blog2

 I enjoyed Steve Amsterdam’s award winning apocalyptic, climate change novel Things We Didn’t See Coming , so I was quick to purchase a copy of What the Family Needed . Calling Things We Didn’t See Coming a novel might be bit of a misnomer as it is a collection of short novellas. But they all feature the same character and are told in chronological order. Amsterdam uses the same technique with What the Family Needed , but this time each story is told from the viewpoint of a different character.   What the Family Needed begins with teenagers Giordana and Ben arriving at their Aunty Natalie’s house with their mother Ruth. Once again their mother has deserted her husband. Giordana is looking forward to the normalcy of her Aunts family’s stable life, but she has not factored in the fantasies of their son Alek. Gordiana feels her mother does not care about her opinion of her father, and that she is taken for granted by her mother. It’s like she is invisible. While ...

Brother in The Land begins with teenager Danny taking a break from working in his father’s corner store to go on a long bike ride into the English countryside. It starts to rain, so he takes shelter in a World War II pillbox. As he waits for the rain to stop, he sees the flashes of nuclear missiles exploding. Aware that the rain might contain radiation, he waits for it to stop and then rides back to his fictional hometown of Skipley. It is badly damaged and hundreds are dead. The rest of the novel tells the story of Danny’s attempts to survive. Brother in the Land is a young adult novel told exclusively from Danny’s point of view. Danny seems slightly emotionally detached from what is going on around him. He mourns little for family and friends who died, which leaves the reader wondering if he had had any friends. But perhaps he is just in shock and too busy getting on with surviving to mourn. The novel does a realistic job of describing the aftermath of a nuclear attac...

Juli Zeh's The Method is a very believable dystopian, science-fiction thriller. It is a different take of themes explored in novels like 1984 and Brave New World . The novel is set in a future Germany, not too different from the current version, except society is controlled by a strict set of rules known as “The Method”. The Method is an all-encompassing health regime that every member of society is legally obliged to follow. Every person must eat the right foods, excluding those deemed unhealthy. Everyone must do the right amount of exercise. People are only allowed to mate with those who have compatible immune systems. Anyone who fails to follow the rules is arrested and rehabilitated. An individual’s commitment to The Method is tracked by microchips embedded in them, and by their toilets that automatically examine their urine. Each member of society has an exercise bike on which they must complete a certain amount of kilometres per week. The novel revolves ...

No Limit is a book about hip young things doing hip things and wanting the world to know about their hipness via social media. The novella is set in Auckland, New Zealand, in December 2012, which is important because the world was supposed to end then due to the Mayan calendar running out. To add to the apocalyptic feel of the novella, a volcano is erupting. Its ash causes the cancellation of Ash’s plane to Australia. With no idea how long she will have to wait, Ash decides to look up a cousin in Auckland. She spends much of the novella searching for him, meeting a few strange people along the way. The novel is full of references to pop culture. For example, Tom, everyone’s first Myspace friend, makes an appearance. And many words are spent describing the clothes the characters wear. Labels, labels everywhere. The characters all seem to suffer from attention deficit disorder as their thoughts flick from observations of the world around them to desires, to how they a...

How did Zoo City win the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke award? Not that it’s a bad book, it is a very enjoyable, imaginative and well-written novel. The problem is science does not drive its plot, so it is not science fiction. If anything, the novel is fantasy, as its plot’s two main drivers are magic and spiritualism. Lauren Beukes sets Zoo City in an alternative version of her homeland, South Africa. In this alternative version, criminals are identifiable by the animals attached to them. Not physically attached, but an animal and its master are psychically linked. The animal feels what the human is feeling. The animal has to be close to its owner or they both will panic. The animals also instil minor magical abilities in their owners. The animals reminded me of the Daemons in Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials series. Beukes acknowledges that similarity by mentioning that series within the novel. But Zoo City is nothing like Dark Materials. Zinni is the book’s protagonist. She is an ...