Two Book Reviews Demonstrate the Future is not What We Expect

The Apocalypse Seven, by Gene Doucette (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

My introduction to Gene Doucette’s witty style was his previous novel, The Spaceship Next Door, reviewed here. This newest adventure has all the charm, warmth, and thoughtfulness I’d come to expect.

One morning, a small and disparate group of people – college students, a hermit preacher, an astrophysicist, for example – wake up to find the world changed. Each seems to be utterly alone. Familiar buildings are more or less intact, but wildlife and vegetation has taken over the university town of Cambridge. There’s no electricity, and all the batteries are dead. The astrophysicist notices the stars are in subtly wrong positions. As the group makes contact with one another, gathering at the university, they support one another when they aren’t arguing, for each has a different understanding of what has happened. Touré, a twenty-ish Cambridge coder, calls it the whateverpocalypse. Just as they learn they are not the only humans alive and suspect around a century has elapsed while they were unconscious, they begin to suspect they are not the only intelligent species on the planet, but it’s anyone’s guess whether the ghosts or aliens or whatevertheyare mean the human survivors well or ill.

By far, the sneak star of the book is Norman, the coywolf (coyote-wolf hybrid) tamed by the blind character, Carol.

 

Tiny Time Machine, by John E Stith (Amazing Select from Amazing Stories)

I’ll read anything by John E. Stith, but somehow I missed this charming short novel. The description says it’s “for young adults,” but I disagree. While teens are going to love it, and it’s a novel featuring young characters, it’s so full of buoyancy and hope that adults will gobble it up, too. Meg describes herself as the daughter of an angry scientist dad, so angry that he in fact turns a smartphone into a time machine that not only peeks into a not-too-distant future but allows people to jump into it. Alas, it’s not a future anyone would want to live in. The planet is dying, and humanity along with it. The oceans have turned into a stiff jelly, reminiscent of ice-9 in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. Meg and her new friend Josh embark upon a quest to stop a billionaire technologist whose well-meaning attempts to clean up the ocean’s plastic garbage will lead to this bleak future. Soon they’re on the run from the police, as well.

One of the things I enjoy about Young Adult novels is how teens can have agency, not only in their own lives but in the world. Typically, parents are therefore absent or dead (in Meg’s case, both of them, her father recently so), and that frees the characters from supervision. In this story, not having a parent deprives Meg and Josh of the perspective and resources an adult ally could offer. They have internal challenges of growing up and learning to work together, deal with jealousy, and so forth, all within the limitations that minors face. This is while figuring out what happens in the future and how to stop it.

As a bonus, the book contains a piece of short fiction, “Redshift Runaway,” set in the same world as Redshift Rendezvous. When a sentient alien pet runs wild on a starship traveling a significant fraction of the speed of light, where the laws of ordinary physics no longer apply, chaos ensues, but also understanding. Nobody writes relativity-based science fiction better than Stith.