The world has fallen apart. It is twenty years after the fall
of civilisation, there’s only a few scattered remnants of humanity left who are
trying to struggle to survive and, maybe, rebuild.
Peyton is the newly elected leader of her Settlement’s security,
they’re trying to rebuild and keep themselves safe from raiding Scavenger looking
to steal their resources. One raid recently killed her father
Nixie is a Scavanger, desperate, under-resourced and driven
to scrape what living they can. The Settlers seem to live a life of high luxury
in comparison and the resentment is strong.
This is a post-apocalyptic dystopian world – humanity has
been driven to the brink of extinction, the cities are abandoned and the
remaining people are desperately trying to struggle to survive in the ruins.
And I really like this dystopian world – I like how it
focuses a lot on the practicality of surviving and the possibility of
rebuilding. Not with lots of despair and angst and “are we living or surviving”
(yes this genre is really getting over-stuffed) but simple practical matters
like how they’re producing food and finding clean water and standing together.
It’s a lot less militaristic than many, far less combative and far more about
survival.
A lot of apocalypse fiction loves to realy make a huge
point that it’s not the
zombies/vampires/plague/hockey-stick-wielding-were-beavers that you need to
worry about but other people who are evil murdering raping arseholes. Usually
with all the subtlety of a chainsaw wielding guy wearing his last victim’s
skin.
And that kind of savagery is certainly not an unrealistic
message – but this book looks more at communities coming together. Sure, it’s
not perfect but the community tries, it is genuinely coming together and
supporting each other and collaborating in the face of this difficult new
world. We have a community of people that doesn’t need one leader to keep
everyone in line with the threat of violence. We have different communities
working with each other, trading, co-operating and not trying to fight each
other or scrabble for advantage.
That’s not unrealistic either. Time and again history has
shown us that people have faced terrible conditions and rallied wonderfully
together. When faced with adversity people ARE good at rallying and supporting
each other – it’s how communities started. It’s nice to see a world where
humanity isn’t 3 days without a wifi connection away from eating their
neighbours brains (now, cut my wifi AND my coffee and your brains are fair
game). Not everything has to be grim and gritty to pretend to be “realistic”.
