“There were riots in Paris, but there are always riots in Paris”
Post-apocalyptic and dystopian, cynical, cautionary, satirical, hilarious, concern“There were riots in Paris, but there are always riots in Paris”
Post-apocalyptic and dystopian, cynical, cautionary, satirical, hilarious, concerned, realistic, evocative, ominous, thought-provoking … MR ADAM is all of the above and a good deal more besides.
Consider a hypothetical world in which a nuclear accident sterilizes every man on the planet except Mr Adam, a rather unassuming, mildly introverted man with a definite case of low self-esteem, who happened to be working deep in a mine shielded by vast quantities of lead deposits at the time of the accident. Pat Frank’s brilliant (but hopefully not prescient) tale tells the disconcerting story of a shocked world’s reactions to the situation from a variety of possible perspectives – young vs old; male vs female; government or military vs citizens; nation vs nation; and, of course, Mr Adams vs the rest of the world who see artificial insemination (with him as the sole source of semen) as the only possibility for the continuation of the human race (as if that is necessarily a good thing, LOL!).
Easy, easy, easy to recommend to other readers and a definite incentive to explore Pat Frank’s more widely known classic, ALAS, BABYLON.
“Three smallmouth bass so far, another three pike, and a couple of smaller pickerel … she had pulled in about half of the net already. She’d hoped “Three smallmouth bass so far, another three pike, and a couple of smaller pickerel … she had pulled in about half of the net already. She’d hoped for a few more fish.”
In MOON OF THE CRUSTED SNOW, Canadian author Waubgeshig Rice explored what happens in a post-apocalyptic world where the bridge to civilization, as fragile and as tenuous as it was when it existed, collapses utterly – complete power failure, total communications blackout, no internet, no telephone, no television, no delivery of any goods or commodities, no fuel.
Ten years later, life in a small aboriginal community fully isolated from the outside world, from the white world, a life renewing their dwindling Anishinaabe traditions, has encountered the fatal roadblock of dwindling resources. Their lake is overfished and the land-based animal resources have fled the neighborhood of their community. Migration to a new home has become a vital necessity and the elders of the community have decided it is time to send a scouting party to their traditional home area of the northern shores of Georgian Bay on Lake Huron. They need to discover whether life in their former home is viable.
As one might expect in any such novel, the reader is met with a complete spectrum of actions and reactions – heroism, cowardice, bravery, courage, violence, fear, hope, despair, doubt, greed, generosity, leadership, withdrawal and, of course, more than a few deaths under a myriad of related circumstances. Sadly, author Rice also tells a story in which a post-apocalyptic world has failed to learn from its past errors, its past hatred, and most definitely has not evolved into a post-racial world. Racism and xenophobia remains an endemic component of white, western society.
MOON OF THE TURNING LEAVES is a worthy sequel and although it does not have quite the strength and compelling urgency of its predecessor MOON OF THE CRUSTED SNOW, it is an easy novel to recommend to those who enjoy themes of post-apocalypse and dystopia. Learning some of the components of aboriginal Anishinaabe culture and their relationship to the world around us is a definite bonus.
I’m generally not a fan of the horror genre. That and my brother’s firmly stated dislike of Stephen King’s work Yes, Virginia, there IS a multiverse!
I’m generally not a fan of the horror genre. That and my brother’s firmly stated dislike of Stephen King’s work (our tastes seem reasonably closely aligned) kept me from trying anything by King for until I was firmly ensconced in my eighth decade of reading. Other than serendipity and finding a free copy in one of our Local Free Library boxes, I can’t imagine what prompted me to start with an immense chunkster like 11/22/63! But start it I did … and my reaction is hands down “WOW”! 11/22/63 is a page turner for every one of its 1100 pages.
If somebody suggested to me that it was possible to create a novel that dumped historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy, dystopia, alternate history, and romance into a genre blender to create a credible and completely compelling novel that would have me holding my breath through the length of a 1000+ page doorstopper, I would in turn have suggested that they get their head read. 11/22/63 fits the bill.
A time portal or an alternate world portal is a well-worn fantasy trope. Indeed a reader of fantasy and science fiction would not raise many eyebrows if they suggested it was over-used. But once Jake Epping, a high school English teacher in small town Maine steps through a time portal and finds himself in a very racist, very misogynist, very McCarthy-esque anti-Communist mid-20th century USA, Stephen King’s awesome story-telling ability will carry you away.
The pathos in King’s description of an essay from one of Epping’s students describing his father’s sledge-hammer slaughter of their entirely family was heartbreaking. The heartwarming evolution of Epping’s love for fellow teacher Sadie Dunhill (in the past, mind you) would put to shame any efforts by any romance author you care to name. There’s a fabulously clever twist. Epping’s presence in the past invokes the well known butterfly effect and changes his subsequent future BUT any return visit to the past resets everything to where it was before his first step through the portal. Now THAT would put a smile on any successful sci-fi or fantasy author’s face. The new past and alternate future history created by Epping’s interference in the events in 1963 Dallas is disturbing and completely terrifying.
Taking a cue from Alfred Hitchcock’s working manuals and his perennial cameo appearances in his movies, King manages to squeeze in any number of sneaky references to Pennywise, the evil clown of IT fame. (I’m betting there were other references to previous novels sprinkled throughout the story but – as I said – I haven’t read any other King novels so, if they were there, they went right over my head).
Did I say that I hadn’t read any other King novels? That’s a situation I plan to change very quickly.
“… just like the old ones the government stole us away to, where they conducted experiments, where the“I was in one of the new residential schools, …”
“… just like the old ones the government stole us away to, where they conducted experiments, where they tried to kill the Indian in the child.”
HUNTING BY STARS, a sequel to THE MARROW THIEVES, posits a mid-21st century dystopian world, caused by the ravages of global climate warming, in which non-aboriginal white people have somehow lost the ability to dream. The scientific reasons for this devastating neurological deficit in white people and the fact that its cure rests in the bone marrow of aboriginal people are not explored. Nor are those explanations necessary for Dimaline’s story - aboriginal people are hunted down, their bone marrow is harvested, and the marrow donor is summarily killed. Aboriginal lives are meaningless and expendable in the drive to rescue whites from the plague and pandemic madness caused by the loss of dreaming. Even worse yet, with a terrifying program of indoctrination and brain-washing (in a manner much like Rick Yancey hypothesized for his extraterrestrial invasion in his young adult sci-fi novel, THE 5TH WAVE), some aboriginals, having been captured by the marauding whites, are absorbed and re-inserted into their communities as secret agents to assist with the “recruiting and harvesting” of healthy young aboriginals for their marrow.
The narrative stands, fully exposed in its naked reality, as an extended metaphor for the cultural and actual genocide of aboriginal people in Canada by the white non-native population, their government and its tools, the Roman Catholic and other Christian churches.
Highly recommended with the added hope that THE MARROW THIEVES and its sequel HUNTING BY STARS make it onto the curriculum for younger school readers. Perhaps if young readers, who are undoubtedly innocent of Canada’s past offenses, become shocked and angry, they will become adamant activists in the fight to ensure the problem is repaired and subsequently relegated to history. (Dare I say that we might hope to swell the ranks of the “woke”?) Like the first step in AA’s Twelve Step Program to recovery from alcoholism, the white community’s acknowledgement of the existence of this problem, as shameful and as embarrassing as it is (and note carefully that this is couched in the present tense), is the first necessary step to a meeting of the minds with aboriginal people, to the adoption of some of the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and to the elevation of aboriginal people to a recognized, important status in the future of a compassionate, tolerant, forward-thinking Canada.
“Forget about flying saucers and little green men and giant mechanical spiders spitting out death ray“The truth is, once they found us, we were toast”
“Forget about flying saucers and little green men and giant mechanical spiders spitting out death rays. Forget about epic battles with tanks and fighter jets and the final victory of us scrappy, unbroken, intrepid humans over the bug-eyed swarm. That’s about as far from the truth as their dying planet was from our living one.”
THE 5TH WAVE is a gripping young adult tale of courage and survival in the face of an extraterrestrial invasion that knocks the intellectual stuffing out of the likes of INDEPENDENCE DAY, a much loved classics like THE WAR OF THE WORLDS or even the best that the STAR WARS franchise has to offer. This invasion was not meant for mere planetary conquest. This was all-out total genocide of humankind that had been planned over centuries and would be carefully executed in five stages – first, EMP or electromagnetic pulse; second, artificially generated coastal tsunamis on a global scale; third, a devastating plague; fourth, the silent hunting down and execution of remaining pockets of humanity … and the fifth? Well, you’re just going to have to read the story, aren’t you?
Aside from telling a fascinating tale of survival, romance, high-tech horror and gruesome dystopia, I have no doubt that Rick Yancey was also making a profound political comment. He was leaving intellectual thinking room for the conclusion that his story was an extended metaphor for the possible destruction of the USA or even world from within by current right-wing elements, gun worship, and even evangelical Christianity. A literary, book-length version of Walt Kelly’s oft-repeated Pogo aphorism, “We have met the enemy and he is us”.
Consider these rather interesting hints that might lead a reader to that interpretation:
‘ “Twigs” … street for “thugs with guns”, murderers, rapists, black marketers, kidnappers, and just your general punks who showed up midway through the 3rd wave … it wasn’t the aliens that first made us gear up for war; it was our fellow humans.”
“Dad had a thing about guns. Never liked them. Said guns might not kill people, but they sure made it easier. Now he didn’t think they were dangerous so much as he thought they were ridiculously lame.”
‘ “Now I lay me down to sleep …” to me, just random noise. Gibberish. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but I felt that, when it came to God, there was a broken promise in there somewhere.”
Maybe there’s a message and maybe there’s only a story. But, if you put your nose down to where the rubber hits the road, that story is pretty damned exciting. Definitely recommended.
“Cal and I are not in the Silver world anymore … we have escaped.”
When I reviewed RED QUEEN, I characterized it as
“a timely and thrilling dystopia“Cal and I are not in the Silver world anymore … we have escaped.”
When I reviewed RED QUEEN, I characterized it as
“a timely and thrilling dystopian young adult tale of revolution in the face of authoritarian rule by a patriarchal royal family and a right-wing population that see privilege and rule as their right by virtue of their physical superiority (endowed, of course, by no more than the coincidence of their birth genes)”
set in a world
“populated by two peoples separated by their DNA and their blood – red (effectively like yours and mine and our fellow normal and human readers) or silver, that comes with a bewildering variety of fantastic and near magical powers.”
I praised the novel for its commentary on a variety of disparate themes –
“coming of age and young love (including, of course, the almost mandatory love triangle); family; war and death; slavery, totalitarianism, and revolution; courage and heroism, loyalty, and friendship; compassion contrasted with anything that a reader might consider its opposites; government; hereditary royalty, and more.”
GLASS SWORD not only failed to clear the expectations set by this fabulous opening novel, it tripped and fell before it even got to the point of attempting to jump over the bar!
While I was happy to give RED QUEEN a 5-star rating and a place on my Top 10 Reads of 2022 list, its sequel, GLASS SWORD (which I was anticipating with a world of high expectations) on the other hand is a classic example of fall-flat-on-your-face crash and burn! The plot, such as it is, includes only an endless pointless search for Aveyard’s mental vision of a Legion of Super Heroes – those other folks in Cal Calore’s and Mare Barrow’s world who were inexplicably born with the hybrid gene that gifts them unimaginable (and unexplained) super powers. In short, she’s accumulating a revolutionary army of red-silver hybrid X-men. The meandering search and Mare Barrow’s perpetual introspection questioning her abilities, her motives, her judgment, and whether, in fact, Cal is to be trusted any more than his evil brother Maven becomes a flat, boring trudge that actually escalates into aggravating and pushes the reader into a “GET ON WITH IT!!” mental state.
Sorry, Ms Aveyard. This reader simply lost interest and endurance waiting for something meaningful to happen. GLASS SWORD was, regrettably, set aside as a 1-star DNF and KING’S CAGE or any subsequent novels in the series were permanently removed from my TBR list.
“Like those weird cults that crop up from time to time.”
“I heard of one that asks an old man in the sky to keep them alive every time they go to slee“Like those weird cults that crop up from time to time.”
“I heard of one that asks an old man in the sky to keep them alive every time they go to sleep. People need to believe there’s more to the world than there is.”
“And the world is just shit … there’s no need to imagine the planet as some malevolent force seeking vengeance. It’s a rock. This is just how life is supposed to be: terrible and brief and ending in – if you’re lucky – oblivion.”
NK Jemisin can turn a phrase. There’s sure no doubt about that. And I can recognize and appreciate an artful double jab and left hook at theism, organized religion, and the dismal state of world affairs when I see one. But despite that and notwithstanding my characterization of Jemisin’s THE FIFTH SEASON as one of the finest fantasy/sci-fi novels that I’ve ever been privileged to clap eyes on, THE OBELISK GATE just wasn’t working for me. I thought that the dialogue was strained and neither the character, the continued world-building, or plot development was coming into focus for me. I really, really wanted it to work but, despite forcing myself to read through to the halfway point, I ended up setting it aside for future consideration.
I’m going to make the assumption that the novel IS as good as most readers say it is and the fault rests with me and the state of my mind when I gave it a shot. Perhaps after a year’s lapse since my reading of THE FIFTH SEASON, I had lost a little of the momentum and enthusiasm necessary to tackle such a monumental and complex literary challenge. I had also just returned from a month long vacation in Egypt and Europe. My body was tired and my mind was probably not up to the demands of that kind of a novel.
"We are the seeds, ... This is a silo. They put us here for the bad times."
A toxic world after a disaster whose exact nature was left undefined ha"We are the seeds, ... This is a silo. They put us here for the bad times."
A toxic world after a disaster whose exact nature was left undefined has forced humanity to flee into dystopian underground silos. And, taking a page from the oft-used sci-fi trope of multi-generational starships, humanity has lost the knowledge of the nature of that disaster, the nature of their previous existence, and even the existence of other silos in which humanity was planted like seeds for a far distant future time and an unplanned and only distantly hoped for return to the surface. The existence of that possibility seems to have been lost to subsequent generations born underground who know life only in the limited environment of the silo.
“She had a sense of the size and scope of the world below them. And then she had seen with her own eyes the view of the outside with its phantomlike sheets of smoke they called clouds rolling by at miraculous heights. She had even seen a star, which [she] thought stood an inconceivable distance away. What god would make so much rock below and air above and just a measly silo between?”
Think of WOOL as a slow-paced, unquenchable slow-burn yet entirely compelling and gripping coming-of-age story of an entire civilization after a global disaster and toxic political managment by a close-knit, tightly held autocracy that controls an unknowing population through lies and manipulation. But even the government’s own comprehensive guide books and procedure manuals knew that the revolution was a foregone conclusion. WOOL is the story of that revolution.
“ ‘What do seeds do when they’re left too long?’ she asked him … ‘We rot,’ he said. ‘All of us. We go bad down here, and we rot so deep that we won’t grow anymore.’ He blinked and looked up at her. ‘We’ll never grow again.’ ”
A tenacious, resourceful, courageous and self-willed heroine, Juliette was having none of that.
So why not a 5-star rating? My personal take on the plot needs a deeper development of the back story of the autocracy within the silo. Did mankind place themselves into a silo “starship” to seed future generations and then restrict mankind’s movement back to “mother Earth” by creating an authoritarian autocracy or did that somehow develop on its own after mankind had retreated from a clear existential threat above ground? This reader needs to know. That said, I have no hesitation in recommending WOOL to lovers of the sci-fi and dystopia genre.
“I’m not entirely convinced that there are limits to misfortune and evil.”
I should have been expecting exactly what I got. It isn’t as if there weren’“I’m not entirely convinced that there are limits to misfortune and evil.”
I should have been expecting exactly what I got. It isn’t as if there weren’t any clues or warnings. The first, of course, was that José Saramago had previously won a Nobel Prize in Literature. I have no wish to be pretentious or snobby about literary writing but it does stand to reason that a Nobel Prize winner’s writing would be … well, literary! The back cover marketing blurb gushed, “A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century. BLINDNESS is a powerful portrayal of man’s worst appetites and weaknesses – and man’s ultimately exhilarating spirit.” Hmmm … in short, a clearly very high-minded and literary description for a very literary novel.
There is no question that BLINDNESS, the story of humanity’s response to an epidemic of “white blindness”, has moments of breathtaking brilliance. And the plot idea itself is compelling stuff. But the mixture that was dystopian, apocalyptic, suspense thriller plot and Saramago’s style of literary composition of ideas just never gelled into a story that I felt compelled to finish. One or two stars for my personal reaction and the fact that it was a DNF combined with four or five stars for the episodic “wow” moments averages it out to a three star “been there, done that” for me.
But there’s no doubt you’ll have to come to your own decision.
“So the history of life on Earth is … a never-ending symphony … written on nucleic acid and performed by protein.”
If you’re not fond of a science-“So the history of life on Earth is … a never-ending symphony … written on nucleic acid and performed by protein.”
If you’re not fond of a science-based, technical thriller plot moved forward at high speed by an awesome number of info-dump essays on an equally awesome and disparate variety of topics then DUST is probably not a novel you’re going to enjoy. Me? I loved it – entomology; evolution and paleontology; ecology and the importance of bio-diversity; domestic terrorism; submarines, nuclear war and the operation of nuclear missile silos; extinction cycles; cloning, genetics, gene-splitting and recombinant DNA; the exploration of Saturn and its moon Enceladus; prions and mad cow disease; economics; right-wing politics and talking heads - you’ve got to admit that it would be a challenge to come up with a more diverse list than that!
The plot of DUST is simple enough to describe without wandering into spoiler territory. What happens when the world wakes up and discovers that a wide variety of its insects have catastrophically become extinct? And make no mistake! We’re not talking about the imagined joy of life without mosquitoes and black flies here. DUST hypothesizes a tumultuous cascade of terrifying possibilities up to and including global nuclear warfare piled on top of the existential threat of mankind’s biological extinction following hard on the heels of the insects. This is a story which will guarantee that a reader pays more attention to the news when topics of climate change, bio-diversity, ecology, and care for the environment reach the headlines.
On a side note pertaining urgently to today’s political environment. Pellegrino’s portrayal of the conduct of an ultra right-wing radio celebrity makes it VERY clear that conspiracy theorists, radio hosts and media stars like Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh are dangerous. What should be done about their lies and their fomenting of hatred, racism, and violence up to and including domestic terrorism is an open question that MUST be addressed as a matter of national survival!
“The gods rule us still … And they are no longer kind.”
“And we will rise up. Red as the dawn.”!
RED QUEEN is a timely and thrilling dystopian young adu“The gods rule us still … And they are no longer kind.”
“And we will rise up. Red as the dawn.”!
RED QUEEN is a timely and thrilling dystopian young adult tale of revolution in the face of authoritarian rule by a patriarchal royal family and a right-wing population that see privilege and rule as their right by virtue of their physical superiority (endowed, of course, by no more than the coincidence of their birth genes). Mare Barrow’s world is populated by two peoples separated by their DNA and their blood – red (effectively like yours and mine and our fellow normal and human readers) or silver, that comes with a bewildering variety of fantastic and near magical powers.
It isn’t difficult to guess that the themes such a novel would touch on would include coming of age and young love (including, of course, the almost mandatory love triangle); family; war and death; slavery, totalitarianism, and revolution; courage and heroism, loyalty, and friendship; compassion contrasted with anything that a reader might consider its opposites; government; hereditary royalty, and more.
While I saw RED QUEEN as located in the center of a square cornered by Suzanne Collins’ THE HUNGER GAMES, Kristin Cashore’s GRACELING, George RR Martin’s GAME OF THRONES, and (believe it or not!) John Wyndham’s perennial sci-fi classic, THE CHRYSALIDS, I would rush to assure potential readers that there is absolutely nothing in the least derivative about Aveyard's delightful novel! And it certainly isn’t difficult to imagine Mare Barrow’s plight; her mental outlook, emotions, and physical characteristics; her conduct; her decision making; and her trials and tribulations as being a thoroughly innovative construct that draws on pieces of Katniss Everdeen, Karsa, Daenerys Targaryen, and Petra Storm.
When I reviewed THE CHRYSALIDS, I closed with the following thought:
“Analytical readers will be mindful of the irony in the closing chapters as it is clear that the more advanced community is as repressive and intolerant as the community from which the children fled. Wyndham leaves us with the unresolved open question as to whether Man's evolution into a new species will perforce require the extinction of the remaining members of the previous species.”
RED QUEEN leaves us on a minor cliff-hanger pondering a similar question regarding the difficulties of co-existence of evolving hybrid species in the sequels that obviously follow!
Global warming has run its course. Catastrophic climate change is a reality. The ice caps are gone and the“Our world has been utterly transformed”
Global warming has run its course. Catastrophic climate change is a reality. The ice caps are gone and the continental land masses as we once knew them have been obliterated. All that remains are a series of islands, once the peaks of the greatest mountain ranges in the world, and now little but scattered remnants separated by vast expanses of open ocean. The survivors, and there appear to be precious few of those, have been reduced to a warlike lifestyle of stealing, scavenging, salvaging and surviving. The path to renewed civilization is a distant hope and fraught with dangers and obstacles.
AFTER THE FLOOD is the thrilling, intriguing, innovative, and poignant tale of Myra and her daughter Pearl’s such for Pearl’s older sister and the father who kidnapped her after a deluged destroyed their Nebraska home. If Ms Montag’s imaginative post-apocalyptic tale of survivalist struggles prompts you to consider the reality, the dangers, and the social impact of the current levels of human-caused global warming and climate change, then I expect Ms Montag will be well pleased with the results of her efforts.
AFTER THE FLOOD is a gripping, readable and enjoyable story of survival and resilience under impossible duress. But, be warned, there is very little to like about what people are forced to do and to become under such conditions. Definitely recommended.
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