Wednesday, May 18, 2022

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Smoketown by Tenea D. Johnson

 




Smoketown was the debut novel from Tenea D. Johnson, and a novel that won the Parallax Award from the Carl Brandon Society (A group dedicated to promoting PoC written works in SF/F) back in 2011.  It's a short novel, just around 200 pages, featuring a future where jungle has reclaimed a city in Kentucky and resulted in a new city-state....which in response to a Pandemic 25 years ago took measures to eliminate all birds from the City and became somewhat of a police state in response.  And then you have both cyberpunk - nanomachines, virtual reality devices that give you the senses and experiences of the person who recorded it - and fantastical magical elements as well.  Oh and we have a bit of F/F romance and mysticism based in a fictional religion in here to boot.

The result is a novel that is interesting, but honestly might be a bit too short in my opinion to really totally work, leaving me a bit more non-plussed than I hoped.  The biggest main character (out of the three point of view characters) has a solid story of regret and guilt and of learning to move forward in life with love while still remembering the past at the same time.  That said, the story is a bit muddled by the two other main characters - a man investigating the past of the epidemic, and whether as he suspects the blaming of birds and resultant ornithophobia is merely a cover and a scared old scion of a rich company that was once/is the most powerful corporation in the city - such that it doesn't really come across as strongly as I'd hoped.  The result is definitely interesting, but not in a way that fully lands as much as it should.  


------------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------
25 Years ago, the Crumble struck the city of Leiodare, a disease which quickly struck and spread throughout the Jungle City-State and killed so so many.  Blaming the birds for the disease, the City outlawed Birds, and erected a barrier to keep them out, reorganizing a restrictive society to enforce this rule and to make up for the comforts suddenly missed without the birds being present.  

Anna Armour is not from the City, but has made her way there as part of a search for Peru, the woman she lost.  She spends her days listening to the Callers imitate bird calls on the Street, working inconspicuously in a factory, and finding gifts to try to send to Peru to lure her back.  But when her childhood power, the power to make her drawings turn to life, results in the creation of two new live Cygnets, she finds herself out of her depth, and thrown on a journey that makes her revisit the guilt inside of her, and her path going forward.  

Meanwhile others in Leiodare are following their own paths, chief among them Eugenio, a Health inspector who believes that the birds were not the real cause of the plague, and that the only way to fix the city is to discover the truth behind it all.....
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Smoketown is a story told through the perspective of three characters.  First, and most in depth, is the story of Anna, which takes up the bulk of the story's runtime (probably around 60%); then there's the story of Eugenio, who is searching for the truth behind the Crumble; and finally - and intersecting with Eugenio's story - is the story of Rory, the last scion of the rich family whose company basically owns the City, and whose reaction to the Crumble killing all he loved was to lock himself away in a tower and only go "outside" via virtual reality.  Some of these storylines work stronger than others, and they never directly come together really, even if they're thematically tied together.  

So for example, Anna's story is pretty strong, even if it seems like there's some connective tissue missing.  Anna is a young woman whose magical gift was nurtured in essentially home schooling by her mother until said mother was murdered right in front of her, leading to Anna attempting one major act of resurrection which does not go as she expected.  Now, years later, she is in Leiodare kind of lost, with her pining over a woman named Peru (whose relationship to Anna is slowly revealed over the story), with whom she had a relationship both romantic and professional, as Peru and Anna once were legendary for their creations of Virtu, the virtual reality sensations that are popular throughout the world.  Anna's tale is one of guilt for what she did in the past, and what she didn't do (or really couldn't do), and it's really easy to feel for her, as a girl so lost and abandoned that she doesn't know what else to do other than to survive and hope she can lure back the one who left her (for possibly good reason) until events force her to look forward.  And she finds that way forward through love, through magic,, and through acceptance, and it works decently well, even if some of her revelations about her relationship with Peru didn't quite fully work for me.  (Peru herself works interestingly as her own character whose tale is revealed by others, as the blank slate for whom so many want to see through her eyes).

The other two point of view characters share some themes, but aren't quite as strong with their lesser time.  Working better is Eugenio, who belongs to a side religion called Mendejano who, among other things, preach a purpose of acting to fix everything.  For Eugenio's "sister" and teacher Lucine (a relationship forged by a cannibalistic ritual of eating each other's flesh), that fixing involves a goal of fixing the city by tearing down the barrier physically keeping birds and others out of the city.  But for Eugenio himself, that fixing is mental, discovering the truth behind the Crumble to emotionally exonerate the birds and to cure the fear that covers the whole city.  How he and Lucine each try to fix the City is interesting, but the story really doesn't devote as much time as it needs to that - for example at one point Eugenio runs into a conspiracy to hide the truth that then promptly disappears by the next chapter. 

Working a bit less for me is Rory, the last heir to the corporation that created the Virtu and revolutionized the city, who was an adventurous man in his youth until the Crumble killed his whole family and made him hide in his tower in fear, seeing outside only through virtual reality.  It's an interesting tale, of how the blame of birds and everything else could make a seemingly adventurous man into an utter sheltered wreck, "living" only through outsiders' eyes and senses.  But it just felt weird given his family's connection to the conspiracy, for him to not know about it or him to be this perspective, which just made it an awkward fit?  

Still, Smoketown is definitely interesting, especially in Anna's story, and if you're looking for different scifi, which doesn't last long, featuring a lesbian main protagonist who is struggling with guilt and searching for a way to move forward in a cyberpunk and magical world, well, it's certainly worth a try, even if it didn't hit for me as much as I'd hoped.  

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)