Unless you only get your news from a Donald Trump-authorised news source, you would know that The Testaments is Margaret Atwood’s recently released sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. I loved The Handmaid’s Tale when I first read it a few decades ago. It had great world-building and created a believable brutal vision of a right-wing theocracy in an almost post-apocalyptic US (Gilead). I re-read The Handmaid’s Tale about a year and a half ago for a university course where we studied the text in-depth, so it was relatively fresh in my mind as I read The Testaments. I have not watched any of The Handmaid’s Tale television series. People who watch it may make different connections to The Testaments than I did and react differently.

The Testaments takes us back to Gilead 16 years after The Handmaid’s Tale. It tells the story from three points of view. From that of a 16 year-old-teenager whose mother escaped with her from Gilead to Canada when she was a baby. One of the four head Aunts complicit in imposing the strict regime of oppression on the women of Gilead is the second storyteller. The final narrator is a teenager who grew up in Gilead and joined the Aunts to flee an attempted arranged marriage.

The story has a plot which the author does not fully explain. Atwood leaves it up to the reader to work out why some things happen rather than have one of the characters tell the reader why she is doing something. For example, I wondered why the Aunt chose a particular courier to smuggle documents out of Gilead. A reader looking for plot holes might think they had found one, as it took me a while to figure out why that particular courier was chosen.

The novel switches back and forth between points of view, but unlike many books that use this technique, I wasn’t troubled by the frequent change of viewpoint as I was keen to learn more about that person’s story. This indicates that all the storylines were equally important and not dominated by one main storyline with interrupting subplots.

I found the novel a real page-turner. I read its 400 pages in five sittings, which is quick for me. I particularly enjoyed discovering more about how Gilead came into being and the origins and motivations of the original Aunts.

The Testaments’ words flow off the page. Atwood is very much a writer who writes for readers. She would rather impress with her ideas, themes and story than with her clever word usage. I have read four of her other novels, including the excellent Maddaddam trilogy, so she is one of my favourite authors.

The Testaments has a much more definite ending than the somewhat ambiguous finish of The Handmaid’s Tale. Overall, I think The Testaments is an excellent end to the world of Gilead, but it is not as good as The Handmaid’s Tale, which created Gilead and the belief system imposed on the people there. I think The Handmaid’s Tale would have been a more worthy winner of the Booker Prize. But The Testaments is still a great novel by a great speculative fiction writer.

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. Many words are spent describing the clothes the characters wear—labels everywhere.

The characters all seem to suffer from attention deficit disorder. Their thoughts flick from observations of the world around them to desires, to how they are going to get to where they want to be, and then to wanting to be somewhere else immediately after they get there. Their lives seem jaded by too many unlived and unanalysed experiences.

All along the way, they want to record everything they do and say, but the internet keeps dropping out. Perhaps the end of the world is really happening. The novella emphasises a youth culture that can’t see the point in doing anything if they can’t take pictures of it and then share them on social media.

This is Holly Childs’ first published longer work of fiction. She is a writer and artist who, according to her bio, creates work around digital semiotics, transformations of language, obscurities, fashion, aberration and corruption.

She uses many short sentences in No Limit as if to emphasise the characters’ quickly passing thoughts. The novella is also very humorous.

This novella is for those who enjoy watching the slightly deluded lurch from one unfulfilled fantasy to another.

  

How did Zoo City win the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke Award? Not that it’s a bad book; it is a enjoyable, imaginative, and well-written novel. The problem is science does not drive its plot, so it is not science fiction. If anything, the book 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. They are not physically connected, but an animal and its master are psychically linked. The animal feels what the human is feeling. The animal must be close to its owner or 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 ex-journalist who, after killing her brother, winds up with a sloth. The sloth gives her the ability to find lost things by following the threads they leave. She makes some of her income by finding people’s lost rings and keys. She also runs scams where she dupes the gullible out of their money. She is just surviving, living in a part-abandoned block of flats.

While trying to find a lost ring for a client, the client dies. Outside her client’s house, two well-off, cultured people with animals contact her. They want her to find a missing pop star. She tells them that her magical ability only helps find lost things, not people, but they are insistent. She needs the money, so she agrees to search for the singer. Her investigation leads her through the decaying suburbs of Johannesburg.

The novel consists of many short chapters. Her motives for going or being somewhere are often unclear at the beginning of chapters. Usually, the connection with her investigation becomes more apparent as the chapter progresses. Similarly, the search for the singer seems to conclude well before the novel’s end. Zinni then begins to investigate some murders of animals and their owners. That investigation eventually enlightens her on why the pop star went missing.

Zinni is a tough, intelligent, independent, strong female character who takes on men rather than submitting to them. She scams people, lies to people, sets people up, and fights back when attacked.

Her sloth – she has not bothered to name it – lets her know of its displeasure with many of her activities. It hisses in her ear or jabs her with its claws if she drinks too much or puts them in danger. It will take a swipe at the face of anyone it does not like who tries to get too close to Zinni. The sloth’s grumpy reactions are an enjoyable counterpoint to the serious situations Zinni finds herself in.

Beukes’ writing flowed like Zinni and her sloth; the words linked together nicely. With Zoo City, she has excelled at word-building. She has created a wonderfully edgy alternative, Johannesburg, a decaying world full of dangerous and magical people.

At its essence, Zoo City is a fast-paced crime novel set in a different version of reality. It is a world where magic is real but does not dominate. The novel should be enjoyed by anyone who likes fantasy that mingles the familiar world of today with the strange.

I finished reading Justin Cronin’s apocalyptic vampire novel The Passage a week ago. It is a brilliant novel in both the way it is written and the story. Cronin introduces dozens of characters, each with individual fears and problems that make them easy to empathise with. The Passage is one of the best adventure epics I have read. I thought it was close to the best apocalyptic fiction I have read. To try and decide if it is the best, I went through my bookshelves and found dozens of apocalyptic novels to compare it to.

I define apocalyptic fiction as any story set during the collapse of a civilisation and/or the stories of the survivors in the years after that collapse. Some novels on my shelves had civilisation slowly in decline, not so much a collapse, so I did not include them. This meant my all-time favourite science fiction novel, The Sea and Summer, by George Turner, missed out.

After much consideration, here is a list of the top ten apocalyptic novels I have read:

1. The Passage, Justin Cronin
2. The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood
3. The Road, Cormac McCarthy
4. Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
5. The Genesis of Shannara trilogy, Terry Brooks
6. Things We Didn’t See Coming, Steven Amsterdam
7. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
8. Warday and the Journey Onward, Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka
9. Graffiti, Peter Van Greenaway
10. Earth Abides, George R Stewart.

 

Five of the novels are written by “literary” writers: Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy and Steve Amsterdam. I am a bit of a fan of Margaret Atwood. Justin Cronin claimed to be a non-genre writer before he wrote The Passage. Steve Amsterdam Is the only Australian on the list.

The books made the list for different reasons. The Road for its bleak atmosphere, the boy and man only have the next day’s struggle to look forward to. It’s keep moving or die.

The Genesis of Shannara is written for young adults, and its theme could leave them thinking that they better be prepared to live in a world destroyed by their parents. Brooks might not be the greatest writer, but he can tell an engrossing tale that kept me wondering if the main characters would survive for three books.

I loved the way Things We Didn’t See Coming is divided into eight or so self-contained short stories. Steve Amsterdam does a brilliant job of imagining the life of a person born just before the year 2000, coping with future dramatic environmental shifts. The novel sure lives up to its name because its stories constantly surprised me.

Warday is written like a diary and gives an account of what happens when EMP pulses from a limited nuclear attack send the US back into the Stone Age. It shows in grim detail the decline of the US.

Graffiti has a great concept; the history of the world after a nuclear war is written on the walls of a hotel. So much for ebooks being the future.

Margaret Atwood’s novels are so well written. Her words are seamlessly put together; there are no attempts at cleverness that throw me out of some other writers’ writing. She writes how she imagines characters would behave when civilisation is collapsing or collapsed, not how she would hope they would act. The Year of the Flood is a prequel to Oryx and Crake.

And Earth Abides was probably the first apocalyptic novel I read. It shows attempts to re-establish civilisation that are stalling.

Cause of the Apocalypse

What did these writers imagine destroyed civilisation?

1. The Passage– genetically engineered vampires
2. The Year of the Flood– a virus
3. The Road– nuclear war
4. Oryx and Crake– a virus
5. The Genesis of Shannara– pollution, genetically engineered mutants, and demons
6. Things We Didn’t See Coming– climate change
7. The Handmaid’s Tale– pollution and biological warfare
8. Warday– nuclear war
9. Graffiti– nuclear war
10. Earth Abides– a virus.

 

I will probably read Stephen King’s The Stand one day. King’s Under The Dome just failed to make the list. I also must read the classics War of the Worlds and Day of the Triffids. And I am still yet to delve into apocalyptic zombie novels.

What’s your favourite apocalyptic novel?