HOPE RISES

In this cli-fi novel, a young woman tries to overcome her dark past (and disability) to join her isolated community’s powerful policing squads.

Author Souter, also a filmmaker, sets his dystopian story in the year 2070, although there are few futuristic props. Climate change wreaks havoc on food harvests and supply chains, and central government has collapsed, leaving individual cities and towns to fend for themselves against wildfires and rioting. In one community, ironically renamed Prosperity Way, demagogue Paulix Kane has taken over with a seductively persuasive philosophy of peace and security via harsh law and order. He dubs himself the Supreme Valor, and his police force, the Elite Front, patrols the minifascist state, divided between the wealthy “Royalton” area and the poorer Zone B. Hope Mulder is a 21-year-old Zone B native, and she was born missing a left arm to a young mother straightaway murdered. Though raised with love by her adoptive family, the intense Hope pins her future on the goal of a position with the feared Elite Front. Summary public executions as punishment for taking a life are an unquestioned part of the law (and Prosperity Way natives unintentionally kill each other so often it becomes grimly amusing; one can almost sympathize with the grumpy Supreme Valor). When her cherished stepbrother dies because someone else was horseplaying with a bow and arrows, Hope’s fierce reaction at the execution impresses Paulix, and she gets to train with Elite Front despite her disability. Others in the Kane dynasty are not so sympathetic, and the hero grows disillusioned with the pitiless justice system and the bullying mindsets behind it. Souter’s prose is sturdy and efficient, and the steely Hope is a fascinating character, which counters the dearth of surprises and arid, featureless setting. Readers of “prepper” fiction might be attracted to the doomsday/survivalist aspect of the material, though the milieu and sense of fatalism tend to recall some of the less sentimental Westerns of yesteryear (think Shane or the oaters of Elmore Leonard).

A bracingly tough female protagonist enhances a so-so SF tale.