Sunday 8 July 2018

Book Review: Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson: Eco-punk, time-travel, business & politics

A wonderfully fresh, inventive, lively and thoughtful read.




We are at some point in the future where humanity seems to be rebuilding itself following various disasters, largely ecological one of our on making. I say "seem to be" because Robson never states this, just has the characters allude to things in their history - or, rather, things in their present that hint at the history. This naturalism is one of the things I loves about the writing, the way the ordinary interplay of the characters builds a vision of the world for us. Which works, at least in part, as the characters are so well drawn.




The two main characters are Minh, an old-guard ecological systems designer who moves around on six tentacled prostheses instead of her 'natural' legs and is of the generation who have gone through the hardships of trying to recolonise the surface after decades of subterranean life and Kiki, a young, ambitious engineer who initially idolises the older woman.




One of the conflicts of the book is that the banks, who had made money through investing in recolonisation and the surface habitats (and seem to hold everyone in massive debt; an ongoing theme is how all the characters just seem to accept crippling levels of ongoing debt as part of existence, a comment on student debt in the US and elsewhere I assume) are turning their focus to the lucrative business of time travel.




Minh and Kiki are part of a team hired to travel back to the Tigris basin, around 2000 BC, to take environmental samples to bring back to the present. There is conversation that this real work of time travel is being minimised due to pressure to take tourists (critique of the distorting effect of commerce on pure science), but i was never quite sure what the end-game of the mission was. I had thought it was to find hardy specimens to help restore the ravaged planet, but there was later reference to changing history.




I loved the layout of the book, each chapter beginning with a short segment from the viewpoint of the king and priestess of the small civilisation of the Tigris as they begin to see changes brought on by the technology of the visitors - the new stars of communications satellites, for example - followed by the building of the main tale.




Very much worth a read, and I look forward to more from Kelly Robson

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