69books-suck69

[69books-suck69]

Like The Syndic, I picked this up (thrift store, I think) hoping for dumb trash, a nice Mad Max ripoff, as I'd seen a bunch of those around second hand shops (endworld, deathlands, etc). What I got instead was a brutal, uncompromising, empathic, and thoughtful piece of eco-fiction that grappled fearlessly with sexual violence and the fallout of trauma. I've since learned that I love spec fic by 70s & 80s lesbians, due to an evocative deployment of romance novel techniques (often bordering on slashfic) in violent SFF frameworks. This one flashes some trash fiction ultra-violence early, then pivots to a slow-burn character study, and a very grounded survival story. The ambiguous non-ending and denial of catharsis was a quality I would later come to love in the work of Yarbro's contemporary, CJ Cherryh. False Dawn is pretty underrated, like Yarbro is generally. This book is an all-timer imo. Walking Dead eat your heart out.

[69books-suck69]

10 years ago I wasn't reading science fiction. I found this in a free library by the place I was living at, held together with electrical tape (fixing a book with black tape = baller move) and missing pages. The back copy sounded so bad, I thought I'd be in for a trashy, lazy knockoff dystopia full of half-baked reactionary ideas. I thought I'd skim though it for a laugh. What I got was an absolute mindbender that derailed my reading life for the next decade: a chaotic anarchist (u/dys)topia, an intriguingly ambivalent attitude to violence, pre-60s mindwipe identity psychedelia, witchcraft, mass shootings+terrorism, and a positive-nihilist conclusion... I became pretty immediately obsessed with Kornbluth's simultaneous pro- and anti-authoritarianism, his atypical libertarianism, his flashes of melancholy, his clever careening plots. Far from trash, I had found an idea-packed nightmare that changed my reading habits for years as I searched for something that could touch it. Gonna be posting more capsule reviews here in days/weeks to come so that I can throw out my book journal