THE LONG HAUL

In a blighted America in the late 22nd century, a small band of rebels travels the western states, guarding the key to secret underground vaults of precious, viable crop seeds.

Gibson continues the dystopian SF Train Hoppers trilogy commenced with Switching Tracks: Out of the Trash (2024), forecasting the bleak year of 2195: What used to be the western United States is now a struggling police state of territories left by the “Collapse” brought about by a climate change/asteroid strike combo almost 200 years earlier (“With seventy thousand inhabitants, Utah was one of the most populated areas remaining in what had once been America”). South of Canada (which remains intact and civilized), people subsist under the jackboot of the powerful GreenCorps, a corporate dictatorship commanded by the baronial McCoy family that forces settlements and cities into submission via ruthless control of water and food supplies and squads of brutal soldiers. Elsa Lee, a barely tolerated McCoy sister-in-law, has killed a McCoy son in self-defense and fled to the protection of anti-GreenCorps rebels. She brings with her a key to precious seed-vault bunkers that were sequestered centuries earlier. If the seed secrets can be safely smuggled into Canada, there is a chance of breaking the GreenCorps monopoly on agriculture. Another fugitive is 17-year-old Ginger McCoy, daughter of the thuggish GreenCorps CEO Malcolm McCoy. Educated and literate (privileges only the wealthy have), she is fleeing her Denver fortress to escape a cynically arranged marriage to another odious boss-chieftain—the union is Malcolm’s gambit to accumulate yet more wealth and power. Despite being set more than 150 years in the future, the novel’s milieu is a techno-throwback one, with little to no advanced science accessible to the nomadic heroes; railroad trains are the primary mode of transportation. The result is something like a Louis L’Amour western crossed with “prepper” dystopian fiction, thankfully lacking the hyper-machismo and gun-mania that tend to characterize both genres. Action balances effectively with emotion, and a satisfactory wrap-up still leaves enough dangling threads for the upcoming conclusion.

Sympathetic protagonists propel a solid dystopian SF adventure.