Well-considered social SF—an engrossing, foreboding, and uncomfortable offering.
In this novel, two White South Africans and a Black American must open themselves to change in a near-future dystopia of chronic water shortages and a corporatocracy.
In 2048, life revolves around water. In South Africa and the Federated States of America, the FreeFlow Corporation holds immeasurable power. The wealthy few have enough to drink. They hoard their privilege while the rest of the population struggles to subsist. White South Africans Graham Mason and Lizette Basson live in a gated compound in KwaZulu-Natal. Graham, a hack journalist stuck in his ways, is looking ever more cynically to hold on to what little he has. His frequent absences give his wife time to reflect on their relative prosperity. Lizette becomes involved with the Imbali Township Co-op—an impoverished but socially active collective of traditional landowners holding their shantytown against the bulldozers of corporate “gentrification.” As the world reaches its tipping point, can Graham and Lizette’s marriage survive? Arthur Green is a Black American working for the Environmental Protection Agency, Water Division, in California. Art and his colleagues are fighting a losing battle to protect state-controlled water reserves from corporate malpractice. Art’s efforts are all-consuming but hopeless. When one of his co-workers is killed by corporate heavies—the “Men behind the Gold Curtain”—Art is forced into witness protection. Can he survive to testify and, in doing so reconcile with his estranged wife and daughter? Wood writes in the first person, past tense, cycling a chapter at a time through Graham’s, Lizette’s, and Art’s stories. Whereas the prose is straightforward, the plot and setting create a dense tangle of characters and ideas. Earth in 2048 evidences some futuristic developments—cerebral implants and emergent artificial intelligences—but for the most part forms a depressing, oppressive endpoint for current-day trends. The SF story unfolds slowly and provides little hope. But the author does propose a way forward. Art represents a Black America that has risen above the prejudices leveled against it. Lizette stands for open-mindedness at any age. Graham is a most unlikable character, but even he is forced to change. Together, they speak to unification beyond borders. The message is an important one, albeit not always pleasant to digest.
Well-considered social SF—an engrossing, foreboding, and uncomfortable offering.Pub Date: April 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-912950-61-4
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Newcon Press
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
The novel’s voice remains engaging, and its spirit resilient, against some staggeringly tough times.
Amid the dystopian collapse of the near future, a musician embarks on a quixotic voyage from the shore of Lake Superior.
There’s both a playfulness and a seriousness of purpose to the latest from the Minnesota novelist, a spirit of whimsy that keeps hope flickering even in times of darkest despair. Things have gone dangerously dark along the North Shore, and likely for the country as a whole. A comet is coming that augurs ill, a pandemic has wreaked havoc with the public health, an autocratic despot and raging populism have made books and booksellers all but treasonous. There are corpses floating in the lake from climate change, and there are numerous instances of people swallowing something that kills them; the dead are generally considered seekers of whatever comes next (which has to be better than this) rather than suicides. As narrator Rainy sets the scene, “The world was so old and exhausted that many now saw it as a dying great-grand on a surgical table, body decaying from use and neglect, mind fading down to a glow.” Rainy is a bass player in bar bands, a jack of a variety of trades, and devoted husband to Lark, a bibliophile who runs the local bookstore. Before the collapse of the publishing industry, a cult author had been set to publish a volume with the same title as this novel, and finding one of the few advance copies has been like a holy grail for Lark. Then a copy finds her, courtesy of a fugitive pursued by the powers that be, and whatever tranquility Lark and Rainy had achieved is shattered. Rainy takes to the lake to escape the fugitive’s pursuers and reunite with Lark. He experiences a variety of hardship, challenge, and adventure, yet somehow lives to tell the tale that is this novel.
The novel’s voice remains engaging, and its spirit resilient, against some staggeringly tough times.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780802162939
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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