These three novellas deal with the issue of community, oppression, resistance, and violence in worlds which are dealing with the aftermath of an apocalypse.
Ogres, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Ogres are bigger than you.
Ogres are stronger than you.
Ogres rule the world.
In this apparently medievaloid fantasy world, humans are ruled by ogres. In addition to being bigger and stronger, ogres are physically capable of eating meat, which makes humans very sick. Humans are passive and non-violent... until a young human, Torquell, dares to fight an ogre. Torquell then flees to the forest, where he meets some Robin Hood-like human outlaws. But that's just the beginning...
From this premise alone,I had a pretty good idea of where this story was going. With the exception of a nice final twist, I was absolutely correct.
Ogres are, more-or-less, original humans. What the "human" characters call humans are genetically modified to be small, weak, passive, and allergic to meat. This was done ostensibly for reasons of population and environmental control, but actually to solidify a ruling class. Surprise surprise, ogres are also cannibals. Torquell is a throwback to original humans.
Ogres has a strong leftist theme about class warfare and resistance, but as a story, it's pretty cliched. The Hugo nominees liked it more than I did.
Everything That Isn't Winter, by Margaret Killjoy
A tea-growing anarchist commune after the apocalypse is threatened by violent outsiders.
Killjoy is a trans woman anarchist of the practical variety: self-sufficiency, community-building, and punching Nazis. I approve. She has a great Twitter and two excellent podcasts, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff (resistors in history) and Live Like The World Is Dying (prepping for anarchists).
I was excited to read her fiction, but this novella was just... fine. It's exactly what it says on the can.
Nothing but the Rain, by Naomi Salman
In a small town where it rains all the time, the rain has started to erase people's memories. A single drop will take away the memory of the last few moments. More than that, the last few hours. And so forth. Enough exposure will erase your entire mind. No one can remember exactly when or how this started, because by the time anyone realized that they need to write down what happened, a lot of their memories had already been erased. The town is surrounded by soldiers who won't speak to them or let them leave.
The narrator, Laverne, is a doctor who keeps a journal to try to keep her self as intact as possible, and to read it back to remember what the rain erases. This structure is essential to the story, and used in a really brilliant manner. She's more isolated than many of the people in the town, for reasons which are gradually revealed, but she does have one contact, a woman with a toddler.
The premise is really well done, working out all the implications in a terrifyingly believable manner. I would call it a horror story, not because of any conventional jump scares, but because the entire premise is essentially horrific.
Be aware going in that you will never get an explanation of exactly why the rain is happening or what's going on in the wider world, though you do get enough bits and pieces that you can construct a plausible explanation for some questions.
This has by far the bleakest view of resistance of the three novellas. In this story, both resistance and non-resistance may be equally futile. The people who resist are all brutally murdered. But if you don't resist, then you are stuck in stagnation and, eventually, death. Maybe it's better to go down fighting, at least morally. Community survives in a disaster, but sometimes the odds are just overwhelming.
Laverne doesn't join with the community because she correctly sees that resistance will get them all killed. But she doesn't have any better ideas. Not doing anything is equally bad, and there is the suggestion that if they had all just sat there and done nothing, they would have all eventually completely lost their memories and then been killed anyway.
While Laverne does end up escaping with a child, the only reason she can do it is because she took advantage of the chaos when everyone else resisted and was shot down. In order to do that she had to commit a horrific act, possibly necessary but pretty terrible and also somewhat self-serving – she erased the child's memories completely to stop her from crying for her mother, which would have given them away to the soldiers. At the end we learn that the story is her confession to the child, who is now old enough to understand and forgive or not.
Chillingly, it's suggested that the rain might have been inflicted on the city to remove their memories of... something. It's apparently kept up as an experiment.
Thanks to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
just_ann_now for the rec; I never heard of this before and it's great.
All these novellas deal with community and resistance to oppression.
In Ogres, resistance is necessary, violent resistance is also often necessary, but there is a danger of new bosses taking over for the old bosses.
In Everything That Isn't Winter, community is most important thing and the threats to it are primarily from outside forces. But because there are threats from outside, self-defense is necessary. This story deals with cost of violence on the people who commit it, even if their reasons are essentially good.
Nothing but the Rain has an optimistic view of people's willingness to resist, but a pessimistic view of its likelihood of success. It deals with the impossibility of staying morally pure in extreme situations, and the awful choices people are forced to make in order to survive.
Ogres, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Ogres are bigger than you.
Ogres are stronger than you.
Ogres rule the world.
In this apparently medievaloid fantasy world, humans are ruled by ogres. In addition to being bigger and stronger, ogres are physically capable of eating meat, which makes humans very sick. Humans are passive and non-violent... until a young human, Torquell, dares to fight an ogre. Torquell then flees to the forest, where he meets some Robin Hood-like human outlaws. But that's just the beginning...
From this premise alone,I had a pretty good idea of where this story was going. With the exception of a nice final twist, I was absolutely correct.
Ogres are, more-or-less, original humans. What the "human" characters call humans are genetically modified to be small, weak, passive, and allergic to meat. This was done ostensibly for reasons of population and environmental control, but actually to solidify a ruling class. Surprise surprise, ogres are also cannibals. Torquell is a throwback to original humans.
Ogres has a strong leftist theme about class warfare and resistance, but as a story, it's pretty cliched. The Hugo nominees liked it more than I did.
Everything That Isn't Winter, by Margaret Killjoy
A tea-growing anarchist commune after the apocalypse is threatened by violent outsiders.
Killjoy is a trans woman anarchist of the practical variety: self-sufficiency, community-building, and punching Nazis. I approve. She has a great Twitter and two excellent podcasts, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff (resistors in history) and Live Like The World Is Dying (prepping for anarchists).
I was excited to read her fiction, but this novella was just... fine. It's exactly what it says on the can.
Nothing but the Rain, by Naomi Salman
In a small town where it rains all the time, the rain has started to erase people's memories. A single drop will take away the memory of the last few moments. More than that, the last few hours. And so forth. Enough exposure will erase your entire mind. No one can remember exactly when or how this started, because by the time anyone realized that they need to write down what happened, a lot of their memories had already been erased. The town is surrounded by soldiers who won't speak to them or let them leave.
The narrator, Laverne, is a doctor who keeps a journal to try to keep her self as intact as possible, and to read it back to remember what the rain erases. This structure is essential to the story, and used in a really brilliant manner. She's more isolated than many of the people in the town, for reasons which are gradually revealed, but she does have one contact, a woman with a toddler.
The premise is really well done, working out all the implications in a terrifyingly believable manner. I would call it a horror story, not because of any conventional jump scares, but because the entire premise is essentially horrific.
Be aware going in that you will never get an explanation of exactly why the rain is happening or what's going on in the wider world, though you do get enough bits and pieces that you can construct a plausible explanation for some questions.
This has by far the bleakest view of resistance of the three novellas. In this story, both resistance and non-resistance may be equally futile. The people who resist are all brutally murdered. But if you don't resist, then you are stuck in stagnation and, eventually, death. Maybe it's better to go down fighting, at least morally. Community survives in a disaster, but sometimes the odds are just overwhelming.
Laverne doesn't join with the community because she correctly sees that resistance will get them all killed. But she doesn't have any better ideas. Not doing anything is equally bad, and there is the suggestion that if they had all just sat there and done nothing, they would have all eventually completely lost their memories and then been killed anyway.
While Laverne does end up escaping with a child, the only reason she can do it is because she took advantage of the chaos when everyone else resisted and was shot down. In order to do that she had to commit a horrific act, possibly necessary but pretty terrible and also somewhat self-serving – she erased the child's memories completely to stop her from crying for her mother, which would have given them away to the soldiers. At the end we learn that the story is her confession to the child, who is now old enough to understand and forgive or not.
Chillingly, it's suggested that the rain might have been inflicted on the city to remove their memories of... something. It's apparently kept up as an experiment.
Thanks to
just_ann_now for the rec; I never heard of this before and it's great.
All these novellas deal with community and resistance to oppression.
In Ogres, resistance is necessary, violent resistance is also often necessary, but there is a danger of new bosses taking over for the old bosses.
In Everything That Isn't Winter, community is most important thing and the threats to it are primarily from outside forces. But because there are threats from outside, self-defense is necessary. This story deals with cost of violence on the people who commit it, even if their reasons are essentially good.
Nothing but the Rain has an optimistic view of people's willingness to resist, but a pessimistic view of its likelihood of success. It deals with the impossibility of staying morally pure in extreme situations, and the awful choices people are forced to make in order to survive.
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Also the intersectionality with feminism didn't really work for me.
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The Killjoy piece
I enjoyed the Killjoy piece when Tor.com published it a few years ago and commented there in 2016 on some things I liked about it:
I liked the moments where the narrator got surprised, as a balance to the supercompetence displayed elsewhere. And it’s refreshing to see the competence demonstrations, loyalty, sacrifice, tradecraft, and suspense I’d usually see in milsf deployed in a story about the defense of an egalitarian commune in the woods.
I believe I noticed that the reader never gets told the narrator’s gender — I appreciated that.
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Re: The Killjoy piece
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Sounds rather like N K Jemisin's Emergency Skin, which got the Hugo in 2020, and which is roughly what would happen if Elon Musk and Peter Thiel went off to have a baby society together*. OTOH, the Jemisin may be even more savage, though all its observations are at a remove, seen through one of the society's soldier drones encountering actual humans and having reality explained to him.
* One more reason to worry about Space Karen experimenting with brain implants....
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Hanging out too much with biologists whose focus is actually on genetic expressions and behaviours and their intersections and so on has also destroyed my ability to enjoy premises like this because the nitpicker in my head goes "I'm pretty sure you can't do that without destroying their usefulness as an underclass . . . "