UNICURSAL

In Powell’s SF novel, a family is caught in a tangled web of destiny as climate change and nuclear war threaten Earth.

The story opens in the dreary dystopia of 2068. What remains of the former USA is now an impoverished and splintered occupied territory divided by China and a resurgent communist Russia; global warming, economic devastation, and AI technology have decimated North America. Teenager Willow Krist, subsisting in the miserable “Middle Eastern District of Cameriko, Western Province of the New Soviet Republic,” knows her late grandfather, William, is blamed for the atomic terrorism and sabotage that left the country stripped of nuclear warheads and defenseless against its insidious occupiers. But the truth hides under layers of social media disinformation, propaganda, and censorship. For a school assignment, she endeavors to uncover the facts, aided by a family cache of papers and legacy media. Willow discovers that William in the 2020s was a rather jaded entrepreneur behind an encryption system that safeguarded launch routines for America’s massive nuclear arsenal; something went wrong, and an accidental global holocaust occurred in 2026. Or did it? Readers learn that in 1809, a Franciscan missionary in South America tremulously transcribed the “Orange Book” from the words of a member of the Indigenous Mapuche tribe. This mystical manuscript teaches disciples to mentally project their consciousness back through time and affect events, creating opportunities to rewrite history. The book has passed in and out of the Krist family, and William, with a small band of trusted associates, tried to use the text to avert the devastation that lay ahead. The narrative is an intriguing mosaic of first-person journal entries, blog posts, bulletins, transcriptions, and ephemera; the stream-of-consciousness, bitter-rant style of the William Krist passages is bracing in the short term but grows rather wearisome in large doses. Powell proffers cause/effect intrigues and paradoxes that will transfix readers acquainted with time-travel SF, but the thematic focus is on nuclear war horror, alongside sobering considerations of climate change, toxic American politics (there’s a mercifully brief appearance by a female Donald Trump stand-in, a right-wing elitist anti-immigrant cretin), and injustice.

A compelling, time-scrambled SF take on nuclear angst.