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two 2021 Valente novellas
Mar. 24th, 2022 06:31 pmComfort Me With Apples, Catherynne Valente. Spoiler cut. ( Read more... )
The Past Is Red, Catherynne Valente. An initial novelette, "The Future Is Blue", from a 2016 Strahan anthology, and then a sequel novella. The premise is that people are living on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which has been condensed and sorted into various themed areas based on type of garbage, like pill bottles and candles and e-waste. I kept being bothered by things like how many kinds of trash there were that wouldn't have floated, or how on earth they could possibly be doing enough agriculture to support the population even with extensive fishing, and had to remind myself that that really wasn't what Valente is doing here. It's a postapocalyptic fairy tale, a riff on Waterworld, an argument with Elon Musk, the math doesn't have to work. (But then, the math never has to work, as long as you're too caught up to think about it, so maybe the problem was that I wasn't.) There is an interesting core here about civilizational collapse and how the survivors might think about it and their current lives, but the running gags about the neighborhood names and artifact-interpretations kind of wore on me.
The Past Is Red, Catherynne Valente. An initial novelette, "The Future Is Blue", from a 2016 Strahan anthology, and then a sequel novella. The premise is that people are living on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which has been condensed and sorted into various themed areas based on type of garbage, like pill bottles and candles and e-waste. I kept being bothered by things like how many kinds of trash there were that wouldn't have floated, or how on earth they could possibly be doing enough agriculture to support the population even with extensive fishing, and had to remind myself that that really wasn't what Valente is doing here. It's a postapocalyptic fairy tale, a riff on Waterworld, an argument with Elon Musk, the math doesn't have to work. (But then, the math never has to work, as long as you're too caught up to think about it, so maybe the problem was that I wasn't.) There is an interesting core here about civilizational collapse and how the survivors might think about it and their current lives, but the running gags about the neighborhood names and artifact-interpretations kind of wore on me.
