subject to an organisation known as The Fulcrum which gathers orogenes - or roggas, as they are called by most humans - as children and trains them to serve the needs of human society.

The narrative is told in three strands, at three different points in time. On the earliest strand, Damaya, a young orogene discovered when she instinctively uses her powers to defend herself against a human boy, is taken by a Guardian and brought to the Fulcrum for training. In the second strand, an orogene woman named Syrenite is sent by the Fulcrum on a mission with an older and very powerful orogene, Alabaster, to clear a blocked harbour in the city of Allia. And in the third strand, which opens at the moment of the cataclysm, an orogene woman hiding from the Fulcrum, passing as human, finds her dead son, and sets out through the wounded landscape and the post-apocalyptic chaos to track the killer who has taken her daughter.

Like the land itself, the characters are wounded again and again, partially healing only to face yet another catastrophe, and yet in their survival is the hope that something can be salvaged, and that perhaps, if the world is changed enough, there can finally be true healing - even if it is the healing of the end of all things.

The first of a trilogy of books, Fifth Season is a powerful and mature work from a master storyteller.

The Summer Prince is a complex and thoughtful YA novel set in a post-apocalyptic future (references are made to bombing, extreme climate change and plagues) in which some parts of the world have recovered, advanced and prospered while others remain damaged, unstable and unsafe. One bubble of prosperity (at least for most of its citizens) is the city of Palmeres Tres (the historical Palmeres was a fugitive community of escaped African slaves, people of mixed race, Indians and poor whites, mostly Portuguese, established in colonial Brazil in 1605). Palmeres Tres is a city built in the shape of a pyramid, with the wealthy and political elites living on the upper tiers, and the lowest class, those who work and live amidst the stench of the algae tanks that feed the city on the bottom.

Founded after the Y Plague which killed 70 percent of the male population around the world, Palmeres was and is a matriarchy, ruled by a Queen and her congress of advisors, mostly Aunties with a sprinkling of Uncles. The legitimacy of the Queen, however, comes from the dying choice of the Summer Kings, who are sacrificed yearly (in a cycle of four moon years followed by one sun year - the moon year Kings traditionally only confirm the current Queen, the sun year Kings have the option to choose a new Queen as they are ritually killed.

Palmeres Tres has evolved a society that is essentially conservative and rigidly stratified on class, age and gender, but sexually permissive. Same-sex marriages, bisexuality and multiple partnering are commonplace, but the classes rarely interact, society is divided into grandes (those over 30) and the younger wakas (seen as children and lacking power), and men are rarely seen in positions of power and authority. Furthermore, there is a divide between the grandes, particularly of the upper classes who are resistant to new technologies, and wakas, particularly those of the the lower classes, who are eager to access and use these technologies.

The novel starts in the spring of a moon year. All of Palmeres Tres is eagerly following the public appearances of the three final candidates for Summer King, including two young friends - June, an aspiring artist from a high-ranking and politically connected family, and Gil, a dancer whose mother is a sought-after clothing designer. Their choice for Summer King is Enki, dark-skinned and the child of a refugee from outside, who grew up among the algae vat workers. (Don't read too much into the similarity of the names Enki and Enkidu, Gil and Gilgamesh - I did, and was a little disappointed to find that all that was being referenced was "wild man" element of Enki's character, the gap in social status between the two young men, and the intensity of the relationship that eventually develops between them.)

Enki, of course, becomes the Summer King, and rather than play the game of figurehead, he sets out to use his ceremonial powers to effect real positive gains for the people of the underclass. Gil becomes his lover, and Juno his secret collaborator in performance/spectacle art intended to spark social change.

As the narrative unfolds, this complex coming-of-age story addresses issues as diverse as the role of art and spectacle in shaping revolution and social change, the responsible use of new technologies, the ethics of privilege and power, the meaning of sacrifice, the importance of integrity and the need to consider consequences. All this on top of the more commonly highlighted YA themes of exploring love, sexuality, and friendship and negotiating the path from teenager striving to break with one's family to adult who accepts and understands one's family.

I enjoyed the book, but I feel it is important to comment on the issue of cultural appropriation raised by one reviewer:

Unfortunately, the book is set in Brazil and so obviously written by someone who is not Brazilian. And before anyone can say but “it is not really Brazil, because it’s in the future” or something equally disingenuous like that: the language used in the book is Portuguese; the location of Palmares Tres is still in Bahia; the book references Brazilian history and background. So yes: it is Brazil.

But a Brazil that only an outsider could write. Because the story focuses on the parts of history and culture that an outsider would highlight, and none of the insider knowledge that goes much beyond the surface. And I want to be careful here because it’s not like I don’t appreciate and admire authors who want to move the focus from Europe/US to elsewhere in the world. I also have read interviews with the author (and even briefly met her at BEA a couple of years ago) and I believe in her good intentions and that she tried to be as respectful as possible, which just goes to show that even the best intentions can go awry. (http://thebooksmugglers.com/2013/10/smugglers-ponderings-thoughts-on-the-summer-prince-by-alaya-dawn-johnson.html)

I did notice that many readers/reviewers seemed to be veering toward exoticising the setting, as in this comment: "Alaya evokes the feeling of this place so well that I don't just want to visit Brazil, I want to learn capoeira, and samba."

Johnson has spoken about having done research and reached out to people with more knowledge and experience of Brazil, so it's clear that she acknowledged the issues of writing about another culture. And it's important for writers to push boundaries. It's hard to write authentically about a culture you have not lived in, but it is every author's right to try it, and Johnson clearly tried to do it with sensitivity and respect.

Personally, I feel that a book that succeeds in many areas while being flawed in some others is still a good book. I've read some great books set partially or wholly in Canada but written by people not steeped in Canadian culture that were "off" from a cultural perspective but still good because of what they accomplished in other areas. Is it always cultural appropriation to write about a culture not one's own? Does the intent and effort to deal with the culture respectfully make up for any lapses or inauthenticities perceived by the reader who is familiar with the culture? These are questions I don't have answers to. Which is, I suppose, why I've written at length about all the interesting aspects of the novel, but also added this lengthy discussion of culture appropriation.

One of the few 1950s era novels dealing with the immediate consequences of nuclear war that was written by a woman and from the perspective of a female protagonist.

Reading a '50s novel that's written from the perspective of an ordinary '50s suburban housewife is a very strange thing in 2014. So much has changed, especially for women. And yet so much is familiar. Many developments in the novel that come in the wake of a surprise attack on American soil, such as the persecution of immigrants who've been in the country for years, eerily parallels recent events in the US.

It was difficult to read about the struggles of women who had so little practical knowledge and experience of anything outside home and family to make sense of what's happening to them - even though I'm old enough to remember when that was true for many middle class married women. And yet the subtle pervasiveness of sexual threat, both from strangers in lawless and desperate times, and from the men placed in charge of a frightened and helpless population, was unhappily too familiar still. Merril captures the protagonist's transition from confused and helpless suburban wife and mother to a survivor with the strength to deal with privation and illness with skill.

C. L. Moore and Leigh Brackett also wrote dystopic/post-apocalyptic novels in the 50s (Doomsday Morning and The Long Tomorrow) and I don't remember ever reading either one. I think I might hunt them down and check them out. Andre Norton also wrote several post-apocalyptic novels - Star Man's Son is the one that leaps immediately to mind but I think there were othets as well. Might be interesting to re-read those as well.

Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy - consisting of Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam - is a dystopic vision of monumental proportions.

I didn't get around to reading the first volume until after the third had been released; this perhaps meant that I was somewhat more fortunate than early readers of Oryx and Crake, who were faced with something very bleak, and did not then know that there would be more to come, that would at least explain and leave the reader with some sense of hope.

My first coherent thought about Oryx and Crake was to relate it to other science fiction works - I thought of it as Doctor Frankenstein meets Doctor Ain in the Garden of Eden (and if you don't know the Tiptree short story I'm referring to, shame on you). My second coherent thought was to reserve further thinking until I had finished the remaining volumes.

I enjoyed reading The Year of the Flood more than I did Oryx and Crake - possibly because I like the protagonists better, and because I liked the story of subversives and neo-hippies more than that of genetic scientists playing god - even though in this volume, the second of the trilogy, those two groups are shown to overlap.

It was most interesting seeing the events and the people of the first volume through different eyes, from different perspectives. So many gaps were filled in, and Snowman's solitary narrative from Oryx and Crake took on depth and complexity. I was quite caught up by the ending, and moved on to the third volume, Maddaddam, immediately.

And was rewarded. All the threads from the previous two novels are caught up and woven together in one final tapestry that shows clearly connections barely seen or hinted at before. So, too, the survivors of the Flood - and not just the humans and the experimental creations of Crake - come together to presage a new and very different future.

Through this layering and re-layering of perspectives, Atwood brings the reader slowly but powerfully to the conclusion you'd least expect (at least, if you were reading anything other than Atwood) and does it so beautifully that by the end I was crying.

For those well aware of Atwood's tendency to make sly references, I will simply add that the name of the final volume is a palindrome, which for some reason called to my mind the phrase from T. S. Elliot's Four Quartets: in my beginning is my end.

Nomansland is inspired by a casual reference to a female-only society in the classic post-apocalypse novel The Chrysalids by John Wyndham: "To the north-east they say there is a great land where the plants aren’t very deviational, and the animals and people don’t look deviational, but the women are very tall and strong. They rule the country entirely, and do all the work. They keep their men in cages until they are about twenty-four years old, and then eat them. They also eat shipwrecked sailors. But as no one ever seems to have met anyone who has actually been there and escaped, it’s difficult to see how that can be known. Still, there it is—no one has ever come back denying it either." Hauge has taken this reference as the basis for the community of Foundland.

In talking about Nomansland, I think it is important to keep its beginnings in mind because both novels feature extreme examples of societies obsessed with conformity to a rule of behaviour and indeed of ways of being, and young people who secretly challenge the strictly enforced norms and ultimately elect to leave these societies. It's also important to keep in mind that in both societies, memory of what life was really like before the apocalypse has been lost in part, supressed in part, and heavily coloured by the choices made by the founders of these post-Tribulation societies. As well, knowledge about other existing communities of survivors is repressed and mythologised - the women of Foundland are not cannibals, and as the young protagonist of Hauge's novel learns, men as not exactly as she has been told either.

Nomansland presents a society that shares some elements with other women-only dystopias, including Wyndham's Consider Her Ways, and also some elements with the medieval Christian monastic orders, both for men and for women. The women of Foundland live under a rigid caste structure, live highly regimented communal lives, obey rules of conduct that focus on a denial of individuality, sensuality, "vanity" - which includes everything from personal decoration to looking in a mirror, are enjoined to avoid "special friendships" and receive severe punishments including whippings, shunnings, solitary confinement and banishment for breaking the Rule.

However, as the teen-aged protagonist Keller learns, these rules are indeed broken at every level of Foundland's society. Its rulers dress up in fancy clothing and indulge in sensual repasts. Some adults maintain extended "special friendships" and a few maintain clandestine connections with men who visit the island from time to time, trading in tobacco and other luxuries. And some of Keller's peers have stumbled upon a cache of artifacts from the past, including clothing, jewely, cosmetics and fashion magazines. Some reviewers of the novel have fastened on the way in which Keller and her companions throw themselves into frenzies of secret beauty pageants and make-over parties as a rebuke of feminist criticism of "the beauty trap," and even a statement about the "essential" quality of decoration as part of the female psyche, but it serms to me more that these are adolescents embracing new (to them) behaviours and rejecting the severe codes of behaviour they grew up with, and human beings seeking to explore their individuality and sensuality. In any case, the novel provides much food for thought on issues of gender and individual identity.

It's also a good read.

And finally, the last few books from 2013.

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Magnificat

What would happen if, following the death of the Pope, the Conclave met and somehow unanimously elected someone whose name they had never heard or seen before? Who was everything a Pope should never be - a middle-aged magistrate from communist China, an atheist, a woman? Yarbro imagines it, and it is quite wonderful to read.

Simon Clark, The Night of the Triffids

A quite enjoyable sequel/homage to Wyndham's classic The Day of the Triffids, which begins 30-odd years later among the human survivors on the Isle of Wight. The narrator and protagonist, David Mason (son of the narrator of the original novel) is a pilot who hopes to find evidence of other surviving colonies to unite in the face of increasing indications that the triffids are intelligent and have plans to destroy the remaining humans. In the course of his quest, Mason, like his father before him, is harshly reminded that triffids are not the only threats to the survival of humanity.

Ellen Galford, Queendom Come

Galford's satirical, feminist, woman-centred view of the world is in high form in this novel. Set in Scotland during Thatcher's Blue Reign, the narrative focuses on the sudden appearance of an ancient Caledonian war-queen, called upon, like Arthur, to return in the hour of her nation's greatest need, and the near immortal seer/sorceress who was the queen's counsellor centuries ago and has awaited her return. Funny as hell.

R. A. MacAvoy, The Third Eagle

MacAvoy is a brilliant fantasist, but this foray into space opera is, while pleasant reading, not among her masterpieces. The protagonist, Wanbli Elf Darter, a skilled member of a clan of bodyguard/assassins who traditionally serve the landed classes on the planet of Neunacht, leaves his people and culture behind to travel in space. After many picaresque adventures, he ends up on the "revivalist" ship Commitment, which is crewed by survivors of generation starships sent out centuries before. The crew of the Commitment have adopted a mission to hunt down other such sleeper ships drifting through space - whereupon they decant a few of the frozen people aboard. The rest they kill, because there is no place for them to go - the colonised planets won't accept them, and the Commitment can only take on enough to replace crew lost to injury, illness or old age. Wanbli, of course, finds an answer that allows the sleepers to live. Despite the grim situation of the sleepers, this novel is mostly light-hearted and fun.

Three novels about the end of the world, from three authors, writing at three points in time - the 1970s, the 1990s, and the 2010s.

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Time of the Fourth Horseman

An early Yarbro science fiction novel (from 1976) set in a (now alternative) timeline in which overpopulation due to improvements in medicine has brought about massive social problems and a burgeoning, underserviced underclass. Suddenly, in the city of Stockton, diseases thought to have been eradicated begin showing up, but no one recognises them - or at least admits to doing so. The novel focuses on the efforts of a small group of dedicated maverick health care workers who discover that the diseases have been intentionally reintroduced into the underclass population as an experiment in population control, with a side order of eugenics.

From the initial horror of one doctor's realisation that the man closest to her is responsible for running this "experiment" to the ambiguous ending which may or may not presage the spread of plague worldwide, this is an interesting read, albeit one that is in some ways dated, and that lacks the careful characterisation and attention to detail that marks Yarbo's later fiction.

Jack Womack, Random Acts of Senseless Violence

I had not heard of this book until Jo Walton reviewed it on tor.com. Then an acquaintance of mine with excellent taste in books (we like many of the same things) read it and couldn't stop raving. So I read it. It is amazing. And the last few pages chilled my soul. More people should read it.

This is what Walton said:

Random Acts is written in the form of the diary of Lola Hart, a twelve year old girl in a near-future New York City. As the book progresses she changes from being a sweet middle-class child to a robbing murdering street girl as society changes around her. Presidents are assassinated and money is devalued and martial law is declared as she worries about her sexuality and groans about being forced to read Silas Marner for school. At the start of the book she's writing in standard English with the occasional odd word choice, by the end she has progressed into a completely different dialect, and you have progressed step by step along with her and are reading it with ease. I can't think of a comparable linguistic achievement, especially as he does it without any made up words. (Random example: "Everything downcame today, the world's spinning out and I spec we finally all going to be riding raw.") I also can't think of many books that have a protagonist change so much and so smoothly and believably. What makes it such a marvelous book is the way Lola and her world and the prose all descend together, and even though it's bleak and downbeat it's never depressing.

So, why haven't you read it?

Back in the 90s when this book was written, i'm not sure I would have accepted the premise that the veneer of civilization we cling to is so fragile that it can disintegrate into chaos in just a few months. But we've come so much closer to the edge now, and that makes the events of this book that much more believable to me.

It's brilliant. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Don't be fooled by the fact that the protagonist is 12 years old. This is not a YA novel.

Alex Adams, White Horse

A novel (first in a planned trilogy) of considerable power. As it begins, The protagonist, Zoe, is living a perfectly normal life working on the cleaning staff at a pharmaceutical company, trying to save money to go to college. Then one day, she wakes up to find a mysterious jar in her apartment. The mysterious appearance of the pot, which she does not touch, seems to signal the beginning of the apocalypse, in the form of a mutagenic plague that kills most of its victims from rapid, lethal change; those who survive no longer seem human. Zoe is one of the few immunes, and the novel details most chillingly her struggle to survive and find the man she loves in a world that is filled with monstrous brutality.

So, one of my favourite authors from my youth is John Wyndham, and I have been trying to re-acquire and, of course, re-read, his novels. Well, Penguin Books seems to have decided to help me out with that, as they have recently re-released a number of Wyndham's classics, and so I've been adding to my collection of Wyndham.

The Chrysalids

A post-apocalyptic dystopia, set hundreds, perhaps thousands of years after a Tribulation, most likely a nuclear world war from the description of the ruined places of the earth and the key plot point of on-going outbreaks of hereditary defects among plans, animals and humans. The novel's strong point is the description of a society that polices its racial purity with extreme and religious vigour, destroying and evidence of genetic deviation among plant and animal life, and exiling (after forced sterilisation) any humans who show signs of being Other than what is prescribed as human.

The story focuses on a group of young people. outwardly completely human, who have developed - and learned to hide - telepathic abilities, and what happens to them once they are no longer able to keep their suspicious gifts a secret. The conclusion is (almost literally) a bit of a deus ex machina, and wraps everything up all too quickly without examining any of the potential problems it poses - but the close look at a society obsessed with keeping itself pure of all taint of the Other - and how those in power use the obsession to their own ends - is worth the read. Also fun is the counterpoint provided by the world-travelling sailor-uncle of the narrator, who has seen through much of the hypocrisy, deception and fear rampant in his own society and the others he has known in his travels.

Trouble with Lichen

Despite the light and breezy tone of this novel, which is often considered one of Wyndham's lesser works, it's actually an interesting novel with a profoundly feminist perspective for something written by a man in 1960.

Diana Brackley is a chemist, at her first job following graduation, when she discovers that her boss, a man she has somewhat of a hero-worshipping infatuation with, is concealing a scientific discovery. Shocked by this, she secretly repeats his discovery, realises that he has found an compund that can significantly increase life span, and decides to do something about it on her own since it seems that he won't.

Her decisions are rooted in the awareness that for women (in this pre-Pill era), life seems require a forced choice between career and motherhood - but that if only women had more time, they could do both, if they wanted too.

There's some wonderful social satire from a feminist point of view in this novel, and it's a quick and pleasant read. At times, Wyndham drops the ball in his understanding of the feminist perspective, but considering the time in which he wrote, I'm certainly not going to rag him for it (sexist metaphors intentional). There are lots of men today who couldn't see some of this as clearly as he did then.

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My life in books

Books in my life

Entries tagged with g: post-apocalyptic fiction

Short Fiction: March 1, 2019

Mary Robinette Kowal: The Lady Astronaut of Mars duology

Rebecca Roanhorse: Trail of Lightning

Gwyneth Jones: Proof of Concept

Essays: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Post-Apocalyptic TV and Film

Nancy Kress: Tomorrow’s Kin

Short Fiction: December 20, 2017

Short Fiction: December 5, 2017

Sandra Newman: The Country of Ice Cream Star

Carrie Patel: The Buried Life

Neal Stephenson: Seveneves

Paolo Bacigalupi: The Water Knife

N. K. Jemisin: Fifth Season

Alaya Dawn Johnson: The Summer Prince

Judith Merril: Shadow on the Hearth

Margaret Atwood: The Maddaddam Trilogy

Lesley Hauge: Nomansland

2013: Novels

An apocalyptic trio

Two by Wyndham