tl;dr

A post climate-change novella that has a brilliant take on time travel.  Loved it.

opening remarks

Kelly Robson’s Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach appeared on my Kindle app this morning (when I originally wrote this in March).  So, of course, I’m going to read it straight away.

knee-jerk observations

I love that line, “… teeth too perfect to be human.”

I’m enjoying the tasty little dollops of world-building Robson keeps ladling out (I do love a food metaphor).  We know that the Earth has experienced complete ecological disaster; that people were forced to live underground; that there was plague; that decades later Earth is slowly recovering and people like Minh have come back to the surface to reconstruct and rehabilitate the environment.  Oh, and time travel is a thing.

It’s also refreshing to see countries other than America (or the first world) leading the way in repairing the planet’s ecology and saving lives:

Minh, Kiki and Hamid have won a contract to travel back in time to Mesopotamia to do a ‘past state assessment’ of a Mesopotamian trench.  That’s not what’s caught my interest though; it’s the fact that everyone in the future has ’fakes’ – avatars of themselves – to deal with all the needless shit of life.  Fuck the time travel; I want one of them!

Famous last words…

I haven’t read every time-travel story ever published, but I can’t remember one that used travelling to the past as a means to restore the future, not by changing the timelines – which is impossible anyway – but by getting an accurate picture of history so it can be duplicated in the present.

I like that Robson is sneaky with the structure of her novella.  Each chapter opens with a scene set in Mesopotamia; it’s not until you’re a good chunk into the novella that you realise that each of these short scenes foreshadows the chronological future of our main characters.  But then this is a novella about time travel and Robson would be missing a trick if she didn’t reflect that in the storytelling.

The Gist Of It

There’s a 98.7% chance (stat not verified) that a science fiction story set on Earth in the near to medium-distant future will, in some way, involve the effects of climate change.  That’s fair enough, unless you’re a denialist, or so optimistic you believe we can pull ourselves out of the mire through technology, you need to acknowledge that of all the threats that face us as a species, it’s the big one.  What I’m finding interesting though is the way authors are taking these gloom and doom predictions and speculating how we might adapt as a species during and after the ecological shit hits the fan.  New York 2140 (Kim Stanley Robinson), Austral (Paul McAuley) and Clade (James Bradley) are three recent, off the top of my head examples that consider possible outcomes and solutions.  They also happen to be terrific books, the climate apocalypse need not be boring or more importantly need not be about the last dregs of humanity scrabbling around for food and resources.

Kelly Robson’s God’s, Monsters and the Lucky Peach isn’t just another entry into this ever-expanding canon it’s also, easily the most imaginative – and that’s saying something given KSR’s book is about the dismantling of capitalism.  Robson not only provides us with a richly drawn future savaged and scared by climate change, but she puts a fresh coat of paint on traditional SFnal ideas ranging from gene and body modification to smarter AIs to that old chestnut time travel.

On that last one, Robson’s take is impossibly original in as much as I thought all time travel tropes had been exhausted.  I love the idea that people looking to rebuild the future would travel back to the past to take accurate notes on how things were before the collapse.  Robson’s decision to adopt the multidimensional or branching model of time travel means she can have her characters discuss and tackle the ontological consequences of killing someone in a timeline that “doesn’t count” and provide a nasty edge to the climax.

I could go on; in fact, I’ve barely scratched the surface, I’ve said nothing about how Robson frames money and capital in her future Earth or the diverse background of her characters.  If I have a complaint, it’s that at times I found Minh to be a little too unapproachable, a little too narrow in her views and her relationships with Kiki, Hamid and Fabian, especially Kiki.

But it’s a small concern for a novella that on the level of story, setting and ideas is as exciting as anything I’ve read in the genre.