SciFi Novella Review: Firewalkers by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Firewalkers by Adrian Tchaikovsky


Firewalkers is an upcoming SF novella by Adrian Tchaikovsky scheduled to be released on May 12 - I received a prerelease e-Advance Reader Copy (e-ARC) from its publisher in exchange for a possible review.  It's not a short novella - it's listed at 185 pages on Kindle and perhaps more importantly, it's not a novel that reads quickly either.

What it is however is a post-global warming - I hate to say post apocalyptic but you could go with that too - novel featuring a world in which the rich and powerful have left Earth onto spaceships orbiting the planet and a trio of young people left behind on Earth desperately scrapping for whatever they can get to feed themselves and their families.  Needless to say class issues feature prominently in this SciFi thriller, and the book manages to weave them effectively through it all to form a really strong whole.




Quick Plot Summary:  Global Warming has made the world mostly uninhabitable, and the areas around the equator should be too hot for the "mostly."  But the rich needed those areas to build their space elevators so they could get to their escape ships, so small towns - the Anchors - of struggling workers moved to those wastelands anyhow, desperate for work.

Mao is a Firewalker, one of the young people who is willing to do the dangerous jobs out in the wastelands that lie just beyond the Anchors for money.  So when he gets an incredibly well paying job to figure out why there are power shortages coming from solar panels set up out there, he and his two compatriots - tech savvy genius Lupe and exile from the rich space ship Hotep - set out to make the impossible and dangerous journey.  But what they find out there will change everything....or will if they survive it all and manage to come back.....

Thoughts:  Firewalkers is for the most part really effective at merging its two genres - a mad max-esque thriller as our heroes try to get from their home to the solar panels and figure out what's happening in the wasteland, only to find things and people in shapes they couldn't have imagined; and a class struggle in which the rich literally drive in fancy cars into a rich hotel, throwing out money to the poors along the way, as they then leave the hotel to go to space where they can never see the poors again.  Without spoiling much, these two plot types fit together seemlessly (I mean they sort of did in Mad Max too, so perhaps that's not a surprise) and come back to prime importance by the plot's ending.

This is helped by not only the interesting setting but by the three characters all being really interesting for the most part: you have Mao, the desperate leader who knows mainly how to push forward to survive no matter what; you have Lupe, the tech genius girl who is cynical about the whole world and situation; and you have Hotep, perhaps the most interesting, who was on the rich space ship but exiled back to Earth for not fitting in and is desperately angry about it.  They each have their strengths and weaknesses that for the most part work and make them fascinating and surprising - although Mao's moment of weakness is the weakest part of this whole novel, as it doesn't really match the rest of his character at all - and makes the plot compelling from beginning to end.  And a surprise twist character's argument comparing a trope to not being any different from how the world really is is the most pleasant and interesting surprise of all, leading to a really satisfying conclusion in the end.

Strongly recommended.