post-apocalyptic

The Flower – John Light (author), Lisa Evans (illustrator)

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The Flower CoverFirst Published: 1st April, 2006
Genre: Children’s Dystopian / Picture Book
Available: Amazon.com | Amazon UK | Child’s Play

Brigg is a child living in a grey city. He works at the library, where he finds a book he isn’t supposed to read. It’s filled with pictures of flowers, which he hasn’t seen before. If only he could find a flower in the city.

Dystopian futures are tricky to condense for picture books, as there’s not a lot of space to explain what’s going on, and early readers may not be familiar with the tropes of the genre. This book does a good job of tackling that issue. There are many small details, like Brigg having a job and living alone rather than with parents. Brigg has never seen flowers before, and doesn’t recognise a seed packet or understand how plants grow.

It focuses on a personal act of revolution, rather than trying to overthrow the system. Brigg can’t change how the city runs, but he can try to grow a flower. The theme of finding a point of happiness when the world seems bleak will resonate with children going through tough times.

There’s also a suggestion of post-apocalyptic themes, with the environment changing so there aren’t any plants in the city. It takes something pretty major to kill off all the weeds.

The art reinforces the story, by showing the city as a dull grey place. Brigg is shown walking the other way to everyone else, or sitting apart from other children, highlighting how out-of-place he feels. His room is very plain, with few personal items. Once the flower appears, it’s a point of colour and life in an otherwise dull environment.

I wasn’t sure whether Brigg was intended to be mixed race. The art style has everyone with very lightly shaded skin, making it rather ambiguous. He also has somewhat European facial features. But his hair texture suggests black ancestry. So, I personally saw him as mixed race when I read it, whether or not that was intended.

This is an enjoyable book that packs a lot into very few words. It touches on things like feeling alone, environmental issues and book censorship. It’s an accessible introduction to dystopian fiction for younger children, with darkly whimsical artwork.

Steamborn – Eric R. Asher

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Steamborn CoverSeries: The Steamborn Series, #1
First Published: 29th November, 2015
Genre: Young Adult Steampunk / Novel
Available: Amazon.com | Amazon UK | Smashwords

Jacob is a boy living in a walled city, under constant attack from giant invertebrates. When an attack devastates part of the city, he and his friends investigate the cause.

I read this because of my love of invertebrates. It’s a steampunk world where invertebrates can grow to giant sizes. There are knights who ride giant spiders, insects pulling carriages, and the threat from wild invertebrates coming over the walls. I liked that though the wild ones were dangerous, it wasn’t that invertebrates were evil. Predators will kill people because they hunt, but there were invertebrates who were tame, who were farmed for food, and so on.

It’s one of the few books that treat spiders as just another animal. As well as the giant ones people ride, there are large (several inches across) jumping spiders that live around the city. Not everyone likes them, but they’re mostly treated as harmless.

Class themes are important. Jacob is from a poor family, who live in the Lowlands. As well as generally struggling with money for food and medicine, the walls protecting the Lowlands aren’t as good. That means they’re at risk from attacks. The rich area of the city is at the highest point, with the best walls.

It touches on some disability issues, as amputees are common due to the attacks. Jacob gets to work making prosthetics for people. This also links to the past, when the city was at war with people who had very advanced steampunk cybernetics. Some as prosthetics for people who’d lost limbs, but also some who’d been turned into cyborg soldiers. This would have had more impact if someone in the main cast had been injured, rather than being something that happened to minor characters. Though dehumanizing people with these prosthetics was treated as a serious issue, it was all rather distant.

The characters weren’t particularly diverse. They were mainly men/boys. Though it’s claimed the people in the present of the story are a mixture of all the races of the old world, everyone looks rather white until a few characters at the end. They fit a lot of stock character types. The eccentric old inventor. The reckless young boy who’ll save the world. Alice, the only girl who really had a major role, was there as the sensible one who told Jacob off for being too reckless.

The result is I was a lot more interested in the world than the characters living in it. The history and the society built around giant invertebrates was fun to explore. The characters who did the exploring were not the major draw for me.

The book is a little heavy on capitalised new names for things, which often made it harder to understand rather than clarifying what things were. It’s also the first in an ongoing story. There’s some resolution at the end, but it’s more of a pause before continuing the larger narrative.

[A copy of this book was received from the author for review purposes]

Sugar Scars – Travis Norwood

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Sugar Scars CoverFirst Published: 28th July, 2015
Genre: Post-Apocalyptic / Novel
Available: Amazon.com | Amazon UK

Sugar is a type 1 diabetic. When a virus kills most of the world’s population, she hoards all the insulin she can find. But insulin can’t be stored forever. To survive, she’s going to have to make her own.

There will be some discussion of sexual assault in this review, though no graphic descriptions.

The basic premise is something that appealed to me. It’s a different kind of post-apocalyptic survival, as it deals with how to get something that requires a society to produce. This part is handled well enough. Sugar’s diabetes is something she constantly has to remember, by monitoring her blood sugar and food intake. Producing insulin also isn’t something she can do alone. It requires a community. Though there are people who use society’s collapse to do bad things, most of the survivors are simply trying to live their lives and help each other out. This is realistic, as most people don’t actually turn into serial killers the moment a disaster happens.

The issues I had weren’t with the main plotline of trying to set up insulin production. Communities that band together and help their sick and disabled members is something I’m down with, and I wish happened more in post-apocalyptic work. The problem was everything else.

Sugar does not act like an older teenager. She acts like a child. Though her voice does mature somewhat over time, the start was a mismatch between what the text says she is (a nineteen-year-old who has been in and out of various foster homes, and living on her own since she was eighteen) and her behaviour (maybe nine or ten years old at most). At first, I thought this might be purposeful. She might be non-neurotypical. But as it went on, I changed my mind, because of the gender binary stuff.

And there’s a lot of gender binary stuff going on. Women all want babies, even the ones who say they don’t. Men are all lust machines. Sugar thinks her first relationship was as an equal and she never relied on her boyfriend, yet what is shown is her struggling with basic tasks when he isn’t there to do them. He did manly man stuff, because he was the provider. She cooked and looked after the house. There’s a constant repeating of how small and tiny Sugar is (she’s a woman of average size) that I’ve come to associate with this sort of attitude. It’s a way to portray women as being like children. Which with Sugar’s immaturity, combined together in a package that says women really need menfolk around to look after them.

Non-white people are mostly there as background decoration, or for Sugar to sweep in and rescue. It’d be nice to say no gay people appeared, but one of the characters has a backstory of being raped by his father as a child, and by other boys of a similar age. Gay people are rapists and paedophiles. There are no counterexamples to this.

That’s touching on just a few of the bigger issues. There’s basically a layer of bigotry over every aspect of the book. The author’s worldview shines through clearly, and it’s a worldview that hates people like me. I was not particularly surprised that the author’s note says he aspires to be like Orson Scott Card. For anyone who loves Card and his politics, this might be a great book. For anyone else, it’s one to avoid.

[A copy of this book was received from the publisher for review purposes]

Above World – Jenn Reese

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Above World CoverSeries: Above World, #1
First Published: 14th February, 2012
Genre: Middle Grade Science Fiction / Novel
Available: Amazon.com | Amazon UK

The breathing technology used by the Kampii (mermaids) is failing. The adults won’t do anything, so Aluna and her friend Hoku travel up to the surface to find answers (young Kampii don’t get their mermaid tails until they’re older, so they still have legs). In the above world, there are unaltered humans, bird people and horse people (among others). They’re under attack from the upgraders (cyborgs).

This book is a fun action-adventure. The world is a dystopian spin on old mythology, without being too gritty. The current situation is one that developed from the founding of the various colonies, so as well as travelling the world, they also have to learn about their past. I enjoyed the contrast between the two main characters – Aluna as a warrior and Hoku as a scientist. It was nice to see Aluna having positive relationships with other girls/women, rather than being the one special girl who hated all the other womenfolk (as so many books with warrior girls/women tend to do).

There were some points that made me pause. Though it’s good that being cool mermaids and so forth isn’t a white person only zone, I wish the racial descriptions had been less ambiguous. There’s mention of brown skin, but that leaves a lot to the imagination in the sort of way where people rewrite in their heads to make everyone white (especially when the character isn’t on the cover). It would have been nice to have some mention of other features, such as hair, facial features and remaining pieces of culture.

I wasn’t too comfortable with what was shown of Dash’s people. They seem rather pseudo-Native American, which is potentially problematic when they’re a race of horse people. Or the suggestion that the desert was an uninhabited area free to be colonised by the genetically changed. However, it’s possible both issues are handled in later books, as these things were told second hand rather than seen.

I did enjoy the book despite those concerns and look forward to the sequel.