Adrift, by Lisa Brideau

A woman wakes up alone on a boat floating off the shore of Canada. She can't remember anything, not even her own name. She has ID for an identity she doesn't recognize. Her only clue is this note:

There are pills in the drawer for the headaches.

You want answers, but this has been done to keep you from them.

This is the only way out alive.

Start over.

Don't make yourself known.

Don't look back.

The woman, who ends up calling herself Ess, takes the warning seriously but can't resist trying to figure out who she is, what happened to her, and why.

It's 2037 and climate change has made things even worse than now, without any governments willing to do much about it. Climate refugees are turned away or put in camps, and there's a hunt on for lone amnesiacs found floating in boats, who are suspected of being climate refugees and jailed. So Ess has another reason to keep her amnesia hidden. But she can't resist trying to connect with other human beings; when she's alone, she feels her lack of identity even more acutely.

This is a low-key ambitious book which has the form of a thriller but the pacing and mood of literary fiction. It held my interest and pulls off some technically difficult elements, but I ultimately found it more admirable than enjoyable. For me it had a feeling of distance that prevented me from getting very emotionally engaged or thrilled. But that's very subjective. It got very good reviews.

Spoilers for what was up with the amnesia. ( Read more... )

Author's impressive bio: She holds degrees in aerospace engineering and urban design and currently works as a municipal sustainability specialist in Vancouver, BC focused on climate policy.

Winterfox/Benjanun Sriduangkaew is back

I have not personally heard from her - please do NOT inform me if she's libeling me on Twitter or anything like that - but apparently she's being a busy little bee on social media, sweetly befriending new writers with marginalized identities who have no idea that she's a serial blackmailer.

If you have the good fortune to have never heard of her, she's a multi-millionaire heiress (yes really) who chooses to devote her life to bullying people on the internet, making death threats, and boosting her own career as a science fiction writer by trying to destroy the careers of other writers she sees as rivals - primarily women writers of color. She befriends new writers, encourages them to confide in her, and then demands that they do what she say or she'll send their correspondence to their boss, significant others, etc.

I know how outrageous this sounds. I am not making it up. There is an avalanche of documentation of it if you choose to look it up. If you spot someone you know being befriended by her, it would be a good idea to warn them.

She has a new pseudonym, Maria Ying, which is publicly linked to her Benjanun Sriduangkaew identity. She is also known as Requires Hate, Lesifoere (the identity she used to bully trans people with repulsive transphobic slurs), and many other identities.

I am not on Tumblr so I can't reblog this, but here's a post warning people about her. If you have a Tumblr and wish to do so, you can reblog it and possibly save some new writers a world of trouble.

She has still not promised to stop abusing, harassing, and lying about me. The last I heard from her, she was calling me a pedophile on Twitter.

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