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Review of Nancy Kress’s Sea Change

Fiction Reviews

**Review of Sea Change by Nancy Kress**

Jeremy Brett

Nancy Kress. Sea Change. Tachyon, 2020. Paperback. 191 pp. $15.95. ISBN 9781616963316.

It’s a singular book that begins with a runaway self-driving house, and Nancy Kress has mastered the art of the opening line. Sea Change begins with the words “The house was clearly lost.” It’s a funny, yet at the same time jarring, line that instantly tells the reader that something has clearly shifted in the world. And so it has. Kress gives us a United States where normal life is increasingly rare as the effects of climate change and man-made environmental collapse encroach more and more on society. Of course, in our age of climate change this is not groundbreaking in itself, but Kress puts a unique spin on it by avoiding a simple “Us (environmentalists) vs. Them (the government, or Big Business, or terrorists)”. Instead, in Sea Change Kress presents a bio-thriller with a multifaceted setting in which environmental groups battle the government but also compete amongst themselves with different agendas and tactics. The tendency of humanity to fracture runs deep through Kress’s book; however, just as strong is humanity’s endurance in the face of catastrophe. As protagonist Renata notes:

Most of all, I felt fear. Not for myself but for the organization that always hovered between detection and ineptitude, the organization made of dedicated amateurs up against both law-enforcement professionals and a stupid public, the organization that I would protect with everything in the world until we’d succeeded in our quixotic attempt to save that—probably unworthy—world from itself, whether it wanted that or not.
Sometimes the world doesn’t know what’s best for it.
17

Climate change fiction faces unique challenges. It’s easy and even seductive to simply write an apocalyptic dystopia where we’re all going to die and where humans in the last days of civilization carve out meager or desperate existences by feeding on others. That kind of dark pessimism has run through science fiction since its beginnings, carrying into the Cold War with its numberless tales of nuclear holocaust through the environmental disasters chronicled by Brunner and Harrison, into today’s endless, increasingly tiresome zombie apocalypses. However, writers like Kress are also finding a space in their climate change fiction for hope. We need hope, if we are to survive the existential and psychological crisis that climate change represents. We need stories in which humanity actively works to slow or repair the damage it has caused. We need them so very desperately, and as readers we are fortunate enough to have a cadre of hopeful authors such as Kim Stanley Robinson, Kelly Robson, L.X. Beckett, Neil Stephenson, and others who chronicle our drive to be better, to do better, to fix what we have broken.

Sea Change is such a work, wrapped in the fabric of a well-paced biothriller. Kress chronicles a world suffering in the aftermath of “the Catastrophe”: a widespread drug is infected by a genetically modified bacterium that picks up a lethal gene; hundreds of children die as a result. In the aftermath, worldwide protests—many of them violent—against genetically modified organisms (GMOs) cause deaths, widespread economic collapse, and government overstrain and neglect. In Kress’s new world, GMOs are outlawed, their ban heavily enforced by the US government (through a powerful new Department of Agricultural Security), with the result that massive food shortages are endemic. And underground organizations fight back. Renata is a member of the Org, a resistance group working, as she says, “to restore genetic engineering to a country that had rejected it, and so feed the United States and the world as climate change, desertification, and rising seas changed the face of the globe” (71). One of the ways the Org fights back is through a covert, fragmented network of isolated farms that use engineered crops. It’s an unusual resistance strategy and one of the things that makes Kress’s book so unique.

Quiet, determined resistance is the hallmark of Sea Change (although the book certainly has its share of more dramatic actions, much of it hinted at or appearing ‘offscreen’, as it were). Renata moves forward in the face of unspeakable personal tragedy, including the death of a child, caused ultimately by effects of climate change. She and her compatriots operate an underground group, that seeks to change the world, not violently, but rather through the distribution of scientific achievement and accurate information. They operate with a hopeful belief that change is possible.

Near the end of the novel, following a massive pro-GMO information dump across cyberspace by different environmental groups, Renata notes that “seeds had been planted, and the harvest of changed perceptions might grow” (183). Here is Kress’s optimism, here is the hope that people can change their minds for the better, that they can overcome their fears and their distrust to make a potentially better future. This is not easy; Kress expertly and simply delineates what a society permeated by fear and suspicion looks like, and it is not an easy one to escape. But recall that the term ‘sea change’, taken from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, denotes a substantial change in one’s perceptions. If the change comes, as the Catastrophe did, it must be large-scale and it must produce a long-lasting alteration in people’s behavior. The future of the Earth demands it. Sea Change is a welcome addition to the growing subgenre of climate change fiction that bursts with hope. If nothing else, if we ignored Kress’s clever worldbuilding and her engaging characterizations, that belief in hope makes it worthy.

Review of Lavie Tidhar’s The Violent Century

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 50, no. 2-3

Fiction Reviews

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**Review of The Violent Century by Lavie Tidhar**

Jeremy Brett

Lavie Tidhar. The Violent Century. Tachyon, 2019. (Originally published Hodder & Stoughton, 2013.) Paperback. 316 pp. $16.95. ISBN 9781616963163.

Tachyon’s reissuing of older works (as well as the publication of new ones) by Israeli-British author Lavie Tidhar is an incredibly welcome gift. Tidhar’s concern with shifting perceptions of history is increasingly relevant in an age where an objective chronicle of facts seems increasingly like an outdated product of a more innocent age. In his 2011 World Fantasy Award-winning novel Osama, he told the story of a world in which the 9/11 mastermind is a fictional character. In the masterful 2014 A Man Lies Dreaming, World War II never happened because Adolf Hitler was never made Chancellor of Germany and fled to Great Britain, where he ekes out a noirish life as a ratty private detective. Tidhar’s most recent novel, Unholy Land (2018), is set in a Jewish state planted in East Africa (reminiscent of the real-life Uganda Plan of the early 1900s) where settlers clash with the natives they have violently displaced and which turns out to be only one of multiple potential realities. In Tidhar’s hands, history is a set of alternatives and reality is fluid; it’s an atmosphere that seems downright sensible, even oddly comforting, in a world where many of us would welcome potential different avenues for history to take.

Tidhar is certainly one of our more noirish sf writers working today, given his concern with investigating dark conflicts carried out in the shadows of the world (Dark both literally and metaphorically—the first line in the novel is “A gunshot in the fog,” and one of the opening scenes features a man walking along London’s South Bank, alone on a foggy night, in search of an obscure, out-of-the-way pub: quite noir, indeed). This also might very well earn him the title of SF’s John Le Carre, especially with The Violent Century, which has all the hallmarks of a Le Carre work—espionage carried out by world-weary veterans, shifting loyalties, and desperate attempts to remain human in a tense atmosphere of clashes among faceless international powers. Part of Le Carre’s genius has always been to show the deeply human, deeply ordinary side of espionage, and Tidhar matches him well in Violent Century (adding a dollop of superheroism to give it some spice).

The Violent Century is almost entirely set (except for a few flashbacks and a few scenes set in the present day) in an alternate World War II, fought in the aftermath of a 1932 experiment by German scientist Dr. Joachim Vomacht. That quantum experiment resulted in the creation, all across the world, of people imbued with superpowers. Naturally enough these heroes (or Ubermenschen) are brought into the worldwide conflict by the warring powers, fighting both on open battlefields and in the shadow realm of wartime espionage. This situation may seem similar to, for example, that depicted in the DC comic book series Watchmen (and its 2019 television sequel) or the George R.R. Martin-created and co-edited Wild Cards shared universe, both of which depict the political and social effects of superheroes on a “real” world. And those similarities are, indeed, present. However, those works—despite their frequent moments of bitterness and cynicism—are still rooted in a very American sense of colorful costumed personalities battling each other and who are larger than the ordinary lives around them. Tidhar’s protagonists, though, are, despite their powers, small people rooted very much in the ordinary.

The novel’s ‘heroes’ are British operatives who work for an MI6-like agency called the Bureau for Superannuated Affairs (no Avengers or Justice League here!). British superheroes are dull, with aliases that are stunning in their uncreativity. The two main characters are given the names Fogg (his power is, shockingly, generating fog) and Oblivion (whose power is to negate things and make them vanish forever); their colleagues include Spit (who emits saliva that can fly strong and hard like a bullet), Blur (super speed), and Tank (big and strong). The names are direct and uninspired, as gray as the declining British Empire they serve. By contrast, American heroes are right out of comic books, with bright costumes and names like Whirlwind, Tigerman, and the Green Gunman; Soviet heroes bear equally dramatic names like the Red Sickle and Rusalka, and German ones are called Schneesturm (Snowstorm) and Der Wolfsmann (The Wolf Man).

This very British understatement is part of the plan: as Fogg’s superior ‘the Old Man’ says to him, “We need men like you. Do not be tempted by the Americans, the loudness, the colour. We are the grey men, we are the shadow men, we watch but are not seen” (134). The word shadow is telling, and it recurs throughout the novel: Fogg and his colleagues are “the shadow men of a shadow war” (106). Fogg is called “the shadow man” by his great love, a German woman named Clara (which means “clear” or “bright”) whose power is to, essentially, bring things into the light. And the postwar period is only a pale reflection of that shattering conflict: “Everything else is a shadow of that war” (229). Tidhar’s use of the word stresses that his characters are only obscured reflections of some deeper reality, unlike traditional comic book heroes and villains that bring light and noise and thunder to their worlds. While they will never be mistaken for merely human, Tidhar’s characters are nothing but.

And therein lies the sadness and the fear at the heart of The Violent Century. Why is the century so violent? Because regular human beings have made it so, without the need for superheroes, who are almost afterthoughts to the struggles of real people. Because, as Cory Doctorow notes in his introduction to the novel, “[t]hat’s the real terror, after all: that our lives are tossed around not by the brilliant, all-powerful supermen, but rather by people whose pettiness, fears, and weaknesses are as bad as our own” (v). The real Hitler, the real Mengele, are more monstrous than any supervillain, and the inhumanity that ordinary men can wreak on each other is more powerful than any superpower. That may seem cliché, but it is no less true, as Tidhar works to make clear.

The traditional comic book hero has little place in Tidhar’s world, as the traditional James Bondian superspy has no place in Le Carre’s. There is a wonderfully meta scene set during Vomacht’s 1964 trial (based on Adolf Eichmann’s real-life 1962 trial), in which an American historian of superheroes, Joseph Shuster (in real life the co-creator of Superman), testifies to the definition of a hero, in the process setting apart characters like Fogg and Oblivion from Tigerman and Whirlwind.

Those of us who came out of that war, he says. And before that. From pogroms and persecution and to the New World. To a different kind of persecution, perhaps, But also hope. Our dreams of heroes come from that, I think. Our American heroes are the wish-fulfilment of immigrants, dazzled by the brashness and the colour of this new world, by its sheer size. We needed larger-than-life heroes, masked heroes to show us that they were the fantasy within each and every one of us. The Vomacht wave did not make them. It released them. Our shared hallucination, our faith. Our faith in heroes. This is why you see our American heroes but never their British counterpart. Ours is the rise of Empire, theirs is the decline. Ours seek the limelight, while their skulk in shadows…We need heroes.
227

It is a beautiful, heartfelt statement about the importance of heroes. However, as Tidhar shows, it is also completely wrong. American heroes help the CIA conduct its secret war in Laos and Vietnam. Russian heroes succumb to alcoholism and are considered abominations by the mujahedeen in Afghanistan who fight Soviet occupation. Former Nazi ubermenschen are reborn in the US as advertising shills for children’s breakfast cereals. And no hero anywhere flies out of the sky to stop the crashing of two planes into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. “That day we look up to the sky and see the death of heroes” (229). The Violent Century recognizes the very human emotional need for superheroes but hammers home the idea that those same heroes ultimately have little effect on history’s onrush. In the latter part of the novel, Tidhar provides brief passages concerning historical events: despite the existence of heroes, nothing really changes. Atomic bombs are dropped on Japan, the Vietnam War grows and rages, the Berlin Wall is built, the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan. In a particularly telling passage, the comic book industry establishes the Comics Code Authority in 1954—just as it did in our world—which chains the very notion of superheroes to suburban, middle-class respectability. In any world, it seems, heroes can be tamed. Someone from our world dropped into Tidhar’s universe would see very little difference between the two.

The Violent Century, like much of Tidhar’s output, is an excellent addition to the literature of shifting perceptions of reality, most obviously represented by Philip K. Dick. It is also an effective counterexample to the artificiality of “genre”—the novel is at once an alternate history, a spy novel, a story of superheroes, and a war novel. Fitting many boxes and at the same time none at all, Tidhar’s novel (indeed, his entire literary career) demonstrates the imaginative power of fluidity to give us insights into the complex nature of our historical reality.

Review of Lavie Tidhar’s Unholy Land

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 50, no. 2-3

Fiction Reviews

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**Review of Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar**

Amandine Faucheux

Lavie Tidhar. Unholy Land. Tachyon, 2018. Paperback. 264 pp. $15.95. ISBN 9781616963040.

The protagonist of Lavie Tidhar’s Unholy Land, Lior Tirosh, is a science fiction/detective fiction pulp writer who leaves his home in Berlin to visit his sick father in Palestinia, the Jewish state nestled between Uganda and Kenya, before getting involved in an increasingly complex plot of parallel universes. The story’s narrator, gradually revealed to be Special Investigator Bloom, addresses a mysterious second-person character named Nur, who turns out to be an agent trained to move in between the worlds. Bloom follows both Tirosh and Nur from afar, although at times the narrator takes on omniscient powers, as it becomes clear that in travelling from Europe Tirosh has crossed more than international borders, but the border to another world.

The novel’s mirror frame—an author-surrogate protagonist to whom Tidhar attributes his own novels, including Osama (2011) and Unholy Land itself—invites the reader to lose herself into its composite worldbuilding, in which walls and borders and identities both possess the same meaning they do in the real world, and at the same time don’t. Tidhar bases his what-if thought experiment in a real historical moment, the early 20th century Uganda Program, which proposed to create a Jewish nation in East Africa (a land “unholy” but a land all the same), but in his novel, like in the best sf stories, it is our own world’s reality that suddenly appears strange. Like Tirosh, the reader must follow along without ever being securely anchored in either reality or fantasy, history or alternate history, the past or the present. In this country, too, Palestinians (a noun Tidhar no doubt uses ironically) erect a wall to keep out the indigenous people that were forcibly removed from the land; in this story, too, the PDF (Palestinian Defense Force) brutally harasses refugees and uses surveillance against young revolutionaries. But this is also a story in which ‘only’ a “Small Holocaust” happened (since European Jews moved to Palestinia before the rise of the Third Reich) and in which Hitler was assassinated in 1948. Tidhar’s incredibly vivid worldbuilding unveils a wealth of intriguing details: Palestinians speak Judean (at the end a character calls modern Hebrew “archaic” by comparison); old European Jewish families have become diamantaires; children read the story of the Judean Tarzan.

This is also a novel that, at least when it focuses on Tirosh, develops complex and piercing emotional realities. Throughout the story, Tirosh is haunted by the (never quite described) death of his young son Isaac. His constantly resurfacing grief through memories of simple moments with the toddler showcases the talent of Tidhar’s prose. This is not the only thing that haunts Tirosh. His brother Gideon was killed in the war; his father is ailing and Tirosh is so reluctant to visit it only happens at the end of the novel; his niece Deborah is missing and her mysterious disappearance drives the action; and Tirosh’s memories are also increasingly conflicted as the story progresses.

Tidhar’s novel is a powerful, labyrinthine story reminiscent of China Miéville The City and The City (2009) and, in a much more subtle and controlled way, some of the best of Philip K. Dick. With its careful and intelligent treatment of some of the most difficult questions arising from the Israel-Palestine conflict, it will undoubtedly become a staple of postcolonial science fiction courses. Its straightforward prose and short format will provide for a productive introduction to discussions about border conflicts, nationality, nationalism, and imperialism while also allowing teachers to outline some of the key features of the best of sf. As Tirosh himself explains during a reading at a bookstore: “What we do [when writing stories of alternative realities] is literalise the metaphor…We construct a world of make-believe in order to consider how our own world is constructed, is told.” (113-4).

Some of the novel’s shortcomings could come from Tirosh’s own pulp detective stories. When Bloom ceases to be the narrator in the background and acts as a character especially, the plot turns cartoonish and awkward. To give an example, when Bloom and fellow soldiers storm a refugee camp and harass a family, Bloom reflects to himself: “I did not enjoy humiliating [the woman]. I was merely carrying my duties. I was a professional” (148). The missing-girl plotline of Deborah, with its stereotypical mobster characters, ends up leading nowhere. It is actually quite hard to pinpoint, even by the end of the novel, why certain scenes took place (like the different assassination attempts on Tirosh or his search for the theodolite) or why some characters are introduced (like Melody, a woman who seems to be here simply for Tirosh to sleep with). Overall, Tidhar’s beautiful, almost poetic prose and the fascinating worldbuilding propel the reader to keep reading on in spite of some of the story’s somewhat vulgar plot points, and some of the transition scenes between the worlds have a Ubik-esque quality that I will not forget any time soon.

A Contact List of Graduate Students, Postdocs, Adjuncts, and Alt-Acs in SF, Fantasy, and Horror Studies

For the sake of solidarity among graduate students, postdocs, and other contingent members of the academy, SFRA Review editor compiled a collaborative list via Google Docs of folks working on/in/at the intersection of science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, and horror (SFFH) studies. SFRA Review now presents the list publicly for further collaboration.

Whether it’s your primary focus, a side focus, a minor interest; whether you are in literary studies, history, media studies, sociology—we want to get to know you in order to connect, share resources, and develop camaraderie between graduate students, postdocs, adjuncts, and others struggling up through the ranks of academia or now working outside it. This is also a good way to get a sense of the breakdown of institutions, fields, and research interests represented by global scholars of SFFH.

This list is administered by the SFRA Review; information provided here is for the benefit of all SFFH scholars; if contact info is provided, it may be used to contact listees for the purpose of academic work and camaraderie.

Click to enter the Google Doc