Valentine Week 2025: Fairytale Fantasy, Day Three

This year’s theme: RED RIDING HOOD

A reminder–The novels I’ll review during this year’s Fairytale Fantasy series:

Red Rider, by Kate Avery Ellison (2019, indie-published)—reviewed HERE

Wolves and Daggers: A Red Riding Hood Retelling, by Melanie Karsak (2018, indie published–Clockpunk Press, which seems to be owned by the author)–TODAY’S REVIEWED NOVEL

Beauty and the Werewolf, by Mercedes Lackey (2011, Harlequin Nocturne)

Crimson Bound, by Rosamund Hodge (2015, HarperCollins)

Scarlet, by Marissa Meyer (2013, Macmillan)

For the Wolf, by Hannah Whitten (2021, Orbit)

And finally: a medley of interesting outlier pieces, all based on Little Red

TODAY’S REVIEWED NOVEL

Wolves and Daggers: A Red Riding Hood Retelling, by Melanie Karsak (2018, indie-published)

Karsak’s novel, the second Red Riding Hood-themed novel I’m reviewing during Valentine’s Week 2025, is the first in a five-book series, The Red Cape Society. From Amazon, you can buy Wolves and Daggers (book 1) in paperback and in e-book format through the Kindle app and devices, and you can also buy the whole series either volume by volume or as a box set in either format. Apple Books and Barnes & Noble sell Wolves and Daggers in ebook format. Apple sells only book 1 of the series, but Barnes & Noble will also sell you a box set–only of books 1-3, though. Barnes & Noble will sell you an audiobook version, but only Book 1. If you like to consume your fantasy via audiobook, you are out of luck if you want the whole series as far as I know. This may change, or I may have missed a source, so check for yourself.

Karsak’s novel is a very clever gaslamp retelling of Little Red Riding Hood in the form of a detective story. Little Red herself is part of a Victorian detective agency charged with reining in criminal bands of werewolves. There are also good, helpful werewolves. Of course there is a grandmother, and of course there is a red cape (“The Red Cape Society” is the name of the detective agency, as well as the title of Karsak’s series).

You may have a question, if you’ve never read one of these: What is gaslamp fiction?

This is a subgenre of speculative fiction set in a fantasy-Victorian or adjacent parallel time, with gloomy noirish settings, the iconic gaslamps, crazy mechanical contraptions (airships!), and guns typical of the era–very similar to steampunk SF. Read THIS ARTICLE for an illuminating explanation. Three great examples of the gaslamp/steampunk subgenres: Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials books, and China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station and the other two novels in his Bas-Lag trilogy. Karsak’s novel is very much lighter than those giants of speculative fiction (of any fiction, any time–my opinion), but her book is very short, almost novella-length, and it is a lot of fun.

As Agent Clemeny Louvel, aka Little Red, chases down the evil werewolves with the help of her detective partner and the good Knights Templar werewolf Sir Richard Lionheart, expect all sorts of in-jokes like the jokey chapter titles, an appearance by Queen Victoria herself, a continuing riff on the “oranges and lemons say the bells of St. Clements” rhyme, old-timey motorcars, jokes along the lines of “what big eyes you have” and “straying from the path.” Most fun of all, the name of the queen’s secret investigative service, The Rude Mechanicals.

Readers can also expect the usual werewolf lore involving a pack structure of Alpha and Beta wolves, silver as a surefire werewolf killer, and the like. I don’t know if the other books in the series go on to feature other members of “the unhuman,” but this first novel mentions a number of them, including goblins, vampires, and more. But what is it with werewolves and prizefighting? Is that a part of the lore I just don’t know about, or is it a coincidence that more than one of the books I’ve chosen this week uses prizefighting to underscore the feral power of werewolves? I may be too much of a werewolf novice to know.

The Red Riding Hood connection in this novel is more of a running joke than a true retelling, but it is very charming. The book is well-written but–well, I called it “light” but maybe “slight” is a better term for what I experienced. The characters aren’t terribly well-developed, and the plot is over in a flash (literally). I’m thinking the whole series develops these matters more thoroughly, though. I doubt I’ll read on–although I might, if only to see what the author does with the Rude Mechanicals, but I did enjoy this first volume, and I was very appreciative that the novel doesn’t simply stop. It forges a nice connection to the next in the series without hurling me headfirst off that annoying cliff. I’m figuring that in part this is because the series is not one huge extended uber-novel but a series of episodes nested in the overall Little Red concept.

On a personal note, I like how these first two novels I’ve reviewed are indie-published. If you don’t know a lot about the publishing industry, you may not know what that means. In the past, a writer would be published by one of the traditional publishing houses or not at all–self-publishing usually meant publication by one of the “vanity presses” that preys on clueless or disconsolate unpublished writers–still does, but back then, with even more success parting a would-be writer from her money with little or nothing to show for it. Today, four things have happened: through technology such as word processing, self-publishing has become a viable DIY way to produce a book; ebooks have become a big part of readers’ personal libraries and preferred ways of reading; emerging publishing platforms–Amazon’s Kindle and publishing-on-demand, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Apple’s I-books, Kobo’s ebooks–accept indie-published books and present them alongside trad-published books to potential readers; and traditional publishers have undergone drastic consolidation and acquisition by conglomerates that don’t necessarily care about books. In the process, traditional publishers’ marketing and nurturing of all but their most celebrated authors have dwindled. You can read about it in this really informative blog post. A similar situation has happened in the recording industry. The problem with being indie-published (I am, so I know) is that an author doing this needs to be as good a marketer as she is a writer. There’s overlap between good writing and good marketing, but any individual author might not be equally good at both. Ask me how I know THAT!

I’m very pleased that two of the books featured in my blog this week come from indie authors. The featured writer for today, Melanie Karsak, also employs what is known as an “imprint”–a business name for her book publishing endeavor. For example, mine is Shrike Publications. But in Karsak’s case, she really does seem to have incorporated her imprint into a small business–a “boutique publishing company,” the web site calls it–Clockpunk Press. I should investigate to see if that’s how she has published all her books. There are many, and the ratings on Amazon for this first Red Riding Hood book are high.

NEXT UP, TOMORROW, as Fairytale Fantasy Week continues: Beauty and the Werewolf, by Mercedes Lackey

Valentine Week 2025: Fairytale Fantasy, Day Two

This year’s theme: RED RIDING HOOD

A reminder: The novels I’ll review during this year’s Fairytale Fantasy series

Red Rider, by Kate Avery Ellison (2019, indie-published)—TODAY’S REVIEWED NOVEL

Wolves and Daggers: A Red Riding Hood Retelling, by Melanie Karsak (2018, indie published–Clockpunk Press, which seems to be owned by the author)

Beauty and the Werewolf, by Mercedes Lackey (2011, Harlequin Nocturne)

Crimson Bound, by Rosamund Hodge (2015, HarperCollins)

Scarlet, by Marissa Meyer (2013, Macmillan)

For the Wolf, by Hannah Whitten (2021, Orbit)

And finally: a medley of interesting outlier pieces, all based on Little Red

TODAY’S REVIEWED NOVEL

Red Rider, by Kate Avery Ellison (2019, indie-published)

Find it HERE.

This Red Riding Hood-themed novel, classified as YA, is the first book of a series, The Sworn Saga. You can get it through Kindle Unlimited, if you subscribe, and in regular ebook, paperback, and audiobook formats. As far as I know, the book is available to readers ONLY on the Amazon platform, although if you get your fiction through listening, the audiobook is also available through Apple.

This novel’s marketing message claims the book is “a post-apocalyptic werewolf retelling of Red Riding Hood” and “Red Riding Hood meets the Handmaid’s Tale.” The first part of that message is at least superficially accurate. I think the second part is accurate, too, but only if you go on with the series. Since I have not, I can’t swear to that, but the novel makes it pretty clear that the story’s sequels are headed into Handmaid’s Tale territory–even though saying so is kind of like comparing My Golden Book of the Napoleonic Wars with War and Peace.

The world of this novel is set in a future where ordinary citizens have been subjugated to mutated werewolf humanoids. The werewolf females are barren, however, so the werewolf overlords mark certain human girls as mates. When the girls reach puberty, the werewolves take them for breeding stock. (Here’s where the Handmaid’s Tale comparison comes into play.) Meredith Rider is one of the unlucky girls (one of “the Sworn”) marked to be given to a werewolf mate. Werewolves kill her whole family and haul her off to fulfill her destiny. But Meredith, called Red for her red hair and the red, protective cloak her father has given her, is also plucky and resourceful, like all YA heroines. The plot proceeds from there.

The novel has other YA traits and tropes. It is written in the first person, presumably so young female readers can more readily identify with the main character. (Not judging–I’ve done it, too.) It establishes a tricky and interesting relationship situation thing between the main character and her male best friend, on the one hand, and the dominating werewolf known as the Silver Wolf, on the other. The way the author handles it becomes a fresh take on the good boy–dangerous but sexy bad boy trope common to YA novels.

The connection to the Red Riding Hood story only works at the very surface level. I thought at first the werewolf part was because werewolves have become so very popular in recent fantasy fiction, especially that subgenre called paranormal fantasy, but as I mentioned in my last post–while the paranormal fantasy angle may be very convenient marketing, it is also an undeniable and age-old aspect of the Red Riding Hood tale. A child’s casual acquaintance with the story rarely touches on this, but the folklore connection of Little Red with werewolves is sound. As for the rest: the name of the heroine, the grandmother, the red hood, the wolves–all part of the Red Riding Hood story, sure. If you read this novel, though, think about it–except for the werewolves, wouldn’t the story have worked just as well without the other Red Riding Hood trappings? I think it could have been a nice paranormal fantasy series with werewolves. So is the Red Riding Hood connection a marketing gimmick? I’m not sure. But I want to know, and not just because I’m some snarky reviewer! I am in the middle of writing a folklore-themed fantasy novel myself, so I am actually interested in the answer.

I thought the book was pretty well-written. I’m imagining a lot of YA readers will enjoy it. Unfortunately, it also has a hard cliffhanger ending to entice the reader to continue to the next book in the series, and I find that personally distasteful, a real bait-and-switch tactic. But plenty of readers must love this hook into the next volume of the series, so if you are one of them, you can ignore my prejudice here. At any rate, I won’t go on with the series. I feel cheated. I thought I was buying a novel only to discover I have bought a sixth of a novel. But if you love this kind of series, and you accept you are only reading the first installment of a super-novel, there are six installments to love, so go for it. I’m perfectly willing to accept that a long-form Netflix series will come out in seasons with cliffhangers at the end. Why can’t I accept it in books?

I’m very interested in this problem, though–not just as a reader but as a writer of fantasy series novels myself. I always try to wrap each novel up with a satisfying ending, even while suggesting there is more story to come. Am I successful? I hope so. But just stopping–as a reader, I hate that. I have been re-reading Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind (because I’m always intrigued at how that novel works–I don’t think it really ought to, but it really, really does). Now there is a story that stops in the middle, right? Presumably, the book is a three-day marathon in which the main character, Kvothe, recounts his adventures to a scribe. Book One, The Name of the Wind, is Day One. Book Two, The Wise Man’s Fear, is Day Two. And Book Three. . . has never been published (written?), one of the big bad scandals of fantasy publishing, alongside other authors who have never finished their series, such as Scott Lynch with his unfinished Gentleman Bastards series and George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. In spite of the huge compulsion of the reader to go on breathlessly to Rothfuss’s sequel (and maybe–as many fans did–scream in protest when the third book was not forthcoming), I found The Name of the Wind–and its sequel as well– to be satisfying, complete novels. I didn’t feel cheated at the end of either one, and I don’t feel cheated not to have Book Three. Sad, though. Really, really sad!

NEXT UP, TOMORROW, as Fairytale Fantasy Week continues: Wolves and Daggers: A Red Riding Hood Retelling, by Melanie Karsak

Color My Speculative Fiction GREEN

Now that the planet is burning up, it’s no accident that novelists are writing about it–especially as devastating fires sweep down on the LA area while I’m writing this post.

Thanks to beasternchen from Pixabay for this free-to-publish image.

Completely understandable we’re using speculative fiction to explore climate collapse and ecological destruction. Fictions of all types, written, imagistic, patternings of all kinds such as poetic and musical, cinematic, gamer (fun and serious), even legal, even (one might argue) scientific hypotheses, illustrate a common human defensive practice. We try out thoughts, emotions, habits of thinking, situations by using a speculative microcosm, a little laboratory. We build an imaginary world, peer into it, maybe find ourselves entertained by it, but always, even if we are barely aware of it, use it to understand and comfort ourselves, even find solutions to our distress. In the best, most immersive fictional experiences, we discover empathy. Through this human impulse to explore the “little world” of the fiction, we encounter reality in the larger world, and (given the evidence of the Lascaux cave paintings of the Upper Paleolithic and similar finds) we always have.

Novelists as well as writers and creators in other forms increasingly turn to the type of speculative fiction variously termed eco-lit, ecology literature, green literature–to mention a few of its labels. True, all fiction is speculative. A lot of eco-lit is “realistic,” mimicking life as experienced by real people in real historical moments and real places. I’m thinking of Ann Pancake’s Strange as This Weather Has Been (2007), a novel about communal and family breakdown in Appalachia as mountain-top removal mining destroys not only the physical environment but a way of life. An earlier example, Peter Matthiessen’s At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965), shows the damage a technologically advanced and arrogant culture can do to an indigenous culture and its life-giving environment. One of the most powerful recent books in this vein is the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory, by Richard Powers.

Readers and publishers categorize other recent compelling eco-lit– novels, films, and storytelling in other media ( such as The Last of Us and Fallout 76–video games translated into long-form streaming series)–as speculative fiction. This is speculative fiction as it is usually understood, especially dystopian fiction and science fiction (the sub-genre sometimes snarkily referred to as Cli-Fi). These fictions may be set on a near-future earth under threat of climate collapse, or on other planets, or in the far-future. Environmental disaster in these fictional settings can be either the main problem or the consequences of a different problem (nuclear war, for example). If you’re looking for a good list of green-lit/eco-lit novels to read, you might start with the one published by The Guardian in 2020. It’s a bit dated now, but this is a great list. And here is a wonderful eco-lit web site.

Here are six very compelling speculative eco-lit novels–three older novels that have become classics of the genre, and three more recent novels. Of course there are many others. The ones on this list are all superb, and they all address environmental issues, all in different ways. I haven’t posted here in a while–reading other kinds of stuff. It’s time for some speculative fiction!

Take a look at my mini-reviews of these books and the other sources I’ve listed, and other lists of great eco-fiction. Then get reading.

There are many more of these eco-themed speculative novels to read and ponder. Older novels such as J.C. Ballard’s fever-dream of a book, The Drowned World (beware repellant racial stereotypes, though–and its misogyny–never have I encountered a more passive, purely decorative heroine). Newer novels such as Omar El Akkad’s American War. More coming all the time. With the hurricane damage, the fire damage, the inundation of our coastal areas, it’s past time to think deeply about these matters, and fiction–although no substitute for determined action to change the world–is one of the ways we can try out these ideas most empathetically, even energize ourselves for direct action.

Here’s my list:

  • Ursula LeGuin, The Word for World is Forest (1972)
  • Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower (1993)
  • Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2003)
  • Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife (2016)
  • Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future (2020)
  • Annalee Newitz, The Terraformers (2023)

Earlier novels . . .

Ursula LeGuin, The Word for World is Forest (1972)

Find it on Amazon. First published in 1973 by Doubleday.

The matchless Ursula LeGuin wrote this Hugo Award-winning novella in the ’70s. It’s a quick read incorporating many of the themes of her longer novels: clash of cultures, encountering “the other,” and in this book especially, the devastating impact of colonialism on environment. In this novel, an encroaching, colonizing civilization possesses advanced technology able to overwhelm a colonized world without that technological advantage. In this prescient novel, the civilization with the advanced technology is out to destroy its victim’s environment for profit. It’s not a fair fight.

I say prescient, but of course the novel looks backward as well. I’m thinking of the chapter in Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel explaining how in 1532 the Spaniard Francisco Pizarro and his band of only hundreds, with hardly any damage to themselves, could take over the massive Inca civilization. They employed powerful technological advantages–the gun and the domesticated horse–for the ultimate enrichment of Spain. Weird to think of a horse as “technology,” I know, but read Diamond’s book–so interesting despite flaws of overstatement and overgeneralization.

LeGuin’s short novel is part of her Hainish cycle, published between her masterpieces The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed.

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993)

Find it on Amazon. First published in 1993.

Butler’s profoundly moving dystopian novel is the tale of a young “empath” (a person who preternaturally feels others’ pain as if experiencing it herself) who lives in a near-future gated community outside Los Angeles. The carefully maintained defenses of the “haves” fall to the desperation of the “have-nots.” Fleeing as her relatively safe home succumbs to violence, the main character, Lauren Olamina, makes her way north through a ravaged environment. She marries a charismatic man working for a more just society. Together they establish the utopian community Acorn on principles that Lauren envisions, a new religion she calls Earthseed. The novel not only explores the consequences of climate change on the environment but especially the socioeconomic pressures of social injustice exacerbated by climate change. One of those near-future dystopian novels that makes us cringe the more Butler’s predictions mirror present-day circumstances.

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2003)

Find it HERE. First published in 2003.

Some critics loved this book when it was first published. Others were dismissive. I thought it was brilliant when I first read it. Re-readings have only made me admire it more. People think of The Handmaid’s Tale as Atwood’s most prophetic novel (which, interestingly, has a climate-collapse backstory). Oryx and Crake rivals that novel’s prescience. Sadly, Oryx and Crake holds the distinction of being one of the most banned books in American schools. Dystopia is already here, folks. Keep ’em ignorant and maybe they won’t notice their whole world is collapsing.

Oryx and Crake is a novel about a future America devastated by environmental collapse caused by corporate greed, misplaced use of advanced technology in the service of that greed, and disinformation designed to cover up the impending devastation. Sound familiar? It also anticipates a certain Big Pharma scandal involving a company distributing and heavily promoting drugs causing a terrifying health crisis that benefits the company more and more handsomely the more they deny their role in creating it. Sound familiar?

When the novel begins, the narrator is one of the last humans alive–as far as he knows, the very last. Not so the terrifying genetically engineered creatures escaped from their controlled experiments, now thriving in the wild and hunting him. Their savagery is matched only by the savagery of the environment in which he is slowly starving to death. It’s a novel about the price paid by a society valuing STEM training unchecked by education in the humanities, a society where greed runs rampant over any sort of morality, technology trumps human empathy. In a really intriguing way, Oryx and Crake is also a Robinsonade. It’s a wonderful novel. Everyone should read it, especially kids in school. Apparently a bunch of school boards disagree with me there.

Many readers love the sequel, Year of the Flood, even more (maybe better called a companion book, because it involves different characters). I love them both but Oryx and Crake most. Unfortunately the much-later-written third novel in the trilogy, MaddAddam, doesn’t really measure up, although it does connect some dots and tie up some narrative threads.

On to more recent novels. . .

Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife (2016)

Find it HERE.

At first gasp, Bacigalupi’s novel is a thriller that just happens to be set in the near-future and just happens to involve a horrific fight over water rights in the intermountain West. The PR for the novel calls it Mad Max meets Chinatown. The Mad Max part not so much, I’m thinking. The novel doesn’t present a post-apocalyptic landscape resembling Mars but a credibly and terribly degraded version of what we see around us every day. I’d say the novel is Breaking Bad meets Chinatown, with water instead of crystal meth the substance so desired people will kill for it and betray their best friends for it in the most vicious and depraved ways. There’s the same sense of impending dread and violence, the same sickening spiral into actual and incredibly sadistic violence. At one point, I was so disturbed I had to stop reading.

I found the novel a bit hard to get into. The first half hops from character to character to character so fast the novel feels out of focus. Midway through, though, the story finds its footing. I buckled up for a wild and violent ride. I ended up liking the novel although not just loving it. I found the characters interesting but a bit too brittle and unlikeable. If you read it, you may disagree, especially if you are a fan of the suspense-thriller genre (as I am not) with its hard-boiled, hard-nosed macho characters. But I CAN like such a read. Or show. I’m thinking of Breaking Bad again–we WANT to like Walter White, even when he turns out to be a monster. Who is a more compelling (can I say relatable? and at the same time monstrous?) character than Gus Fring? I still want to know more about his back-story. And don’t get me started on Better Call Saul, different but equally superb. I’m not sure whether Bryan Cranston or Bob Odenkirk is more revered around here. Vince Gilligan for sure. Which brings me to. . .

For me, the most relatable thing about The Water Knife is not its characters but its setting, both the physical setting and the political and socioeconomic backdrop. I’m perched right now in the Sandia Mountains of New Mexico just east of Albuquerque, where I spend about a third of my time, thinking how the LA fires could have as easily started here. How, if they did, all of us up here would be (literally) toast. I’m sitting here thinking about the politics of the Colorado River and who controls its water, with New Mexico apparently the last-stop step-sister of the Colorado River Compact. I’m thinking about how I drive by the settings for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul every day, and how the news suggests those violent series have not strayed far from the truth. I’m thinking about recent natural disasters–the LA fires, the hurricane devastation in the Appalachians, and all the rest–and how tied they are to climate change, how much fuel for disinformation they occasioned and still are, how much distrust in the federal government is building because of it, how much finger-pointing is going on, how dangerously states seem to be pitted against states these days.

The Water Knife deals with all of these issues, especially the Balkanization of the U.S. into warring, barricaded combat zones beholden to near-feudal billionaire overlords or well-heeled absentee landlords from other nation-states. Meanwhile, a weakened federal government is powerless to stop the carnage. Bottom line: The Water Knife isn’t some illustrated filled-out Powerpoint with cardboard characters, like some other novels based on contemporary problems. It is a powerful, important book that really rewards the reading.

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future (2020)

Find it HERE.

Whew. Where can I even start? This book is a must-read. The opening is one of the most horrific I’ve ever read. Strangely, you can’t call this near-future novel dystopian, because it presents a hopeful message. The conditions of the plot are about as dystopian as it gets, though.

The novel begins with a major heat wave in India that kills twenty million people, a scale almost impossible to imagine. We see this scene from the close-in perspective of a humanitarian aid worker devastated and irrevocably changed by his experience as one of the few survivors. He sets out to assassinate a highly-placed member of an international agency charged with the near-impossible task of mitigating the increasing, increasingly terrible climate disasters assailing the world. As the planet careens past its tipping point, both characters–the aid worker and his target–are changed and deepened.

I love character-driven fiction, and I love Robinson’s characters. Read as many of his books as you can get your hands on! His characters always seem completely human, flaws and all. Flawed human beings living through dangerous times on a damaged planet heading for ultimate disaster–a thrilling if sobering read.

The Los Angeles Review of Books calls this novel Robinson’s grimmest, and “not an easy read” (I tore through it, myself) and Robinson, nevertheless, as “our culture’s last great utopian.” The reviewer takes issue with Robinson’s method. In a manner reminiscent of Dos Passos, Robinson interlards the plot with snippets of many different types of writing–newspaper accounts, bureaucratic reports, and the like. I don’t know–I went with it. The characters seemed real to me and because of this method, the world-building did too. In clumsier hands, it wouldn’t have worked. But Robinson is not a clumsy writer.

Stephen Frug’s review of the novel also critiques its modernist collage of narrative types but concludes that The Ministry for the Future is above all a political novel. That seems on the nose to me. Frug’s most interesting charge, though, is that by setting his novel in the very near future, Robinson risked real events outrunning the fictional ones–which, Frug persuasively argues, is exactly what has happened. Robinson’s novel, as Frug points out, deals very little with the actual political and social forces opposing climate action right now–yet surely those forces would have played an outsized role if the events of the novel were taking place in the contemporary world. And here it comes, people–the near-future, rapidly turning into the present.

I loved Robinson’s novel anyway. I am in good company. In 2020, Barack Obama called it one of his favorite books of the year. Mr. Obama is a reader I really trust, too. Other books on his list are Jack, by the inimitable Marilynne Robinson (no kin to Kim Stanley–and good lord, read ALL of her books), as well as James MacBride’s amazing Deacon King Kong (read all of his). So I stand by my opinion.

Annalee Newitz, The Terraformers (2023)

Find it HERE.

Bacigalupi’s novel is set in the near-future on Planet Earth. Robinson’s is set in the scary REALLY near-future. But Newitz’s novel is set in the far-future, and not even on our own planet. It is still one of the most compelling examples of eco-fiction I’ve read. Talk about using a fictional world as a laboratory for ours. The politics of this novel, the use of bureaucratic regulations as a tool for ecological repair while others are using it as a weapon of ecological destruction–amazing.

I actually reviewed this novel this summer, when I was reading as many of the short-listed novels for the big speculative fiction prizes as I could. See my review here. Newitz’s novel was short-listed for the 2024 Nebula Award. Although it didn’t win, I thought it was marvelous, all the more since it’s a novel that really shouldn’t work as a novel–it covers a thousand years in the terraforming of a planet. Novels really are about character, one of their signature traits, and you’d think if a writer wanted to explore a time period that long, involving a thousand years’ worth of characters, the writer should maybe break down and write nonfiction instead. This novel works, though. The characters are marvelous, perhaps because the planet itself becomes the main character. I won’t go on and on about this great novel. I could! But I already did, so please see my earlier review. Damn, Newitz’s novel should have won an award.

MORE BOOKS!

Just the same, the novels that did win several of those awards had a climate focus, too, and they are just terrific. I could have posted reviews of them here too, especially The Saint of Bright Doors, by Vajra Chandrasekera, The Mountain in the Sea, by Ray Nayler, and In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes. In fact, I already did. See those reviews in my earlier posts, too, and read the novels. They are great!