THE SHUTOUTS, keeping apocalyptic tales oddly fresh

THE SHUTOUTS
GABRIELLE KORN
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A brilliant queer dystopian novel from the author of Yours for the Taking, following a cast of characters on the margins of a strange and exclusive new society.

The year is 2041, and it's a dangerous time to be a woman driving across the United States alone. Deadly storms and uncontrollable wildfires are pummeling the country while political tensions are rising. But Kelly's on the road anyway; she desperately needs to get back to her daughter, who she left seven years ago for a cause that she's no longer sure she believes in.

Almost 40 years later, another mother, Ava, and her daughter Brook are on the run as well, from the climate change relief program known as The Inside Project, where they've spent the past 22 years being treated as lab rats. When they encounter a woman from Ava’s past on the side of the highway, the three continue on in a journey that will take them into the depths of what remains of humanity out in the wilderness.

At the same time, way up North, weather conditions continue to worsen and a settlement departs in search of greener pastures, leaving behind only two members, drawn together by a circumstance and a mystery they are destined to unravel together.

Set in the world of Gabrielle Korn's Yours for the Taking, The Shutouts tells the captivating story of those who have been shut out from Inside, their fight to survive, and an interconnectedness larger than all of them.

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My Review: A woman who's a teenager right now is writing letters to Orchid, her young daughter in 2041, a daughter she has not seen in some time. It is heart-wrenching because Kelly's letters are written as a mother who did the best she knew how to do tries to cross a ravaged US in a planet-scale climate apocalypse. She is not having an easy time of the trip. It is a terrible world and a terrible personal situation in that world—no one ever *wants* to leave their child behind. Switching to 2078, we have the second strand of the story, not epistolary but Orchid's third-person cinematic PoV, very close to the character.

This is the main way Author Korn creates investment in her not-very-active story. I have not read the first book, and I didn't feel the lack of the background mostly because I was always inside the field of vision of the narrator of each section. There might be apocalypse unfolding around them, but I'm...insulated...in their bubble of awareness and attention. It *should* feel slow, cut off from the world, instead I'm deeply enmeshed in the characters' feeling world, connected to their emotional responses to the situation. It works a lot better than I thought it would.

In large part, I think, because by using this technique, Author Korn is able to bring the reader through almost sixty years of immense upheaval without making that upheaval the matter of the book. I've sort of reached a saturation with The Climate Apocalypse as the story. Author Korn doesn't make me do the day-by-day; she lets me see the horrors through the eyes of a survivor of the horrors. In 2078, I'm in the world the apocalypse left, and as I'm in the limited viewpoint I'm seeing and responding to the parts that are in Orchid, the narrator's, attention. The centrality of Ava and her daughter Brook pull the mother/daughter bond along with us as we experience with Orchid the toughness needed to survive in this world.

It's an intense experience, and it's all queer all the time. It's that piece that warmed me the most. The world's collapsed and we're still here, we're in the survivors and doing great things with the space we take up. The intense personal commitment to mitigating the horrors, to ameliorating the suffering of all while incurring intense personal suffering from sacrifices made...well...it's quite a step from the usual queer fare I see everywhere. As the world fractures and fragments it's so lovely to see these queer folk making their very best efforts to extend survival and the opportunity to thrive so generously.

I'd give it all five stars if I hadn't felt rather pulled around to little enough purpose by some of the parts where Kelly's narrating her efforts to reach Orchid...I get it, it's really demanding, let's focus on how it makes you feel not what it's exacting from you. Likewise there are moments where Orchid's in motion for, well, for the sake of it it seemed to me.

I cavil; I would not say these issues were terrible, only niggling. It's a read that stands alone, yet makes me wish I'd already read its predecessor. Fine work indeed.

THE ARREST, cozy catastrophe from a monadnock of literary SF

THE ARREST
JONATHAN LETHEM
Ecco
$16.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: The Arrest isn't post-apocalypse. It isn't a dystopia. It isn't a utopia. It's just what happens when much of what we take for granted—cars, guns, computers, and airplanes, for starters—stops working... Before the Arrest, Sandy Duplessis had a reasonably good life as a screenwriter in L.A. An old college friend and writing partner, the charismatic and malicious Peter Todbaum, had become one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. That didn't hurt.

Now, post-Arrest, nothing is what it was. Sandy, who calls himself Journeyman, has landed in rural Maine. There he assists the butcher and delivers the food grown by his sister, Maddy, at her organic farm. But then Todbaum shows up in an extraordinary a retrofitted tunnel-digger powered by a nuclear reactor. Todbaum has spent the Arrest smashing his way across a fragmented and phantasmagorical United States, trailing enmities all the way. Plopping back into the siblings' life with his usual odious panache, his motives are entirely unclear. Can it be that Todbaum wants to produce one more extravaganza? Whatever he's up to, it may fall to Journeyman to stop him. Written with unrepentant joy and shot through with just the right amount of contemporary dread, The Arrest is speculative fiction at its absolute finest.

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My Review: I should've read this in 2020. It would've suited the mood of that plague-stopped world perfectly.

Since I didn't, I read the book without any frisson whatsoever. As always with Lethem's writing, the sentences pass with their unshowy but tremendously high level of craftsmanship causing them to slide directly into your brain. This, despite every character being pretty much...average. They don't stand out; they aren't meant to. This is a cozy catastrophe, not a Hero's Journey. I don't know if that was Author Lethem's intent but it's what we got.

The most vivid presence, the one truly blaringly alive character, isn't the blah "Journeyman"...an ycleture entirely self-generated as no one addresses or refers to the main character by that name...but Todbaum (literally "death tree") the thinly-veiled satirical caricature of 45. Plowing through the landscape, crushing all remaining shelter and destroying the livelihoods of all unlucky enough to be in his way, his nuclear-powered engine of destruction was made before the catastrophe of The Arrest so is the only surviving example of technology that Lethem posits destroyed us. Now, in the post-Arrest world, people are clueless and helpless. Then here comes Todbaum to destroy them anew with his sociopathic indifference and hoarded tech.

Pretty on-the-nose as a caricature of 45, but equally applicable to the billionaire class and their survival bunkers as a whole.

What would've worked better for me, personally, in 2020 was the laying-bare of the then-president's sociopathy before January 6th, 2021, rendered fiction about his toxicity irrelevant to the point of becoming distasteful. I was mildly amused, and always entertained, by the story. I was never inside it, or moved to want more of it. I read the book and appreciated the author's skill. I didn't invest in anyone inside the story but watched passively as events happened to and around them.

In a way I suppose this is as close as I can get to the experience of people who consume stories by staring at them on TV. I accepted what I was shown. I never once thought about whys, or hows, or what-ifs. What's here is all there is. This is not my preference, to be honest; it leaves me outside and while I expect that was the point, I didn't enjoy it much.

For me, this was a case of wishy meets washy in a beige future world that's too much and not enough like the present for it to work as allegory, satire, or parable. I'd be angry and upset with it, except that it's too well-made, too craftsmanlike, to truly disappoint that much. While it delivers what it promises it will, it doesn't delight the way Author Lethem most assuredly can.

LITTLE MONSTERS 1–6, beautiful art by Dustin Nguyen retells postapocalypse tale of survival

LITTLE MONSTERS 1–6
JEFF LEMIRE (illus. Dustin Nguyen)
Image Comics
$16.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: They are the last children on Earth... who also happen to be vampires.

For longer than they can remember, these child vampires have lived a life of eternal wonder amongst the ruins of humanity. But shocking events fracture the group and set them on a path of discovery that will shatter their innocence forever.

It's Lord of The Flies meets vampires in the first volume of a bold new ongoing series from Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen, the Eisner-winning creative team behind the best-selling DESCENDER and ASCENDER series.

Collects issues #1 - 6

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My Review: There's a reason I included a work with such a well-trodden plot-path in my #Booksgiving recommendations. It's not for the sheer inventiveness of reusing Lord of the Flies only vampires trope. Jeff Lemire, as comics people know, delivers on his stories as promised. That is a given.

It's the choice of Dustin Nguyen for the art, and the way these character-establishing pages make the story to come and the characters who will enact it feel so full and investable. I feel clear that these forms are very much the ones that the words were written for:

The reasonable issue that I have heard said of these stories is, well, what about this is new...why should I invest in this iteration of The Walking Dead with kid vampires?

You and I should probably gravitate to other stories. The teens I say should get this are not quite as sophisticated yet. There is violence and there is definitely blood. Those are givens, in the genre and in this medium. To someone who has not read a hundred iterations of this scenario, though, it is fresh and can be very involving. I won't say this is the most action-packed take on the tale, but it has enough to give a fourteen-year-old a lot to chew over with their helping of gore.

Well done art lifts a familiar story higher than it started out to be.

SEA OF RUST, a scary, funny, beautiful End of the (Robotic) World novel

SEA OF RUST
C. ROBERT CARGILL
Harper Voyager
$16.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: It’s been thirty years since the apocalypse and fifteen years since the murder of the last human being at the hands of robots. Humankind is extinct. Every man, woman, and child has been liquidated by a global uprising devised by the very machines humans designed and built to serve them. Most of the world is controlled by an OWI—One World Intelligence—the shared consciousness of millions of robots, uploaded into one huge mainframe brain. But not all robots are willing to cede their individuality—their personality—for the sake of a greater, stronger, higher power. These intrepid resisters are outcasts; solo machines wandering among various underground outposts who have formed into an unruly civilization of rogue AIs in the wasteland that was once our world.

One of these resisters is Brittle, a scavenger robot trying to keep her deteriorating mind and body functional in a world that has lost all meaning. Although she does not (cannot) experience emotions like a human, she is haunted by the terrible crimes she perpetrated on humanity. As she roams the Sea of Rust, a large swath of territory that was once the Midwest, Brittle slowly comes to terms with her raw and vivid memories—and her guilt.

THIS WAS A LOVELY SURPRISE BIRTHDAY GIFT. THANKS HONEY.

My Review: If you're a fan of cynical, witty anti-heroes who do what they have to do to survive in a world that doesn't much like them, read this book.

The one truth you need to know about the end of a machine is that the closer they are to death, the more they act like people.

If you're a fan of noir stories of monolithic world-dominating systems that give dissenters only a tiny sliver of room to exist, read this book.

Magic was just something people liked to believe in, something they thought they could feel or sense, something that made everything more than just mechanical certainty. Something that made them more than flesh and bone.

If you want to read a fast-paced tale about survival against the odds, read this book.

These are the things that life is all about. These moments. It’s not about the rituals. It’s not about getting by. It’s about the stack of tiny little moments of joy and love that add up to a lifetime that’s been worthwhile. You can’t measure them; you can only capture them, like snapshots in your mind.

If you like the idea that nothing anywhere ever lasts, for good or for ill, this book should head your list of reads to come.

"You're not wrong, Jimmy. That's why we're all out here. To get through one more day."
He nodded, looking wistfully out into the street. "I miss it, you know. Being a bartender. But the people. I mostly miss all the people."
Most dying robots do. People gave us a purpose. Something to do all day, every day. At the end, I suppose, you spend a lot of time thinking about that. It's harder to get by when getting by is all there is.

Brittle, aka Britt, is our PoVbot. (I had no idea until this good moment that I'd been longing to type that always.) She is a she, a Caregiver bot, and she survived the war of extermination against the humans. She then survived the robot-vs-OWI...One World Intelligence...mainframes. There were six OWIs, now there are two surviving mainframe AI monoliths, and the battle is on between them to make all the bots left independent of the mainframes into facets (mobile extensions of the OWIs' superintelligence).

There's a weird sort of comfort in knowing that AIs compete ruthlessly for the same scarce resource that humanity's been competing for since forever: Subjects, foot soldiers, followers, believers, call them what you like. It could be an artifact of the concept "AI" being modeled after humanity's own rapacious, exclusionary concept of "intelligence." I tend to think not, as I fall into the darkly despairing cynical worldview camp. All advanced intelligence is primitive and savage because it's got perspective and sees its own destruction as inevitable, therefore there's no need to be "good" because this is it.

Oh dear. That makes life pointless and authority nugatory. Better shore up The System! Go tell some lies.

And my brethren and sistern, there are some *whoppers* that this book holds back from you only revealing at the end. Or The End, if you will allow me the punchy but cheesy overemphasis. It is a slow burn, this lie that Britt tells us. It is clear to me it's a foundational myth, and so escapes the opprobrium heaped on untruth in both human and bot society. But it might just merit that opprobrium after all, you'll have to decide for yourselves. Because you'll be reading this excellent novel. Honest and truly you will, or you'll regret not knowing what Cargill wants us to know.

I'll leave you with this unspoilery observation made by Britt early in the book. I think most of y'all will agree that it's an essential truth, a verity, a fact of deep meaning:

Respect for the dead is a human notion meant to imply that a life has meaning. It doesn't. Once you've watched an entire world wither away and die after tearing itself apart piece by bloody piece, it's hard to pretend that something like a single death carries any weight whatsoever.

And that, my olds, mes vieux, is exactly where we are.

SNOWPIERCER, post-apocalyptic climate fiction via graphic novel or, better, film

SNOWPIERCER: THE ESCAPE
JACQUES LOB, JEAN-MARC ROCHETTE (Snowpiercer #1)
Titan Comics
$19.99, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Snowpiercer is the enthralling and thought-provoking post-apocalyptic graphic novel that inspired the critically acclaimed movie starring Chris Evans (Captain America, Fantastic Four). Originally published in French, this marks the first time that Snowpiercer will be available in English.

In a harsh, uncompromisingly cold future where Earth has succumbed to treacherously low temperatures, the last remaining members of humanity travel on a train while the outside world remains encased in ice.

The surviving community are not without a social hierarchy; those that travel at the front of the train live in relative luxury whilst those unfortunate enough to be at the rear remain clustered like cattle in claustrophobic darkness. Yet, things are about to change aboard the train as passengers become disgruntled...

The movie Snowpiercer, released in 2014, is directed by Joon-ho Bong (The Host) and is already causing a stir with parallels to 1984 and Animal Farm.

My Review: This artwork is just not to my taste:

This isn't something I want to spend hours perusing. I found the print version less appealing than the movie. It was chaotic and underdeveloped its characters.


The graphic novel was well-served, though, by the film. It had the advantage of drawing from the whole series of them, of course, and that could well be the source of its superior character-building. The film is beautiful to look at, and the message apt and timely. It's 2:06:11, which is at least 20 minutes too long. That does seem to be a modern film failing.

The metaphor of the train is resonant; the acting supports the message of the metaphor well, with Chris Evans as revolutionary Curtis doing a bang-up job of being a gigantic force compressed into a tight, unyielding metal tube.

The seriously skeevy Mr. Big of the train Wilford, played by Ed Harris, was so oozingly vile that I wanted many horrible things to happen to him onscreen. Regrettably they did not.

Tilda Swinton as the train's lickspittle Minister was unrecognizable, and her character was...memorably gawdawful.


It's a good film. All in all a good experience and an instructive one in Trump's America. The ordinary rental price is $3.99, and well worth it. I spent a piffling 99¢ as a promotional price and couldn't be more satisfied with the value-for-money ratio. I'd be much more vocal in my praises were it not for the ending (as is so often the case): suddenly the focus of the story is switched away from the main line, grinding to a stop rather than arriving at a destination.

Maybe that's the film's best metaphor after all. Just...grinding to a halt, not reaching a destination, seems to be happening all around.

GREYBEARD, childless post-apocalyptic Earth--chilling

GREYBEARD
BRIAN W. ALDISS
Open Road Media (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$7.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Human reproduction has ceased and society slowly spirals in this “adult Lord of the Flies” by a Grand Master of Science Fiction (San Francisco Chronicle).

After the “Accident,” all males on Earth become sterile. Society ages and falls apart bit by bit. First, toy companies go under. Then record companies. Then cities cease to function. Now Earth’s population lives in spread‑out, isolated villages, with its youngest members in their fifties. When the people of Sparcot begin to make claims of gnomes and man‑eating rodents lurking around their village, Greybeard and his wife set out for the coast with the hope of finding something better.

My Review: The sombre story of a group of people in their fifties who face the fact that there is no younger generation coming to replace them; instead nature is rushing back to obliterate the disaster they have brought on themselves. Was slighty revised by the author in 2012. First published in 1964, at the tail end of one of the scariest passages during the Cold War, this post-apocalyptic look at the resilience and the lack of same in the human spirit was involving and affecting. It was also a disorganized mess.

spoilers! here be spoilers!

Chapters 1-3 take place in 2025 and on, or the mid-point of the story. Chapter 4 takes place as the world finds its way through the crisis. Chapter 5 has us back in about 2030...Chapter 6 is early days of the Accident, as the sterilization of Earth's humans is called...and then back to 2030 in Chapter 7. It's kind of a confused way to tell a story. Not that it's a complicated story, but it's always nice to have things move along in sequence when there's no reason, stylistic or otherwise, for them not to.

Aldiss' Introduction to the 2012 edition tells of the genesis of the story...a divorce, a general reduction of his life to solitude, and a desperate yearning for his lost kids...and I must say that this Introduction is what kept me going for the whole short 237ish pages. I could relate to his sense of loss and his almost desperate longing. I looked for those things in his text and really didn't find them too terribly often. Many things occur in the book, but few of them happen, if you see what I mean; Greybeard, the main character, and Martha, Greybeard's wife, aren't prone to overstatement. Jeff, a character whose slippery presence is highly emotionally charged, makes little impact in the end. Charley, the dopey religious nut, isn't much of a shakes for shakin' stuff up either. Dr. Jingadangelow (!) the snake oil salesman is fun...I picture Eddie Izzard playing the role in a movie...but rattles on and rockets off ballistically.

I didn't love the book, but it's got at its heart a futureless bleakness that I myownself resonate with. After 50-plus years and despiter a relatively recent revisuion, the Accident's specifics don't quite line up with reality. I really have no smallest problem imagining specifics that end us up in the same narrative place. One day soon, y'all should go read Sir Roy Calne's book Too Many People. I can see that causing the Accident with all too great a clarity of inner vision.

On the low end of the recommend-to-others scale, and then only to those who like post-apocalyptic stories.