{"id":4002,"date":"2014-09-10T19:44:44","date_gmt":"2014-09-10T23:44:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/?p=4002"},"modified":"2016-09-12T19:52:18","modified_gmt":"2016-09-12T23:52:18","slug":"a-dystopia-that-wasnt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2014\/09\/10\/a-dystopia-that-wasnt\/","title":{"rendered":"A Dystopia That Wasn’t"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Can you write about the future these days without it being apocalyptic?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Jason Heller wondered after reading Monica Byrne\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Girl in the Road<\/em>. Of course, you can, and people do, but in a very particular intersection of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153literary fiction\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153science fiction,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the books that have gotten the most attention are dystopian. It isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t that surprising, when we think about it: dystopian futures are defined by adversity, adversity creates challenge, and challenge generates drama. Where\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the dramatic tension in a world where everything\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s worked out fine and we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve all gotten everything we want, right? (At least, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how the easy logic works.)<\/p>\n

Byrne sets her novel in a late 21st century that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s far from comfortable but, apart from an implied sea level rising due to global warming, isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t all that much more dystopian than the world of 2014. The balance of political and cultural power may have shifted (\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Africa is the new India, after India became the new America\u00e2\u20ac\u009d), but the violent factionalism of Byrne\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s world is indistinguishable from our own. The true crises in the novel are interior, emotional. When we first meet Meena, one of the novel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s two central characters, she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fleeing from her apartment in Kerala and, believing that a terrorist organization is hunting her down, tries to kill herself by jumping in front of an oncoming train. After she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s rescued, she decides to head to Mumbai and, from there, makes plans to cross the Arabian Sea on foot to her Ethiopian homeland. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not as impossible as it sounds, because there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a long string of hydrogen superconductors stretched out across the water, collecting energy; that said, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s illegal and highly dangerous, and the journey will exacerbate Meena\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s already unbalanced emotional state.<\/p>\n

The novel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s other narrative thread focuses on Mariama, an escaped slave who meets some friendly caravan drivers and joins them on a trek across Africa, approaching Ethiopia from the opposite direction as Meena. Looking back at this journey from the perspective of her childhood, Mariama\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s perspective is limited, and her experiences traumatize her in ways that she can recognize but not necessarily articulate clearly, even to herself. From the very beginning, Byrne hints that there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a connection between her story and Meena\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s, and you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll likely be able to figure out just how the two arcs will intersect some time before both women\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s lives spiral towards their unsettling climaxes.<\/p>\n

Climaxes which, to circle back to my initial point, ultimately don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t rely upon the novel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153dystopian\u00e2\u20ac\u009d features for their narrative momentum. The setting is less important here than the emotional dynamics, and those dynamics could just as easily play out in contemporary settings. In that sense, then, The Girl in the Road is not a post-apocalyptic novel at all, but a contemporary drama with just enough futuristic flourishes that it can straddle the line between mainstream fiction and science fiction.
\n
\nEmily St. John Mandel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s new novel, Station Eleven<\/em>, does have a clear post-apocalyptic strain to it, one that may be familiar if you read Edan Lepucki\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s California<\/em> at the beginning of the summer. Familiar, but not derivative; besides the fact that Lepucki\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s world was torn apart by extreme weather and Emily\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s is ravaged by a superflu, Emily finds her own approach to making sense of a world where so much has been lost, and the survivors try to piece together a life with what remains. (Though, as the traveling caravan at the center of one of the novel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s threads paints on the side of one of its vehicles, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153survival is insufficient.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d) I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t review Station Eleven<\/em> because I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m actually not finished reading it yet, though I love everything I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve read so far—but also because I know Emily just well enough that you might reasonably question my objectivity in recommending this book to you. Take that into consideration, if you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re concerned about such things, but then I hope you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll go ahead and read the novel.<\/p>\n

Back in April, writing about this year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s best novel shortlist for the Nebulas, I had some doubts about whether Karen Joy Fowler\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselve<\/em>s should be considered science fiction—but, I emphasized, it was a fantastic novel, period. And the judges of this year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Man Booker Prize agree: In the first year that American writers have become eligible to be nominated for the prize, Fowler is one of two to make it onto the shortlist. (The other is Joshua Ferris, for To Rise Again at a Decent Hour<\/em>.) Her book is the only one of the six nominees I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve had a chance to read so far, though I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been hearing tremendous things about Richard Flanagan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Narrow Road to the Deep North<\/em> and am also very eager to read Neel Mukherjee\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Lives of Others<\/em>.<\/p>\n

(NOTE: This post originally appeared on Beacon<\/b>.)<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Can you write about the future these days without it being apocalyptic?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Jason Heller wondered after reading Monica Byrne\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Girl in the Road. Of course, you can, and people do, but in a very particular intersection of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153literary fiction\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153science fiction,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the books that have gotten the most attention are dystopian. It isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[965],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4002"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4002"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4003,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4002\/revisions\/4003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}