Kindle. Deb Olin Unferth's follow-up to Barn 8 (2020). A short-and-punchy holiday in post-apocalyptic sci-fi (much like Tim Winton's latest) with all the tropes, so much so that it does not seem very original or insightful. I read it in a day in the hope it would level up.
We start after the depop event, with mother dragging daughter to a solipsistic Atlantis to escape the surviving humanity. (Things are gynocentric throughout.) We soon learn that most of the men (mostly ineffectual/emasculated) have departed for Mars (Total Recall (1992) without the brunettes, blondes, Arnie, everything) but "Command" likes to send crews to the heavily degraded Earth in search of saleable tat. You'd expect everything to be heavily AI-mediated but it isn't, not really.
Escaping her mother's Hermicity our femoine escapes to the oh-so-clean desert (think Dune (1965) or Mad Max without the fashion) for an internship at a research lab. There she takes a bullshit job (futilely shovelling sand) rather than become part of "the company"'s machine, preferring to do her intellectual labour in the privacy of a container-house (Winton's The Shepherd's Hut (2018), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)) that she purchases with her inheritance. (The mechanics of food, water, sanitation, money or any other technological or economic thing are not in Unferth's wheelhouse.) On a frenemy-funded rec trip she meets the love of her life, a fake human robot who has undergone extreme beauty surgery after being stolen as a child (Rabbit Proof Fence (2002)).
This last character is actually functionally augmented (Neuromancer (1984), Highlander (1986)). This somehow leads to an ending that is all soul and feeling (Asimov's later/fat Foundations) that — and my eyes may've glazed over by this point — felt like a very modest variation on the concluding movement of John Brunner's Threshold of Eternity (1959) which also centred a female spirit, albeit one with more apparent agency.
The writing is relentless, mostly not funny but occasionally hilarious. Unferth likes the idea of human volition so the apocalypse is nuclear and not some slow-burn expiration of the ecology, and there's some point to the genetic preservation efforts. I don't think she had a moral point to make (unlike Ned Beauman), at least not one of any startling novelty. Some clangers were clearly intentional (and amusing), others pointed to an underbaked understanding of systems: humans are natural too, and just the latest in a long line of ecocidal totalitarians.
Lincoln Michel acknowledges Unferth's derivativeness but protests that her "playfulness" cures all. Goodreads was generally unimpressed. tl;dr — just an appropriation of geek culture.
