Ilmar is a city at the edge of the Palleseen empire, and one conquered in name but perhaps not in spirit; it is full of restless natives, bitter refugees, starry-eyed students, and ruthless criminals, and also sits on the edge of a haunted magical forest, last resort for the desperate. Tchaikovsky assembles a cast of archetypes and then proceeds to make them into whole characters that grate on one another’s edges and force one another into growth, and sets it against a background of cultural repression and inevitable rebellion. Fascinating read.
Tag: genre-dystopian
Moon of the Crusted Snow, by Waubgeshig Rice
Post-apocalyptic (though you don’t know it at the beginning) thriller, documenting the experience of a small Anishinaabe community in a reservation in northern Ontario. As the community is already pretty isolated, even more so as winter approaches, their awareness that civilization is collapsing comes slowly; first the power is cut off, then their fuel shipment never arrives. As the tribe attempts to maintain order and community safety, intruders escaping the crumbling south arrive and throw things into disarray. The narrator, a quiet, solid hunter named Evan Whitesky, quietly maintains family and community ties even as he begins to suspect the new arrivals of more sinister intentions. Well-paced, smoothly written.
We Set the Dark on Fire, by Tehlor Kay Mejia
Dystopian YA fiction, nicely done in that it’s not in-your-face preachy. Daniela Vargas is one of the top graduates in an elite school that trains women for service to powerful men – but in an important role, either as his powerful social and household counterpart, or as the mother of his future children. Daniela, however, has a secret past; her documents were forged by her family, who were desperate that their child escape a future in the abused lower classes. Naturally Daniela’s secret becomes a cudgel, as forces in the rebellion force her to work with them or lose everything. I really liked how this book was executed; the dystopia was subtly done, as was Daniela’s internal conflict between clinging to privilege and risking everything. Warning: cliffhanger ending.
Brown Girl in the Ring, by Nalo Hopkinson
In a future version of Toronto, where white flight and government neglect have reduced the inner core of the city to lawless violence, a young woman with oracular sight chafes under the eye of her herbalist grandmother. This book, a matrilineal retelling of “Ti-Jean and his Brothers,” mashes together many things: figures from Caribbean folktale, sci-fi dystopia and social commentary, strong female characters, and coming of age/redemption through embracing family culture. I followed the action well enough, but the use of Creole between the characters made me feel like it would have been better as an audiobook; I think I would have gotten the flow of the conversation much more easily.
More than This, by Patrick Ness
The book begins when Seth is drowning in the sea. Fighting against the waves, battered against the rocks, he hits his head and dies. And then he wakes up, far from the ocean, at what he belatedly realizes is a version of his childhood home. The book is purposefully confusing at first – Is this the afterlife? Is it a simulation? A story? But as Seth feels his way through this newly strange environment, beset by occasional vivid flashbacks to his past, we start to form a theory of what happened to create the world that he’s in now. Love the side characters that appear in Seth’s new present, especially the character of Tomasz who combines snarky insight with vulnerability. It’s very existentialist for a YA novel, thoughtful while still action-packed, and I quite liked it by the end.
Crosshairs, by Catherine Hernandez
A near-future dystopia in which a racist, ultraconservative government in Canada (working with a similar government in the US, we’re told, but this story is set in Toronto) rounds up basically anyone who isn’t white, straight, or able-bodied, cuts off access to their financial accounts and transportation, and either straight-out executes them or stuffs them into concentration camps and workhouses. The narrator, a queer femme drag performer, is writing letters to his lost love while on the run and getting involved in the rebellion. It should have been exciting stuff, but the writing is super heavy-handed and the characters often pause in the middle of tense moments to deliver long-winded monologues about intersectionality and allyship. In general I found this really clumsily done, from the unlikely setup, to the extremely flat characters, to a really forced ending.
Red Rising, by Pierce Brown
The writing style didn’t really work for me at the beginning, lots of sentence fragments and testosterone, but it grew on me until I found myself paging fluidly through to the end. Incredibly dystopian from top to bottom: the futuristic society’s caste structure is reinforced by bioengineering so that the top castes are literally superhuman compared to the poor workers at the bottom, but even the highest caste children have to go through a Hunger Games type culling to come out on the very top. It’s nuts and weirdly compelling. There’s definitely a lot of casual violence but it’s all presented as mind games, so it doesn’t feel unnecessarily excessive.
American War, by Omar El Akkad
Post-apocalyptic Civil War, in which Southern states including Texas refuse to give up their fossil fuels, and a fragmented Union fights them with drones and soldiers recruited from a working class desperate for opportunity. Meanwhile from across the ocean, the Red Crescent and the Chinese send charity aid and administer refugee camps. It’s told from the post-war future so you know how things end, but not how they got there; the main character, Sarat, travels an all-too-believable arc from child refugee to violent insurgent. Super intense book and quite frightening, particularly when you consider the tribalism that seems to be increasing today.