A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

After a covid-informed pandemic, two teenage boys - one gay, one who hasn't yet figured out that he's bisexual - meet, slowly get to know each other, and go on a post-apocalyptic road trip.

I LOVED this book. There's so much about this story that I've seen done badly so many times, and it not only did all those things well, it did all sorts of other things well that I wasn't even looking for.

The romance is the slowest of slow burns, full of pining but very understandably so - they both have extremely good reasons for not talking about their feelings. Andrew thinks Jamie is straight because Jamie thinks he's straight, so he doesn't want to make Jamie uncomfortable or mess up their friendship by confessing a crush, especially given that they desperately need to stick together for their own safety. Jamie's feelings develop slowly, and he's uncertain what they mean and if Andrew feels the same way. I ended up incredibly invested in their relationship. So, no stupid misunderstandings or inexplicable refusals to just fucking talk to each other.

They both have dark secrets that are actually dark, and so it makes sense that they worry that the other might dump them or feel differently about them if they confess them. (I'm often annoyed by supposedly dark secrets that turn out to be something like "I like light bondage" or "I got in argument with my mom and then she got hit by a cement truck.")

Andrew is pretty funny and enjoys joking with friends, and he and Jamie initially bond by joking. But they both sound like teenage boys who enjoy joking with each other, and Andrew is funny like a teenage boy can be funny. There's no incessant quipping that sounds like each joke was carefully crafted by a professional writer. In a related matter that is often done badly, they each take turns narrating, and they sound like two different people.

And! The pandemic and the pandemic landscape are unexpectedly interesting. They wander through a series of post-apocalyptic tropes - looters, the nice on the surface but actually terrible community, dark tunnels, lone psychopaths - and every single one is well-done and plausible.

Very interestingly, the pandemic itself is different from any I've ever seen in fiction. It's basically a superflu, but one which spread fairly slowly, so things were slowly falling apart long before the whole landscape got depopulated. Also, the response was distinctly covid-like in terms of government denial and uselessness. As a result, though the world is extremely depopulated, there are very slim pickings at shops because supply lines fell apart quite some time before the plague burned itself out.

Anyway, this was great. It had a perfect balance between a very slow-burn friendship-to-romance, character development, and post-apocalypse action. Very suitable for teenagers, but I adored it as an adult. A sequel came out recently that I haven't read yet.

An extremely generic fungus apocalypse novel with a mildly grabby beginning. I read this while half-delirious from lack of sleep on a red-eye plane trip, then deleted as I would never read it again.

Scarlett is a fifteen-year-old in Los Angeles who goes to a baseball game at Dodger Stadium with her family the day the world ends. A man starts screaming about foul balls, then his head explodes. Two white fungus stalks poke out of what remains of his head and form balls at the top which explode in a cloud of spores. A day or two later, everyone in LA but her is dead of exploding head fungus. She appears to be immune.

"White stalks poking through" the remains of heads are described in those exact words over and over and over. (They never thrust or protrude or grow. They only ever poke.) Scarlett grabs supplies, then worries that other survivors, if they exist, will steal them from her. Why would they steal the supplies she grabbed from random houses and stores when everyone is dead and they can grab their own supplies from houses and stores?

There is a general problem with the author bringing up issues that don't really make sense, or only to unconvincingly dismiss them. Scarlett realizes that pets are locked up in homes and pet stores, and animals are locked up in zoos. She thinks of releasing as many as she can to save their lives, then decides that it's enough of a problem for her dealing with the dogs that are already loose and she doesn't want to be stalked by a jaguar.

Why not release only the harmless animals? This feels like an issue that the author thought of, then didn't want to write about, so he brought it up only to dismiss it. I think if he didn't want to deal with it, then he should have just not mentioned it. Having Scarlett deliberately decide to leave a lot of harmless animals to die does not make her sympathetic, but it's clearly meant to make her seem practical rather than selfish.

It's annoying when an author brings up a potentially interesting plotline only to dismiss it in favor of a boring one. Have Scarlett go to the zoo to release the animals, not just wander around LA alone some more! Have Mrs. Pollifax impersonate a fortuneteller while hiding out at a carnival, not lock herself up alone in a caravan!

The rest of the fungus book proceeds along incredibly predictable paths.

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This book is not good, but it served to entertain me when I could barely pay attention to anything, so it served its purpose.

A bunch of John Christopher's books are getting reprinted as ebooks. He's a very uneven writer but his better books are well worth reading if you're okay with male-centricity - The Tripods, obviously, but also the Sword of the Spirits trilogy. His worse books, like Sweeney's Island/Cloud on Silver and Wrinkle in the Skin are some of the most jaw-droppingly misogynistic books I've ever read and that's saying something. (Also racist, but sadly not the most racist books I've ever read.) And some are just plain weird, which is always a plus in my book.

Sadly, Kindle has not yet reprinted the Nazi leprechauns.



Empty World, one of his many apocalypse books, features contagious rapid aging. At first children and younger teenagers are spared, and I thought it would be an "adults die, kids are left to make a new world" book. Then the children start dying too. By the two-thirds mark, there are only five survivors that we know of, and one is insane and one, believing he's all alone, commits suicide the day before the others would have found him. This book is dark.

The last third is very odd. Neil, the protagonist, finds two girls living together. They seem to be doing fine, but he doesn't agree and demands that they leave London and go to the country with him. Things go very, very bad between the three of them, leading to an ending that is weird and abrupt but oddly powerful. (This is a minority opinion. Amazon reviews were mostly "WTF? The book just stopped!)

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Wrinkle in the Skin is another apocalypse book, genre: giant earthquake. I DNF'd/skimmed it as it takes my second-place prize for Most Ridiculously Unrealistically Grimdark Apocalypse Reaction. First place is the book (IIRC Ashfall) in which a giant volcano erupts and people resort to cannibalism the next day. If you can't hunt for canned goods or just fast for one day before roasting babies in the town square, you just really want to roast a baby.

In this one, a giant earthquake kills most of the inhabitants of Guernsey. Literally ONE DAY LATER, when no one has any idea how widespread the earthquake actually was, some random dude has rounded up the women and begun raping them with the intent of quickly impregnating them so he can found a dynasty with himself in charge. The narrator is mildly put off by this, but not enough to do anything about it; he evaluates all women by attractiveness and agrees with the rape dynasty dude that the first one he found and raped is a "slut." The rape dynasty dude discusses forming a rape roster and keeping an eight-year-old girl for later sexual use when she's slightly older; the narrator is mildly put off but doesn't object.

At that point I started skimming. The narrator, accompanied by a young boy who is not considered a rape target because John Christopher cannot conceive of men being sexually victimized, goes on a trek across a former ocean bed in search of his daughter, a student a London. This part is pretty cool though, hilariously, they cannot conceive of eating raw fish so just leave perfectly good fish because they lost their lighter. These dudes are not exactly dynasty-building material is what I'm saying.

They find that England has also been devastated. The narrator meets up with a woman who delivers a "It's a man's man's world now" monologue in which she explains that she needs male protection because she has been raped in like eight separate incidents by different rapists, and was also raped by the men who "protected" her. After rape # 4 or so, I think I would try striking out on my own and avoiding men as much as possible, as there is plenty of canned food around.

At that point I gave up. It's too late now but I would really like to tell John Christopher that 1) you cannot extrapolate the behavior of soldiers in a war zone toward civilians on the enemy side to the behavior of random civilians to each other immediately after a natural disaster, 2) the day after a natural disaster is waaaaaaay too soon to found a rape dynasty, 3) raw fish is delicious and even if it wasn't, when you're starving you eat what's available so so much for your grim realism that allows for rape dynasties but not raw fish, 4) once things have devolved into a rapefest free for all, boys are getting raped too and eventually you, yes you, will land on the rape roster.

In the Before, rock singer Luce Cannon is just starting to hit the big time when the world is hit by the one-two punch of massive terrorist attacks and (apparently unrelatedly) a pandemic. In the After, gatherings have been banned to prevent violence and viruses, life is lived mostly online and under the eye of huge corporations. Rosemary, a young woman who loves music but experiences it only in virtual reality, is hired by one of those huge corporations to scout musicians at illegal underground concerts.

This novel starts with a bang and had me completely engrossed for the first third. The second two-thirds were well-written, but for me lacked the propulsive power of the first part of the book. I say “for me” because I’m not sure if that was the book or me. Given that my favorite part was Luce’s first-person narration of her pre-pandemic tour, I’d happily read a contemporary novel about musicians by Pinsker, no sf content required. Luce is Jewish and her relationship with her family and community, which she's mostly estranged from, is a small part of the novel but very well-done. I'd also have happily read a novel focusing on that.

Luce and Rosemary are both queer, and have romantic relationships with women (not with each other). Their own relationship felt like it should have been the center of the book, but wasn’t; they had a few powerful scenes early on, but later their interactions felt more like a clash of worldviews than like a clash of two people.

Generally, the longer the book went on, the more didactic and abstract it felt, with the vibrant and very human Luce of the beginning giving way to an iconic figure. The more the book is about its actual premise (a young woman scouts for talent in a world where live concerts are banned), the less interested I became. I don't think it was because of anything inherent about the premise, but because of how it was treated.

The early parts about Luce's band were really funny, among other things. Afterward, music and music-making was treated much more seriously, with no goofing around and playing pranks. I'm not sure it's true that people doing illegal things with huge consequences if they slip up actually do stop being silly-- they probably just channel it into areas that won't attract attention outside of their own group. At least, the second part of the book would have been more interesting if they had. The second part also was primarily Rosemary's narration, and she was very very very serious. The book ended up feeling solemn and weighty in a way that didn't play to Pinsker's strengths as a writer.

I still recommend it but not as strongly as I thought I would when I started it.

There’s a big and still-ongoing discussion here which delves a lot into the worldbuilding.

A Song for a New Day

Much like Annihilation if the Shimmer was over a girls’ boarding school on an island and there was 100% more squicky body horror and YA dystopia tropes.

The Tox is a disease which strikes an island entirely inhabited by a girls’ boarding school and the father of one of the girls, killing many and horrifically transforming the rest. Animals and plants are also affected. To make it worse, it doesn’t just transform you and then stop, but keeps coming back in flares that do different things, most likely until it kills you. Unsurprisingly, it is promptly placed under quarantine.

The Tox symptoms are GROSS and often involve vomiting horrifying things, which is a particular squick of mine. I would not have gotten past page two if I hadn’t gotten immediately sucked in by the striking narrative voice and the way the girls deal with their situation; as it was, I had to skim a lot of extreme grossness.

The book picks up a year and a half after the quarantine. There are two adults left alive, the Headmistress and Miss Welch, and about half the girls. They subsist on the edge of starvation on insufficient supplies dropped off by the Navy, but rather than turn on each other a la Lord of the Flies, they’ve responded by forming a tight community, plus extremely close relationships with each other in couples or smaller groups, some platonic, some romantic, some where it’s hard to make that distinction. A lot of aspects of the community and smaller groups are messy and violent, but they carry on and care for each other too.

Hetty, the narrator, lost one eye to the Tox but is still an excellent shot. She has an extremely close relationship with Byatt, her best friend, who has a second spine protruding through her back. The third girl in their group is Reese, who has bioluminescent hair and a silver lizard’s hand; Reese is ferocious and prickly and secretive, and it’s not immediately clear what binds all three of them together.

There is a significant F/F relationship which I’ll explain beneath a spoiler cut, but boundary-blurring, both physical and emotional, is a big part of the story so the exact nature of relationships is hard to pin down.

Despite forever teetering on the edge of my tolerance for body horror and vomit, I found the first half of this book extremely compelling. From the title I expected it to be about girls discovering their wild sides, and there are aspects of that, but I was more struck by the way in which it’s about living with chronic/terminal illness. The relationships and emotions are vivid and desperate, with a surprising amount of love and compassion given that this genre is normally more “when things go to hell everyone immediately resorts to cannibalism.” The doomed community caring for itself and its members as best it can is by far the best part of the book, in my opinion.

The second half of the book also has some striking images but gets much more conventional, to its detriment: 50% Annihilation, 50% nonsensical YA dystopia tropes. It also had one of the most frustrating endings I’ve ever read. This is partly because it stops more-or-less randomly rather than ends, and no sequel appears to be planned. This is also because the climax leading up to the point where the book stops is so utterly WTF.

( Massive spoilers and a lot of ranting about nonsensical plotting )

Author has lots of talent but this was an extremely frustrating book. For me. I’ve seen a bunch of unqualified raves about it, as well as raves qualified due to the non-ending.

Wilder Girls

A magical plague sweeps the world, turning affected humans and animals into monsters, and only the Nordic nations survive. (At least, as far as they know.) Iceland, which isolated itself, is the most advanced country in the world, Denmark has its human population living entirely on a tiny island, the Finns are considered odd and backward and have their own unique kind of magic, and cats are essential military supplies as they can sense trolls.

Characters are introduced in brisk and witty summations, then developed from there. This makes the large cast a lot easier to track, and gives the whole world a sense that it’s full of real people with quirks and agendas, even if they only appear on a single page. The main cast consists of a handful of expendable weirdos and misfits who have been selected to go on a mission into the Silent Land, where trolls and monsters roam unopposed, to bring back books. Old books are a rarity as trolls can be destroyed by fire, so big chunks of previous human habitation have been burned to the ground.

A stunningly beautiful, inventive, witty, fun, and sometimes spooky full-color webcomic. The cast is extremely likable, the world is wonderful, and the author’s in-universe military recruitment pamphlets (clearly gunning for cannon fodder), explanation of the grades of cats (A, B, and C, according to how much training they have), and so forth are both hilarious and great worldbuilding. I can’t overstate how much I enjoyed this or recommend it too highly.

I have a hard time reading comics online, so I read this in paper form. I’ve only read the first book, so I left off when the expedition has just started out and Lalli is seeing visions of a redheaded girl with a braid and freckles. Please no spoilers past that point.

The full-color art is absolutely gorgeous, as is the design of the paper book. If you can afford it, it’s certainly worth it; if not, you can read the entire saga for free online. Books 1 and 2 can be ordered in hard copy. I believe the story is still ongoing.

Twenty years after apocalypse by flu, a Shakespeare troupe and symphony tours a depopulated America, living by the words painted on their caravan, “because survival is insufficient.” This story is intercut with flashback to before and during the epidemic, centered around a web of characters and events which coalesce around an actor, Arthur, who drops dead of a heart attack while playing King Lear.

This is a wonderful concept, especially the post-apocalyptic traveling theatre company, and the novel largely though not entirely does it justice. Post-apocalyptic novels can be roughly divided into those that argue that the structure of current society is all that keeps us from becoming cannibal rapists and kind people are weaklings who will immediately be raped and eaten after the apocalypse, and those that argue that compassion and art are not frivolities but essentials, and civilization is a choice we make every day.

I find the latter much more interesting as well as more enjoyable to read, so I was of course intrigued by this book. The prose is excellent, the mood is elegaic, and the structure, which makes use of a truly Shakespearean number of deliberate coincidences and revealed connections, is clever and well-done. I also liked the use of a comic book, Station Eleven, as a life’s work for its creator and, for its various readers, a talisman and a metaphor. The glimpses into the day-to-day life of the Symphony are great, and a lot of the during-apocalypse stuff was very haunting. I especially liked the small community that sets up in an airport.

I would have liked the book to do more with its best concept, the theatre troupe. We see quite a bit of their lives and hear a lot about what they think they’re doing, but we don’t experience much of the latter. David Brin’s The Postman is nowhere near this well-written or well-constructed, but it does effectively show how delivering letters changes both individuals and society. Very oddly given that this is literally what the entire book is about, we don’t see much of how the Symphony affects the towns it visits and individuals who see it. We’re told that it’s deeply meaningful, but we’re not shown it. We do see how it affects the members of the Symphony, but I also wanted to see how it affects the audiences.

I wish that had been given more page time, and Arthur had been given less. He’s thematically important but not very interesting as a character, and his pre-flu life got a lot more page time than it really needed.

I also had some big issues with plausibility. I can handwave scientific unlikelihoods, but I trip over sufficiently major logic issues and “people don’t do that” issues. The latter are especially noticeable when the whole book is premised on the idea that people will continue to behave like human beings rather than instantly revert to cannibalism: you expect them to behave like plausible human beings.

In a world in which society has undergone a complete collapse due to depopulation, but no physical items are damaged and a somewhat random selection of people survive, many in groups of anywhere from a few to several hundred, you would think that it would not take twenty years before anyone figures out how to get electricity or engines going again. Everyone uses gasoline to drive cars, power generators, etc, for a couple years until it goes bad, and then they just give up on the idea of electricity or motors and sit around having beautifully written and moving conversations about electricity as a symbol of all that they've lost. Even more egregiously, one person rigs a bicycle to generate electricity… and everyone just says, “Cool” and wanders off rather than trying to replicate it en masse.

I am the world’s least mechanically competent person, but under those circumstances even I would either have combed libraries until I figured out how to get power via wind, vegetable oil, or ethanol, or used my car to drive around until I found a mechanic who could do so before the last of the gas went stale. I definitely would have teamed up with Bicycle Dude to do more than get a laptop to turn on for ten minutes once. Also, diesel can last ten years or more.

Similarly, why was no one raiding pharmacies for antibiotics? Why wasn’t anybody trying to recreate penicillin with mold? The latter would be very difficult, but people are dropping dead of infection so it seems like a good thing to try. Many existing antibiotics can last for a minimum of 20 years and they're extremely common medications so pharmacies and hospitals would be full of them. Since most people are dead, even if pharmacies are getting depleted 20 years out the total antibiotic supply shouldn’t have completely run out.

In a story largely about the preservation of art and writing, why was no one hitting the library for anything but Shakespeare? Sure, survival is insufficient, but 1) survival is a prerequisite, 2) I’ll buy that the artists are doing their own thing, but nobody was doing a lot of extremely obvious survival-oriented stuff.

This especially came into play in two incidents that I found psychologically implausible and which undermined the entire point of the novel.

In one, one of a large group of survivors stranded at an airport is a woman who’s run out of her Effexor. They search for some in the airport and in its parking lot and can’t find any. They do not go into the town, which is only 20 miles away, to try a pharmacy. She gets sick from withdrawal, then walks into the woods before anyone can stop her, clearly to die. A short time later, the remaining survivors get frustrated with their limited and monotonous food supply and go to the town to fix that.

This made no sense on any level. Effexor is definitely a nasty drug to go cold turkey on, but it won’t kill you. Even given that everyone’s in shock, they’re all fairly functional and making other sensible decisions. If she’s that sick and desperate, why did no one even consider a pharmacy? Especially since the POV character in this section is a psychologist and a nice guy, who could have told them a pharmacy would definitely have it and also maybe should have talked to the person who was clearly suffering from a problem he had expertise in. If the point was the tragedy of dying due to a lack of meds, something fragile or hard to come by would have been a way better choice, as would something that couldn’t have been treated by the psychologist who was right there but inexplicably didn’t even try.

This would have been easier to ignore if it wasn’t for the even more egregious incident in which (minor plot spoiler) ( Read more... ) And in my final big nitpick, the flu is 100% fatal, but if you can avoid initial contact with infected people for the first day or two and hole up in your apartment once you realize what’s going on, you’ll survive: dead people don’t transmit it, it’s not airborne, and it doesn’t survive long on surfaces.

Given this, WAY more people should have survived. Like, shut-ins, people living alone and home sick with something else, homebodies, people in isolated areas, etc: almost all of them should have made it. This should also include a lot of technical people working in labs or other contained environments for days on end, so why did it kill 99.99% of the population and take 20 years for literally anybody to get even very limited electricity working? Survival based on natural immunity would have made more sense than survival based on lack of exposure.

That aside, I did generally enjoy this and would rec it if you’re interested in a different take on the post-apocalyptic genre.

Station Eleven