This was another sci-fi/fantasy book club read. It's a novella rather than a novel, which is definitely a good thing, I think, for the size of the narrative. I could imagine a longer version of this story, but I think the limitation of where the story started and finished made it stronger and more interesting.
The book takes place in an apocalyptic future, where people moved underground in the far north after climate change destroyed people's abilities to survive further south. It's also a universe in which people could have body modifications, like animal tentacles or legs, that changed their physical capabilities, and there's constant real time monitoring of their physical well being via nanobots. The main people who have these modifications are the plague babies, who initially survived the epidemics and fled the surface, and are now returning to attempt to restore the earth and build a new kind of society. The protagonist, Minh, is one of those plague babies, who is frustrated by how developing technology is interested in traveling back in time as a means of escape and entertainment, rather than as a means of obtaining the necessary knowledge to rebuild their habitat.
She gets the opportunity to go back in time to ancient Mesopotamia and do research on the river basin. But of course the trip doesn't go exactly as planned, due to her travel partners being interested in slightly different things than she is, and to the chaos of time travel. It's not my usual kind of story, but I found it really compelling and unpredictable--even when I thought I could guess where the narrative would go wrong for Minh, what that eventually meant for her was completely different than what I expected. There's also a parallel story that's told at the beginning of each chapter that feels unrelated to the main narrative, and when those two paths finally come together it's really satisfying and also fairly shocking. I wouldn't have read this outside of my book club, but I'm really glad I did.
Grade: B
The book takes place in an apocalyptic future, where people moved underground in the far north after climate change destroyed people's abilities to survive further south. It's also a universe in which people could have body modifications, like animal tentacles or legs, that changed their physical capabilities, and there's constant real time monitoring of their physical well being via nanobots. The main people who have these modifications are the plague babies, who initially survived the epidemics and fled the surface, and are now returning to attempt to restore the earth and build a new kind of society. The protagonist, Minh, is one of those plague babies, who is frustrated by how developing technology is interested in traveling back in time as a means of escape and entertainment, rather than as a means of obtaining the necessary knowledge to rebuild their habitat.
She gets the opportunity to go back in time to ancient Mesopotamia and do research on the river basin. But of course the trip doesn't go exactly as planned, due to her travel partners being interested in slightly different things than she is, and to the chaos of time travel. It's not my usual kind of story, but I found it really compelling and unpredictable--even when I thought I could guess where the narrative would go wrong for Minh, what that eventually meant for her was completely different than what I expected. There's also a parallel story that's told at the beginning of each chapter that feels unrelated to the main narrative, and when those two paths finally come together it's really satisfying and also fairly shocking. I wouldn't have read this outside of my book club, but I'm really glad I did.
Grade: B
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