It’s unnerving reading a book about a devastating pandemic at this point during the COVID-19 crisisFinal review first posted on FantasyLiterature.com:
It’s unnerving reading a book about a devastating pandemic at this point during the COVID-19 crisis, but in fairness, this near-future SF duology by Tosca Lee was published in 2019, so Lee gets credit for anticipating a timely topic. The first book, The Line Between, tells how Wynter Roth, a young woman in her early twenties, escapes from a doomsday cult and (obligatory spoiler warning for the first book here) is entrusted with some tissue samples that may help with the development of a vaccine against the growing pandemic. It’s a rapid onset dementia virus that is — unsurprisingly, since this is a science fiction novel — almost invariably deadly to those who catch it.
At the end of The Line Between, Wynter, her niece Truly, her new boyfriend Chase (with whom she fortuitously met up during her desperate travels), and a couple of family friends are lucky enough to befriend a doomsday prepper, Noah. Noah (with even more foresight than the author) shrewdly built a large, completely decked-out underground silo where sixty-three people, including Wynter’s group, are completely sealed in for six months, in the hope that when the automated door unlocks the pandemic will have passed.
A Single Light begins right where The Line Between left off. Wynter and the others tucked away in the hidden silo are adjusting to their restricted but safe life underground. At least everyone there is healthy, and there’s ample food, as well as a nightly broadcast from Noah, who remained aboveground to help guard their safety, among other reasons. But too soon, Noah’s video communications abruptly cease for an unknown reason. The close quarters and lack of any news from the outside world combine with fear and stress to cause serious problems for the hidden group, not least Wynter herself, especially when murder accusations against her — she was a busy girl in the first book — become public knowledge.
So it’s a relief when the silo’s electronic door opens after six months, though more than a little disturbing because it happens a few days before it was scheduled to open, and there’s no sign of Noah … or any other living person, for that matter. Wynter and Chase set off on an expedition to find out what’s become of Noah and our society, and to try to find some badly-needed antibiotics for a dying member of their group.
Through Wynter’s eyes, who tells this story in first person present tense, A Single Light shows the bleakness of a nation where society has crumbled. Most people are desperately seeking food and medication, while a few take advantage of the disintegration of the rule of law. There’s a hint of both Mad Max and The Walking Dead in Wynter’s and Chase’s travels. Their exploits were engaging and suspenseful, especially when they come to a large town that seems to have the medicine they need, but the town is ruled by a viciously cruel kingpin and his henchmen. The ending of A Single Light felt rushed, as Lee quickly wraps up various plot threads and pulls in a few new ones, in a somewhat scattershot approach.
Wynter is a character defined by her alarming impetuousness and dramatic tendencies, but also her undeniable courage and loyalty to her friends … at least those she can trust. At one point early on Chase is forced to divulge a surprising secret to the silo group. While I loved the new light this shed on his role in the story, I found Wynter’s reaction over the top. It’s not quite as bad as Bella’s shutdown in New Moon in the TWILIGHT SAGA, but close enough. She’s not my favorite type of character, but her reactions are understandable given her traumatic upbringing. The other inhabitants of the underground silo group are roughly sketched-in characters at best, but Wynter does meet a few more memorable people in the course of her travels, particularly Otto, a kindhearted mute man.
As in The Line Between, there’s a discernable spiritual element to this tale. For the most part it’s very subtle, surfacing only occasionally (it’s notable that there’s no indication Wynter ever has premarital sex) and becoming clearer toward the end. Also like the first book, A Single Light has an allusive title, suggesting the need for spiritual light in an increasingly dark world. A Single Light is an intriguing apocalyptic-type adventure, and a quick, gripping read.
3.5 stars.
Thanks to the author, Tosca Lee, for the ARC (and sorry it took me so long to get to it!)....more
A person — whose name and gender are never specified, because that person is “you” — wakes up, al3.5 stars. Review first posted on Fantasy Literature:
A person — whose name and gender are never specified, because that person is “you” — wakes up, alone in a room. You’re blind and in intense pain, and at first you remember nothing at all of your past. You only hear one person, Dr. Anne Kuhn, who instructs you through a speaker: testing you mentally, badgering you to exercise, and, little by little, giving you bits of information about your past life and about why you are where you are now. Gradually it becomes clear that something disastrous has happened.
The Last Conversation is an odd but compelling and ominous science fiction novella from Paul Tremblay. It’s reminiscent of a Twilight Zone episode: strange, somber and slightly horrific in a slow-burn way, with a surprising reveal at the end (or perhaps not so surprising to a perceptive reader; there are some clues as to where this story is heading, though I didn’t guess it myself).
Telling a story in second person — presumably to increase readers’ perception that they’re in the place of the main character — is a tricky thing to pull off well. Combined with the fact that the main character’s name is never given and there’s just a blank line in the text every time Anne speaks their name, it added to the general sense of unease. Perhaps that was intentional on Tremblay’s part; in which case, mission accomplished.
The Last Conversation is a slower-paced work that steadily and inexorably moves toward its disturbing conclusion. Given the main character’s lack of memory and needing to relearn many physical and manual skills from scratch, Tremblay’s approach does make some sense, and the pacing didn’t drag enough to bother me because this was such a quick read. Still, it’s a good thing this is a short novella; if it were longer I think it would have collapsed under its own weight.
The ending was a decent payoff, although it raised several unanswered questions. Anne’s motivations for their final, key conversation are somewhat murky, and the underlying science that is critical to the plot is extremely hand-wavey.
The Last Conversation is part of the FORWARD collection proposed and curated by Blake Crouch. It’s a set of six stand-alone novellas, each by a different author, that explore the “effects of a pivotal technological moment.” The authors are Crouch, N.K. Jemisin, Veronica Roth, Amor Towles, Tremblay and Andy Weir. The individual novellas are reasonably priced and available in ebook and audio form individually or as a set.
Note: Some of the GR reviews give away the twist, so if you're planning to read this, you may want to avoid the reviews until you're done....more
Well, this read was actually a pleasant surprise for me. I thought Veronica Roth's DIVERGENT trilogy went off the rails in the second book, and I neveWell, this read was actually a pleasant surprise for me. I thought Veronica Roth's DIVERGENT trilogy went off the rails in the second book, and I never even read the controversial third book. But this contemplative, melancholic novella was really well done.
An asteroid is about to crash into the earth, and it's a worldwide extinction event - the asteroid has been appropriately named Finis. Humanity has known this was coming for over 20 years (the asteroid did a few flybys first) and somehow everyone has managed to leave Earth for another planet (how exactly this was pulled off is never explained, which I thought was a big hole in the story).
The only remaining people are a group of scientists who are finishing up the collection and cataloging of various plants and animals. They're planning to take off in their two spaceship "Arks" just a few days before Finis hits. But Sarah, a horticulturist, isn't planning to get on the Ark, because of complicated Reasons.
Ark won't be to every reader's taste (the GR reviews are all over the map). There's a lot - maybe too much - talk about plants generally and orchids in particular. But if you're in the mood for a thoughtful, slower-paced SF novella, you might enjoy this one.
3.75 stars for this 2012 Nebula award-winning (and Hugo nominated) SF novella. I have a seriously alarming stack of books to read but I opened this on3.75 stars for this 2012 Nebula award-winning (and Hugo nominated) SF novella. I have a seriously alarming stack of books to read but I opened this one up last night and it was short enough and interesting enough to suck me in until I finished it (around 1 am). It's a combination of worldwide environmental disaster and time travel.
Kress freely jumps back and forth between a couple of different time periods in our day and a grim future, only about 20 years years later. A small, isolated group of people is making excursions to the past, kidnapping children to try to preserve our race in their day.
I had a couple of fairly major unanswered questions that are dragging my rating down a bit, but Nancy Kress is a talented SF author (I don't love everything of hers that I've read, but what I do like, I really like). It's an interesting, somewhat different take on the "humans are destroying our world" genre of SF.
3.5 stars (more if you love YA SF with a good side of romance). On sale now! Review first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Jay Kristoff’s YA post-apocalyp3.5 stars (more if you love YA SF with a good side of romance). On sale now! Review first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Jay Kristoff’s YA post-apocalyptic novel LIFEL1K3 stars seventeen-year-old Eve as its tough, fauxhawk-sporting protagonist. Eve is a gifted mechanic who lives with her grandfather, her only relative, in a post-apocalyptic island version of “Kalifornya” called the Dregs. She has a cybernetic eye and a memory drive (“Memdrive”) implanted in the side of her head, with silicon chips behind her ear that give her fragmentary memories of her childhood and supply her with other useful life skills. Eve’s secret pastime ― at least it’s secret from Grandpa ― is engaging in robot deathmatches to fund Grandpa’s anticancer meds. Eve’s besties are a feisty redhead named Lemon Fresh, whose name comes from the box in which she was found abandoned as an infant, a cranky little robot named Cricket who has major self-image issues related to his short height, and a loyal cyborg dog, or “blitzhund,” named Kaiser who is internally armed with a powerful suicide bomb.
Eve’s latest robot gladiator battle goes badly: not only does her robot, Miss Combobulaton, get reduced to a useless heap of parts, but at the end of the battle Eve manifested a psychic power that completely shorted out the robot she was fighting. Now several factions are out to capture or kill Eve, including the dreaded Brotherhood that kills all mutants as a tenet of its faith, a stunningly powerful and physically augmented bounty hunter called Preacher, and the local greedy and bloodthirsty gang.
On the way home from her ill-fated robot battle, Eve and her friends see an aircraft crash land in a junk heap of old auto wrecks. They pull the remains of a handsome android, an illegal “Lifelike,” from the pilot’s seat. At Eve’s and Grandpa’s home, the android, Ezekiel, unexpectedly comes back to life. Ezekiel seems to recognize Grandpa and Eve, though he calls her by a different name, but can she trust him? Maybe she’ll be able to figure it out while they’re on the run …
Kristoff originally pitched LIFEL1K3 as “Romeo and Juliet meets Mad Max meets X-Men, with a little bit of Bladerunner cheering from the sidelines.” LIFEL1K3 is a cheerfully violent pastiche of those iconic works and more. There’s a Terminator type of character, an unstoppable bounty hunter cosplaying an Old West preacher. Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics play a vital role in the plot. Pinocchio is also expressly referenced several times by the characters, just in case any reader might have otherwise missed the allusion.
It may be derivative, but there’s creativity and enthusiasm in the pages of LIFEL1K3 as well. As our main characters quickly move from place to place, the pace moves swiftly as well. Robot battles and other armed conflicts are interspersed with the developing relationship between Eve and Ezekiel. The human (and android) drama element of the story is also heightened by flashback scenes of a mass murder that plays out at the beginning of the first several chapters, and by Eve’s gradual gain of knowledge about her past. Sometimes Eve overreacts to the new facts about her past; though she’s a volatile character, it seemed (especially at the end) artificially included for the sake of the plot and increased drama. I couldn’t quite believe and accept some of the characters’ actions and reactions at a few key points. The villains in this tale are also a bit cartoonish, with motivations that are understandable but rather simplistic and single-minded.
The romance, though it’s central to the plot of LIFEL1K3, never really took fire for me, perhaps partly because it involves sex (though not explicitly related) between a fifteen year old girl and an android. Despite the unusual and star-crossed partners, the romance itself remains firmly mired in standard YA romance land. More powerful for me was the depth and loyalty of the friendship between Eve and Lemon.
The cyberpunk-infused post-apocalyptic setting is, even if inspired by other novels and movies, well-imagined, with many gritty, vivid details that add to the realistic feel. Also adding to the pleasure of reading this novel were the twists and turns in the plot. Kristoff deftly threaded the needle here with twists that were surprising but had enough foundation in the previous events of the story that they didn’t come completely out of left field. My only quibble was with the very end of LIFEL1K3, which added one additional and rather unlikely twist of the knife to a cliffhanger ending. We’ll have to wait for the publication of the as-yet-unnamed sequel to see how it plays out, and I’m definitely on board for that.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley. Thanks!
Content notes: lots of violence and some sexual content (non-explicit)....more
3.75 stars. This is a pretty good SF suspense novel with a great concept. It derails a bit in the last third but overall a fun and tension-filled rea 3.75 stars. This is a pretty good SF suspense novel with a great concept. It derails a bit in the last third but overall a fun and tension-filled read.
The Genius Plague is a science fiction thriller with a fascinating, unique concept: humanity contending with a biological invasion by a fungus out of the Amazon. The unusual part is the nature of the fungal invasion: when it gets settled in your body and invades your brain, it makes you ... smarter. A genius, in fact. But is that ALL it does?
Paul Johns is a young mycologist studying fungi in the Amazon rainforest. He narrowly escapes death in a strange attack on a riverboat, then even stranger things happen as he and an acquaintance are trying to find their way back to civilization. The book’s POV then shifts to Paul’s brother Neil, a bright 21 year old who manages to get a job with the NSA despite some serious flub-ups. As part of Neil’s NSA job, he investigates encrypted communications and tries to decrypt ones that seem suspicious. This becomes especially important with some recent unrest and violence in South America ... events that may have a tie to his brother Paul’s experiences there.
Parts of the plot are really far-fetched and the final resolution didn't hold water all that well, but it sucked me right in and I read the whole book in one day....more
Light Years (2017), film producer Emily Ziff Griffin’s debut YA novel, explores a New York2.5 stars. Final review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Light Years (2017), film producer Emily Ziff Griffin’s debut YA novel, explores a New York teenager’s coming of age and spiritual and emotional awakening in a world rapidly descending into chaos because of a deadly pandemic. Luisa Ochoa-Jones is an unusually bright 17 year old software coder, on the short list of finalists competing for a coveted fellowship offered by a brilliant tech entrepreneur, Thomas Bell. In her face-to-face meeting with Bell, Luisa demonstrates her prized software program LightYears, which scans the Internet for people’s emotional reactions to a video, news story or other content. But she’s concerned that she and her program haven’t sufficiently impressed Bell. Before the fellowship decision is announced, however, society begins to unravel as a flu-type illness descends. Accelerated Respiratory and Neurodegenerative Syndrome, or ARNS, strikes swiftly and unpredictably and is almost invariably fatal, leaving devastation in its wake.
Light Years has an edgy YA beginning, with copious swearing, underage partying by privileged New York City teens (viewed with combined disdain and envy by Luisa, who sees herself as on the outskirts of their social group because she’s odd and not particularly wealthy), and Luisa’s bitter complaints about her absent yet controlling mother and her anguish about the boy she has a crush on, who’s been sending her mixed signals. As the terrifying ARNS pandemic takes hold, killing friends and family members, Light Years shifts gears to a road trip story, as Luisa decides to head across the country to Los Angeles in search of a man that she believes may be the key to finding a cure for ARNS. I found this part of the novel the most enjoyable, as Luisa, her brother Ben, her love interest Kamal, and their friend Phoebe make their way across the U.S., encountering individuals and groups who have reacted to the epidemic in different ways.
**The next couple of paragraphs discuss the ending in general terms and are mildly spoilerish**
Light Years then unexpectedly veers to a mystical ending that seems to be an amalgam of New Age and eastern spiritualism, combined with a hefty dose of surrealism. It made little sense to me on either an intellectual or emotional/spiritual level. I even read the last fifty or sixty pages of the book twice, hoping for more insight or connection, but didn’t find it any more satisfactory the second time around. The mysterious ending also leaves not just a few plot threads, but really the entire resolution of the plot, wide open. Perhaps Luisa’s metaphysical breakthrough is intended as the final answer. It simply didn’t resonate with me, but other readers may find it more profound and meaningful.
Luisa has a synesthesia type of condition, in which her senses combine, but in her particular case this condition is triggered by strong emotions (“Blue always tastes like chocolate when I’m nervous”). This unnamed medical condition, as well as Luisa’s part-Hispanic and Kamal’s British Muslim heritage, add some diversity to the story. Unfortunately, other than his unusual culture, Kamal is a flat and uninteresting love interest with little personality. So their romantic moment, when it finally arrived, failed to move me.
Still, there is some engaging story-telling, and a thoughtful examination of loss and grief, in between the woo-woo parts. Luisa’s first person, present tense narration gives a sense of urgency and immediacy to her experiences and feelings. Teenage readers may sympathize with her fraught relationships with her parents, her desire to be independent and live life on her own terms, and her struggles to come to terms with the illness and deaths of people she loves.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher for review. Thanks!
Content note: Lots of F-bombs. This one is for older teens who aren't fazed by that. I wouldn't recommend it for anyone under 16, for general content reasons as well as language....more
In this apocalyptic tale, free online here at Tor.com, humanity is dying off of a strange new airborne virus. Patient Zero was a 72 year old woman who suddenly became lost in her memories of a few happy events in her childhood: a Russian lullaby constantly runs through her head, with lyrics that are objectively horrifying (a wolf dragging a child into the woods) but are comforting to the woman. She still experiences the present in limited ways, but most of her senses are engaged with these vivid memories in her past. Until she dies a few weeks later … as does everyone else who catches this highly communicable disease. They all die, though they die happy.
A few humans are able to avoid the infection by cutting themselves off from the world in an airtight survival bunker and constantly wearing hazmat suits. The narrator is an epidemiologist who is searching for an answer to the disease, while falling in love with a man who’s also in the bunker. They illicitly take off their hazmat suits to make love, and try to understand what it is they’re going through.
“It’s the eternal return,” Oliver said. “Did you take philosophy in college?”
“I speak pidgin philosophy,” I said. “Enough to cover my ass at a cocktail party. Nietzsche?”
Then, one day, the surveillance cameras in the outside world offer a possible answer to their question ― an alarming one.
In “Mental Diplopia” Julianna Baggott vividly describes the fatal virus and its effects on people, and I felt engaged with the main character as well as with the fate of humanity generally. The Russian lullaby of Patient Zero was a nice metaphor. I also was intrigued with the theory the narrator and Oliver came up with for the reasons behind the virus. I wasn’t as enthusiastic about the downbeat, rather understated ending of the story, although its Jane Eyre call-out (even if it didn’t strike me as particularly apropos) was amusing....more
$1.99 Kindle sale, March 18, 2019. 4.33 stars. I managed to read this 870 page SciFi chunkster while my family was on vacation in southern Utah, visit$1.99 Kindle sale, March 18, 2019. 4.33 stars. I managed to read this 870 page SciFi chunkster while my family was on vacation in southern Utah, visiting Zion, Goblin Valley, Dead Horse Point and Arches national and state parks. (There was a lot of downtime while we were driving between different points of interest, and luckily my husband likes to drive, which leaves me with a lot of reading time.)
[image] Arches National Park
The seared look of the landscape in some of those parks fit in well with the premise of this epic novel.
[image] Goblin Valley State Park
In Seveneves, the moon is suddenly broken apart by some unknown agent, and scientists soon realize that the pieces of the moon are going to continue to whack into each other and break up into smaller and smaller pieces. Within a couple of years, this will cause a rain of meteors and meteorites that will burn all life off the face of the earth and make it uninhabitable for, say, 5,000-10,000 years.
What to do? It turns out there are a few different possible answers.
One group - and this is initially the focus of Seveneves - heads into space. There's a frantic effort to set up a space station and modules so that life can be self-sustaining for several thousand years. Even with nations and governments (largely) cooperating, two years is really not enough time to really organize such massive undertaking. People do what they can ... but the system soon starts to fray, for both technical and sociological reasons.
When Stephenson is on, he's fantastic and imaginative, one of the best SF writers I know. The sheer brainpower that went into this novel is mind-boggling. The drawback here, at least for some readers, will be the massive overload of technological explanation, especially as it involves the physical set-up of the space station, robots, and other high-tech inventions of the future. I enjoyed it all at first, but by the time it got to the voyage of the Ymir (where a space shuttle takes off on a vital mission), I had mentally checked out of the engineering parts and was skimming them.
Toward the end of the novel, there's a sudden leap forward several thousand years in time, when we find out what happened to the survivors(view spoiler)[both on the space station and some on earth who managed to survive by going into deep caves or the deepest parts of the ocean (hide spoiler)]. It's a little disjointed, though it's interesting to see how it all played out in the distant future. I'm wondering if Stephenson, brilliant as he is, just doesn't have a good handle on how to end a novel strongly. At least this one's ending was better than The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.
Still, Seveneves has an absolutely fascinating premise, and that, together with Stephenson's great imagination and some compelling plotlines, kept me going through the end. I would give my husband (who was driving for our entire southern Utah trip) periodic reports on the State of Humanity in this novel, and even he, a TOTALLY non-SF person, was asking me for updates. So overall it's clearly a win!...more
3.5 stars. Half a War is well-written and a fitting end to the Shattered Sea Viking-inspired trilogy. There are some new plot twists that made me see 3.5 stars. Half a War is well-written and a fitting end to the Shattered Sea Viking-inspired trilogy. There are some new plot twists that made me see the whole trilogy with new eyes. It's always had a Viking flavor to it, but the Beowulf vibes gained an additional intensity in this third book, as a coalition assembles to try to fight against the High King and his oppressive rule over their countries. Once again, a highly dangerous journey is key to the conflict, but in an entirely new and unexpected way.
Father Yarvi, a key character in the prior books, is still a vital presence, but this book is narrated by three relatively new characters: Skara, a 17 year old princess from Throvenland; Raith, the sword-bearer of the brutish king of Vansterland, Grom-Gil-Gorm; and Koll, an ex-slave. It's gripping reading. Father Yarvi, who's already taken several steps toward the morally gray, continues his fascinating manipulation of events around him, but we see those events through others' eyes.
However. Bleak does not even begin to describe what goes on in this book. The prior books were a little on the grim and dark side, but Half a War raises it to a whole new level. The violence gets extremely intense for a YA book. Add to that some characters sleeping around and (view spoiler)[an inconvenient pregnancy and an abortion (hide spoiler)]. I wouldn't recommend this for younger or sensitive readers. This one's for mature teens and readers who don't mind a lot of bloody scenes with some dark character arcs, some of those, sadly, without a redemption.
If you want your YA fantasy Norse experience with a little more light and a lot more humor, try Rick Riordan's The Sword of Summer....more
Update: Well, after writing the review below earlier today--which was based on my recollections from reading this 1975 SF novel as a teen--I read it agUpdate: Well, after writing the review below earlier today--which was based on my recollections from reading this 1975 SF novel as a teen--I read it again. Holy crap: some books just don't age well at all. Superficial writing that tells instead of shows; stereotypical characters that are cut out of cardboard; social attitudes that were dated even in the 70's. The author is trying to give an anti-bigotry message, but it's pretty difficult when you've got an African-American character who thinks it's funny to say "Yassa, Boss" in a (and I quote) "parody of the old-time subservient blacks." It was painful reading; I persevered only for old times' sake.
Even the author only rates this book 3 stars, which is telling. In my opinion it doesn't even rate a two, and I thought seriously about giving it one star. It should have been left to die in obscurity in the 70's.
1.5 stars (down from an initial 3 stars)
Initial Review: This is one of those mass-market scifi books I stole from my dad when I was a teenager. It's very 70's SF, a short and adventurous tale of what happens when the world falls apart, this time because of overpopulation and a massive global economic collapse. The main character, Peter Stone, is an author whose bestselling book predicted the collapse just before it happened, so naturally a lot of people blame the messenger. Peter meets a group of people who are caravanning to a mysterious destination that they won't talk about, but they offer more hope--and food--than any other options he's found, so he falls in with them.
It was a decent read, and I have fond memories, but it's not particularly deep or meaningful. However, my dad was cleaning out his bookshelves at his 80th birthday party a few weeks ago, and this one was in his giveaway pile. I grabbed it because of memories, so maybe I'll give it another read....more
This is a YA post-apocalyptic novel, with a mutation twist and a Wild West flavor. It's told from the alternating points of view of five different teeThis is a YA post-apocalyptic novel, with a mutation twist and a Wild West flavor. It's told from the alternating points of view of five different teens who live in "Las Anclas," what's left of Los Angeles, a small walled town of a little over a thousand people.
The backstory is that several generations ago, there was a worldwide disaster caused by sun flares that caused machinery to stop working and mutations (human, animals and plants) to proliferate. These mutations, called "the Change," are often triggered by puberty or other hormonal changes. Some people gather in small communities, some wander and prospect for artifacts from our prior civilization. Others try to conquer and gain power.
The "stranger" of the title is Ross, a young prospector with PTSD who is being hunted down for a valuable artifact that he's found. He's found by the sheriff of Las Ancles and carried into town, and his presence there starts a chain of events with the local teenagers and with Voske, the dreaded leader of a nearby town, who's in the habit of taking over other communities and leaving the heads of dissidents displayed on spikes.
The beginning and end of the book are exciting but the middle part has a more leisurely pace, as Ross and the reader get to know Las Ancles. For readers who appreciate diversity, this is a refreshingly broad cast of characters of various cultures, races, and appearances. At least in this city, same-gender attraction is completely accepted, without any comments or sideways glances. Several teenage characters are gay. What is a source of discrimination is whether you are Changed, or mutated. Some people are very accepting of those who are changed, while others want to kick them out of town.
I found many of the mutations unique and fascinating: large intelligent rats (R.O.U.S.'s?) who help their human owners with hunting and spying, rabbits who project illusions that they're bushes so they can munch on your gardens in peace, man-sized rattlesnakes herding you to certain death, and my favorite:
KILLER MUTANT CRYSTAL TREES!!!
[image]
These trees shoot seedpods full of crystal shards at you that quickly burrow under your skin, head toward your heart, kill you and use your body to grow a new tree:
There was no wind, but the glassy leaves struck together, ringing out a threat. He was still safely out of range, but not by much. Another step past the outcropping revealed a rock fall that had shattered a brilliant purple tree. The others in the grove were colored by the fur of the animals they had killed and rooted in: yellow brown for coyotes, dark brown for raccoons, gray for javalinas, white for bighorn sheep. But those trees that grew from humans usually took their color from the dyes in clothing. He wondered who had died to create that purple tree.
(There is, by the way, a bright red tree that will play a significant role in the plot.)
I think I would have preferred this book with a few less viewpoints and less exposition, but overall I found it an enjoyable, imaginative tale. This is the first book in a series, but it works fine as a stand-alone novel.
Content note: kisses only (straight and gay), with some non-explicit discussion of teenage sexual relations....more
I loved this book - I’ve bought it on Kindle just so I have it for my own Desert Island Keepers collection. :) 4.5 stars.
I stood looking over my damaI loved this book - I’ve bought it on Kindle just so I have it for my own Desert Island Keepers collection. :) 4.5 stars.
I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.
[image]
Dr. Eleven stands on dark rocks overlooking an indigo sea at twilight. Small boats move between islands, wind turbines spinning on the horizon. He holds his fedora in his hand. A small white animal stands by his side.
[image]
On Station Eleven's surface it is always sunset or twilight or night.
Station Eleven is an elegy lamenting all that humanity has lost when over 99% of the world's population is killed in a flu pandemic, with quiet notes of hope added by the love and connections that people still create and the arts that they refuse to let die. Loss and hope both permeate this bittersweet tale of a post-apocalypic world.
The story follows several different characters both before and after the disastrous epidemic: Miranda, the artist who creates the titular Station Eleven series of graphic art books, a symbol of the twilight world the survivors find themselves inhabiting. Kirsten, an 8-year old actress who survives the epidemic and in the aftermath ends up with a traveling company that combines music and Shakespeare performances for survivors. Jeevan, the former paparazzo and paramedic who survives by holing up with his disabled brother in an apartment with 17 shopping carts' worth of food and supplies. These and other characters' stories are tied together by Arthur Leander, a famous actor who dies at a relatively early age of a heart attack, on the night the plague begins to take root in North America.
I'm not certain that I entirely agree with the choice to put so much focus on Arthur, whose adult life is filled with wealth, fame and self-indulgence. The most telling point about Arthur for me was when he tells another character that he "has to" leave his second wife for another woman, because he's fallen in love with someone else. That's the story of Arthur's self-absorbed life right there. Toward the end of his life it seems like he's starting to realize what he's given up and to take some steps to try to rectify that. But, of course, it's too late, for him and almost everyone else.
But Arthur does pass on two copies of the Station Eleven comic books given to him by his first wife, to two children who will survive the epidemic. The Station Eleven comics become talismans for these children, in very different ways, one more thread that links characters to each other, and the past to the present.
This was enthralling--I had a hard time putting it down. Mournful but also hopeful, there's tragedy and love and losing your way and connecting to others, all swirled together. I had a few quibbles, but this one will stick with me longer than most books....more
I read this SF post-apocalyptic story collection maybe a year ago. It was okay but, other than the first story, I found it completely forgettable. I cI read this SF post-apocalyptic story collection maybe a year ago. It was okay but, other than the first story, I found it completely forgettable. I can't even tell you any longer what happened in the end, and I always remember endings....more
Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽
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Books:
apocalyptic
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