by Lauren Markham
When and how did migration become a crime? Why does ancient Greece remain so important to the West's idea of itself? How does nostalgia fuel the exclusion and demonization of migrants today?
In 2021, Lauren Markham went to Greece, in search of her own Greek heritage and to cover the aftermath of a fire that burned down the largest refugee camp in Europe. Almost no one had wanted the camp—not activists, not the country's growing neo-fascist movement, not even the government. But almost immediately, on scant evidence, six young Afghan refugees were arrested for the crime.
Markham soon saw that she was tracing a broader narrative, rooted not only in centuries of global history but also in myth. A Map of Future Ruins helps us see that the stories we tell about migration don't just explain what happened. They are oracles: they predict the future.
A Map of Future Ruins has two main threads: Lauren Markham's travels to Greece to investigate the roots of her family, who emigrated to the United States three generations earlier, and the burning of the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos in September 2020, with the consequent indictment, arrest and conviction of six young Afghans. Through these subjects, Markham explores the refugee crisis in Europe from one of its hot spots.
Greece is, together with Italy, the main point of entry for immigrants who, driven by war, hunger or oppression, head for Europe. It is also considered the cradle of democracy, the proud foundation on which Western culture and its values of justice and equality are based. But, as Markham reports, since the devastating effects of the 2008 crisis the Aegean country has been reeling under the weight of its myths, unable to live up to its own ideal. According to Markham, the hundreds of thousands of refugees who began arriving in waves since 2015 have become scapegoats for Greece's suffering. On a smaller and symbolic scale, the so-called "Moria 6" have become scapegoats for the camp's burning, subjected to an unfair trial with no substantial evidence.
Markham addresses the judicial process in the third part of the book, which also delves into other cruel aspects of the management of the refugee crisis, such as threats to activists and pushbacks—illegal expulsions of refugees. Earlier, in the first part, she traces the political, cultural and geographical context that explains the matchstick path leading to the fire of Moria. Markham deploys her erudition and extensive research as she outlines the history of Western culture and its mythical roots, and she gives the reader a glimpse of her expertise—she has been reporting for years on migration issues, especially in America.
But in this work Markham is not only an observer: she becomes a character. In the second part, she describes her travels through Greece and the places where her grandmother lived. Like Moria's immigrants, Markham's ancestors fled their homeland in search of a better life. And, also like Moria's immigrants, Markham is now drawn to Greece, the persistent destination of their particular odysseys.
Her travels to research her family history and to report on the refugee crisis began in 2019. Moria's fire a year later became the link between these two stories she wanted to tell, the knot that ties together her large and perhaps overly ambitious project, in which she investigates the mechanisms of myth-making, belonging, exclusion, borders and whiteness. By interweaving all these journeys, her story ceases to be the simple narration of a specific case and becomes a general commentary on migration, as Moria's story is "about the criminalization of contemporary migration, yes, but also about the valorization of past times and migrations."
In this way, chronicle, reportage and autobiography merge, creating a cohesive work that, nevertheless, sometimes becomes reiterative in its main ideas. Markham develops these throughout the chapters, seamlessly navigating between present, past and future. As she writes, the "truest stories move like a mosaic, not a line."
To compose this mosaic, the journalist uses evocative language. Markham's voice is clear and emphatic in her descriptions and opinions, which she doesn't mask. Her vocabulary is rife with mythical terms, especially in her references to Moria, defined as an underworld, a limbo or a purgatory. In this place, Ali, Hassam and the other four convicted—whose names the reader never gets to know—see their hopes stifled. What they thought was a journey to freedom becomes a nightmare with no return: "Ali had lived in Greece long enough to understand that the image Europe projected to the world—a place of strength, where freedom and justice prospered—was, at least for refugees like him, a sham."
This situation highlights the injustice of the refugee crisis management, as well as the timeliness and relevance of Markham's work. The seasoned journalist believes that "by influencing the way events are understood, our stories shape the policies that are made." A Map of Future Ruins is an attempt to change the way contemporary immigration stories are told by revising falsehoods, going beyond mere data and giving voice to the protagonists of these situations. It is the first step of a very long journey.
Book reviewed by Alicia Calvo Hernández
The hands of history have reshaped the Greek past for centuries, sculpting it into an idealized version credited with birthing a myriad of ideas and concepts, notably identity. Certain contemporary political currents claim that Hellenic identity was what we would today consider white, although Greece was a multiethnic society that did not have our modern concepts of race.
Groups promoting racist ideology have pushed the interpretation that the apparent lack of color and ornamentation in Greco-Roman classical sculpture, which is in fact due to the erosion of pigments over time, is indicative of a more advanced and sophisticated culture resulting from the supposed superiority of white Europeans. As Lauren Markham writes in A Map of Future Ruins, "classical iconography continues to be a touchstone of white supremacy today, building off the myth that ancient Greece is the taproot of so-called Western culture."
The author mentions Identity Evropa, a neo-Nazi organization founded in 2016 with the supposed aim of preserving Western identity and values in the face of multiculturalism. In one of their main propaganda campaigns, the group drank directly from classical iconography, trying to attract students by showing an idealized white past. They filled U.S. campuses with posters featuring Greek-and-Roman-looking statues, such as Hercules, David and Apollo. Slogans accompanying these images included "Keep Your Diversity We Want Identity" and "Let's Become Great Again," which evokes Donald Trump's presidential campaign slogan.
The former president has also drawn on classical imagery. In 2020, a draft of an executive order titled "Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again" was leaked. It sought to establish neoclassical architecture as the preferred style for federal buildings. The draft argues that in designing Washington D.C. buildings, the founding fathers embraced the classical models of "democratic Athens" and "republican Rome" because they symbolized "self-governing ideals."
When on January 6, 2021, a group of Trump supporters invaded the Capitol, with its dome, frieze and neoclassical columns, they also made use of Hellenistic iconography. Several wore replicas of an ancient Greek helmet that evoked the Spartans, possibly in the belief that these warriors "saved the white race from destruction by delaying the advance of Persian forces at the Battle of Themopylae," according to Pharos, a website created to fight the growing use of classical culture by hate groups. These rioters saw themselves standing up for "Western civilization" and preventing the advance of an external political force threatening their status.
Classicists are pushing against this misuse of antiquity's ideas and symbols. According to Curtis Dozier, founder of Pharos and assistant professor of Greek and Roman studies at Vassar College, these views "all depend on the widespread assumption that Greco-Roman antiquity is admirable, foundational and refined. Thus any presentation that promotes uncritical admiration for the ancient world, by presenting it as a source of 'timeless' models and wisdom, has the potential to be complicit in white supremacy."
As classics and black world studies professor Denise McCoskey explains, the "idea that the Greeks and Romans identified as 'white' with other people in modern-day Europe is just a complete misreading of ancient evidence." In a similar sense, Western civilization as a concept did not exist until the late 19th century. Journalist Jen Pinkowski writes, "these two notions have joined forces to create a third: that white people need to defend Western Civilization, especially against what many in the white nationalist movements—and Trump—have called a foreign 'invasion.'"
Pretending to "resurrect ancient norms" is a tendency of white supremacist groups, says classicist Donna Zuckerberg. Svetlana Boym, whose work Markham considers instrumental to the writing of A Map of Future Ruins, expresses a similar idea when she speaks of "restorative nostalgia," a "project of reincarnating a nonexistent past when things were better, people and ideas more pure." But, like the white of the Greek sculptures, the "purity" of the classical is nothing more than illusion and invention, an attempt to put a mythologized past at the service of racist ideologies of the present.
Modern imagining of how a classical statue may have been colored
By Sheila1988 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
by Robert Jackson Bennett
In Daretana's greatest mansion, a high imperial officer lies dead—killed, to all appearances, when a tree erupted from his body. Even here at the Empire's borders, where contagions abound and the blood of the leviathans works strange magical changes, it's a death both terrifying and impossible.
Assigned to investigate is Ana Dolabra, a detective whose reputation for brilliance is matched only by her eccentricities. Rumor has it that she wears a blindfold at all times, and that she can solve impossible cases without even stepping outside the walls of her home.
At her side is her new assistant, Dinios Kol, magically altered in ways that make him the perfect aide to Ana's brilliance. Din is at turns scandalized, perplexed, and utterly infuriated by his new superior—but as the case unfolds and he watches Ana's mind leap from one startling deduction to the next, he must admit that she is, indeed, the Empire's greatest detective.
As the two close in on a mastermind and uncover a scheme that threatens the Empire itself, Din realizes he's barely begun to assemble the puzzle that is Ana Dolabra—and wonders how long he'll be able to keep his own secrets safe from her piercing intellect.
By an "endlessly inventive" (Vulture) author with a "wicked sense of humor" (NPR), The Tainted Cup mixes the charms of detective fiction with brilliant world-building to deliver a fiendishly clever mystery that's at once instantly recognizable and thrillingly new.
Speculative fiction author Robert Jackson Bennett makes his first foray into mystery novels with The Tainted Cup, a top-notch police procedural set in an unnamed world little like our own. On this planet, plants have been genetically modified to serve all sorts of functions (kirpis mushrooms cool and filter air, fernpaper is used to construct walls, poisonous vines guard entryways). They're also used in suffusions and grafts to physically alter the inhabitants of the world; for example, giving some superhuman strength or genius-level mathematical ability. And, we soon discover, the augmented plants can be used to commit murder.
Dinios Kol is a newly-minted Sublime – one of the "cerebrally suffused and augmented" who "planned, managed and coordinated everything" for the Empire. Din's suffusion turned him into an engraver, someone who can remember everything they see and hear. He's been assigned to assist Immunis Anagosa Dolabra, Iudex Investigator of the Daretana Canton – aka Ana – a brilliant but irascible, foul-mouthed recluse tasked with looking into a death occurring on the property of the Empire's wealthiest and most influential clan. Din is dispatched to the estate and discovers a grisly scene: the body of a man killed by a tree that apparently grew out of his torso. He relays the details to Ana, who quickly determines the death is a murder, and as the pair investigate, the mystery deepens and the bodies pile up. Increasing the tension, the planet is entering the "wet season," when enormous creatures known as leviathans try to breach Daretana Canton's sea walls, causing massive death and destruction.
The plot is a seamless blend of fantasy and mystery. Bennett's world-building is exquisite, creating an environment at once familiar and completely new. Although the author immediately throws foreign terms at the reader (e.g., princeps, mai-lantern), any words that aren't clear from context are explained a bit later in the story; a map and chart of ranks in the book's preface are helpful here. Bennett doesn't paint a complete picture of this world by any means, but there's enough to fascinate readers without overwhelming them with its strangeness.
Exceptionally impressive, though, is the mystery at the heart of the novel. In many respects it's a standard police procedural – a crime is committed, the authorities collect evidence and interview suspects, the criminal is caught. Every other aspect, however, is wholly unexpected, from the choice of murder weapon to the deductions made by Din and Ana to the ultimate revelation of the guilty party. Bennett liberally peppers the story with red herrings, too, keeping readers guessing from start to finish. And, of course, there's the intriguing pairing of the book's two protagonists. Some have compared them to Holmes and Watson, and while there's rationale for that (Ana certainly has that Sherlock Holmes vibe about her), I find Din a much more interesting and more active participant than Watson ever was.
There are a few things about Bennett's novel that are less than stellar. The secondary characters aren't as developed as I would have liked, with most coming across as one-dimensional. And some stylistic choices should have been rethought, in my opinion, such as repeatedly writing that Ana was "grinning" about something (surely there's another verb that could have been employed for some variety) and the overuse of shocked stuttering during dialogue ("I…I have nothing to say," "Then…then what reason," "But…but just being here," etc.). Certainly, these flaws grated at times, but I enjoyed the mystery so darned much that it still earns my highest recommendation. The book does contain strong language (lots of f-bombs) but otherwise is appropriate for older teen audiences.
The Tainted Cup is the first entry in the proposed Shadow of the Leviathan series, and while its plot wraps up very satisfyingly, Bennett leaves plenty of room for sequels. I, for one, can't wait to read what he dreams up next. Fans of Isaac Asimov's Robot series and John Scalzi's Lock In books will likely enjoy this procedural, as will those who would like to encounter an outstanding yet different mystery novel.
Book reviewed by Kim Kovacs
As most will know, a mystery novel is one that starts off with a conundrum – someone has been killed, something or someone has gone missing – and proceeds along a logical path until the puzzle is solved, generally with plot twists and red herrings along the way. There are many variations on this theme, and consequently many subgenres have cropped up over the decades since mystery novels first appeared, with an often-cited early English-language example being Wilkie Collins' 1860 work The Woman in White. These include:
Robert Jackson Bennett's book The Tainted Cup can be considered a police procedural mystery (a subset of the detective genre) where the action is portrayed from the point of view of someone in law enforcement. This differs from the type of detective novel in which the lead is a private or amateur detective, and which frequently portrays police as inept, corrupt or ignorant. In police procedurals, the police are traditionally more perceptive and savvy, and solving the mystery is generally grounded in realistic investigative techniques (e.g., interviews, collecting evidence, forensic examinations). Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868) is often considered one of the earliest police procedurals, though the narrative doesn't fit squarely in the genre. It features Sergeant Cuff, a policeman investigating the theft of a diamond, but some of the chapters are written from the perspective of other characters.
Mystery novels proliferated around the turn of the century in Britain and the United States, popularized by authors like Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. By World War II, however, the market was glutted with pulp mysteries (many sub-par) and people were eager for something new. In 1945 Lawrence Treat published V as in Victim, which established the police procedural as a distinct mystery subgenre. It was immediately popular, which caused the advent of not only similar novels but radio dramas and, later, TV shows as well.
As the number of police procedurals grew, authors expanded into other genres. One of the first science fiction police protagonists was Lincoln Powell, the telepathic policeman at the heart of Alfred Bester's 1952 novel, The Demolished Man (which won the very first Hugo award). And many fans of early sci-fi will remember Isaac Asimov's classic duo Lije Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw, heroes of The Caves of Steel (1952) and its two sequels.
The genre is not without its critics, who often cite an unrealistic lack of nuance; authorities are frequently depicted as always right, always in control, always the good guys, and they always solve the crime. More recently, however, these rules have started to shift, allowing for more uncertainty, more gray areas in the plot and more details that are true to life. Aiding this evolution is the increased diversity among those being published in the genre, many of whom are incorporating cultural nuance that writers from an earlier age have lacked. S.A. Cosby's All the Sinners Bleed, Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad series and the Kyoichiro Kaga books by Keigo Higashino are just a few examples of modern police procedurals among many.
by Katherine Arden
January 1918. Laura Iven was a revered field nurse until she was wounded and discharged from the medical corps, leaving behind a brother still fighting in Flanders. Now home in Halifax, Canada, Laura receives word of Freddie's death in combat, along with his personal effects—but something doesn't make sense. Determined to uncover the truth, Laura returns to Belgium as a volunteer at a private hospital, where she soon hears whispers about haunted trenches and a strange hotelier whose wine gives soldiers the gift of oblivion. Could Freddie have escaped the battlefield, only to fall prey to something—or someone—else?
November 1917. Freddie Iven awakens after an explosion to find himself trapped in an overturned pillbox with a wounded enemy soldier, a German by the name of Hans Winter. Against all odds, the two form an alliance and succeed in clawing their way out. Unable to bear the thought of returning to the killing fields, especially on opposite sides, they take refuge with a mysterious man who seems to have the power to make the hellscape of the trenches disappear.
As shells rain down on Flanders and ghosts move among those yet living, Laura's and Freddie's deepest traumas are reawakened. Now they must decide whether their world is worth salvaging—or better left behind entirely.
"Was remembered agony better than feeling nothing at all?" This open question from protagonist Laura Iven is at the epicenter of Katherine Arden's war-torn The Warm Hands of Ghosts.
The Iven siblings, Canadians serving in World War I, have their lives upended in the bloody final years of the global conflict. After a bomb lands on the hospital where she is stationed and nearly takes her leg, older sister Laura is honorably discharged from her duties as a frontline nurse. Nonetheless, tragedy follows her back home to Halifax. When a ship in the nearby harbor catches fire, the blast radius kills both mother and father of the Iven family. Mere days later, the orphaned Laura receives news that her beloved younger brother, Freddie, has likely died in the European trenches. Lingering doubts lead Laura to venture back to the front to uncover the truth behind Freddie's mysterious disappearance. Meanwhile, Arden's novel follows Freddie's perspective from around a year earlier as he forms a blood bond with a German soldier, Winter. Together, no longer caring that they are supposed to be enemies on opposing sides of the war, they team up to escape the horrors of the trenches. As the narrative progresses, both siblings are drawn towards the mysterious machinations of Faland, a hotelier who promises the wounded respite, wine, and beautiful violin music — but at a heavy cost.
Arden creates a historical setting that fuses the scientific and brutally realistic with the supernatural and occult. The third-person narration alternating between Laura's and Freddie's perspectives is candid about WWI's horror and viscera. Men's broken bodies fall to pieces on stretchers. Soldiers plead for death as they drown in trench mud. Laura's hands are terribly scarred by infections transmitted from the wounded and dying. Against these unromanticized depictions of physical trauma, The Warm Hands of Ghosts delves into darkly fantastic ways of coping with warfare's psychological trauma. Soldiers, driven mad, report phantoms of dead comrades. Laura, herself staunchly scientific and disbelieving in mysticism, is haunted by her deceased mother and doubts her own sanity. She witnesses women performing seances, desperately attempting to communicate with lost loved ones, and capitulates to her mother's apocalyptic, biblically-coded fatalism: stories of Armageddon, in which "the infallible judgement of God" — with awful "pageantry," including "The Four Horsemen, the Beast from the Sea, the devil riven and falling," and "Fire from heaven" — unleashes "Rewards for the good, and punishments for the wicked." Laura's rationality surrenders to this bleak fortunetelling: "And you were right, Maman … It caught us after all. War, plague, famine, death, the sky on fire, the sun black … you couldn't stop anything. But at least you knew it was coming. The end of the world."
While Laura acknowledges the power of the war machine, strong women like herself are the ones who progress the novel's plot; The Warm Hands of Ghosts is built on the persistent agency of women during historically tumultuous events. Initially, Laura comes across as judgmental, bitter, and even abrasive. But as her characterization unfolds, her no-nonsense attitude is revealed as painstakingly developed in response to her work on the European front and the subsequent familial tragedy. Beyond Laura's coldness and cynicism, Arden shows her heart to be stubbornly motivated by love beyond all hope, as she determinedly seeks out her brother even when evidence points solidly to his demise.
Another thoughtful exploration of femininity confronting war is Pim, a widow who has lost her son to the trenches and accompanies Laura back to the front. Though Laura first expresses condescending pity towards Pim's antiquated, Victorian-Edwardian attitudes in their new age of destruction, the two eventually support each other in a moving depiction of women's solidarity in the face of grief and loss. Pim also reveals herself as more than the archetypical beautiful, ditzy nice girl, the embodiment of the selfless, sensitive angel of the household whose sole purpose is to comfort the tormented men of the world. She skillfully weaponizes these projections to, like Laura, help her loved ones as best she can.
Fascinating is the mysterious, seemingly out-of-place hotelier, Faland, who recurrently appears before the protagonists during harrowing moments in their desperate struggle for survival. Laura first stumbles upon Faland's "ruined hotel" while seeking temporary refuge after a bomb disables the lorry returning her to the front; Freddie, making Faland's acquaintance after overhearing him order a trench newspaper advertisement for his "evening revels," shelters in his cellar overnight as part of his devotion to preserving the gravely injured Winter. In both cases, Faland is a miraculously hospitable host — as he claims, "I serve wine, I listen, and occasionally I play a violin." But despite the magic and warmth of his aura, both Laura and Winter quickly sense the cracks in his façade. The ghosts that swirl menacingly around him foreshadow that his beautiful revels are not to be taken at face value, especially pertaining to his plans for Freddie.
Of course, these complex characterizations take time and space to construct. In its first half, the pacing of The Warm Hands of Ghosts is slow as Arden builds up her characters. Following Laura back to Europe to get to the tumultuous front and Faland is particularly strenuous. The careful worldbuilding and character-building has a satisfying payoff once Laura's and Freddie's narrative lines converge in the Forbidden Zone. A suspenseful unraveling ensues, which leaves little room to fully develop the budding romance between Laura and a frontline doctor, Jones. However, none of this detracts from Arden's meaningful exploration of traumatic violence, fractured history and selfhoods, and superhuman attempts at putting oneself back together. In The Warm Hands of Ghosts, the past calls out to the present in the same way that ghost stories entice even the most skeptical.
Book reviewed by Isabella Zhou
Katherine Arden's The Warm Hands of Ghosts, in addition to focusing on the violence and trauma of the World War I trenches, is also about the female nurses who treated wounded soldiers.
Protagonist Laura's point-of-view sections devote ample description to the sordid day-to-day of serving as a hospital nurse in WWI. Already sent away from the front once for a bomb that nearly took her leg, she is steely and cynical and, like the other nurses, adopts several coping mechanisms: alcohol, smoking, ducking for cover at the first sign of a bombing, and sleeping without dreaming.
During WWI, as many as 3,000 Canadian nurses in the Canadian Army Medical Corps served with 600,000 men in the Canadian Expeditionary Force. These women — of whom Laura is a fictionalized depiction — were called nursing sisters. In her novel, Arden includes the details of Laura, without her parents' support, having to pay her way through a nursing degree. Official nursing training (which eliminated non-white women because they were institutionally barred), British citizenship, "high moral character," physical fitness, and being between 21 and 38 years old were all part of the requirements for becoming a Canadian nursing sister. For their field uniforms consisting of blue dresses and white veils, these nurses were also nicknamed "bluebirds."
While the Canadian nursing sisters and their counterparts from other countries were usually not stationed directly in the trenches — they were set up at first in hospitals and eventually Casualty Clearing Stations, the first point for receiving the wounded from ambulances and administering treatment — they were not sheltered from the horrors of war. Because of their proximity to the front, nurses were at high risk for air raids and shell fire and were exposed to rats and fleas. Even hospitals that were farther away were not completely safe. On May 31, 1918, German bombers attempted to destroy a bridge near the No. 7 Canadian General Hospital at Étaples in northern France, and several doctors and nurses were killed as a result. Nurses stationed on hospital ships also faced the risk of German U-boat torpedoing. Arden incorporates these harrowing realities into her fiction, in part through Laura's persisting leg injury.
Serving as a wartime nurse, especially in WWI, was physically and psychologically taxing. Brian Tennyson, a military history professor at Cape Breton University, explains, "If you're in a hospital in France, things might be relatively quiet for a while, but then there'd be a big offensive, there'd be a big battle and they knew within hours, 24 hours or maybe even less, there would be a whole whack of injured people showing up." In a 1980 interview, now-deceased nursing sister Helen Kendall talked about how because doctors were so busy, nurses like herself often had to be the ones administering anesthetics — "But they [the patients] were the devil to give anesthetics to … They could fight like thieves."
Despite these hardships, written records kept by WWI nurses reveal the poignant bonds that grew between them and the men they treated. In a September 1917 diary entry, Helen Dore Boylston of the American first Harvard Unit recounts the tender experience of treating "a Canadian, about twenty-two, with a frightful arm; elbow joint smashed, and the whole arm stiff and swollen, and full of gas gangrene." The moment is mutually compassionate: "Once, accidentally touching a bare nerve-end with my forceps, I hurt him terribly and he turned his head to see what I was doing. I saw that his eyes were full of tears and the pupils enormously dilated with pain. But not a word out of him … Just patient silence. I choked for an instant, and then burst out, 'Oh, I'm awfully sorry, lad! I didn't want to hurt you.' And he said, so gently, 'It's quite all right, sister. Carry on.'" One could perhaps imagine a similar interchange shared between Arden's fictional Canadian brother and sister pair, tough nurse Laura and her younger brother Freddie.
A group of Canadian nurses having tea at No. 3 Casualty Clearing Station in France, July 1916
British Library/Picturing Canada via Wikimedia Commons
by Liliana Colanzi
The seven stories of You Glow in the Dark unfold in a Latin America wrecked and poisoned by human greed, and yet Colanzi's writing—at once sleek and dense, otherworldly and intensely specific—casts an eerily bright spell over the wreckage. Some stories seem to be set in a near future; all are superbly executed and yet hard to pin down; they often leave the reader wondering: was that realistic or fantastic?
Colanzi draws power from Andean cyberpunk just as much as from classic horror writers, and this daring is matched by her energizing simultaneous use of multiplicity and fragmentation—the book's stylistic trademarks. Freely mixing worlds, she uses the Bolivian altiplano as the backdrop for an urban dystopia and blends Aymara with Spanish. Colanzi never gets bogged down; she can be brutal and direct or light-handed and subtle. Her materials are dark, but always there's the lift of her vivid sense of humor. You Glow in the Dark seizes the reader's attention (from the title on) and holds it: this is a book that announces the arrival of a major new talent.
Somewhere Ray Bradbury is smiling. With this beautiful and brutal collection, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, Liliana Colanzi cements her well-deserved place in the world of dystopian science fiction. Each story explores the devastation that can be wreaked on a world through environmental and manmade disasters. Colanzi approaches dark, harrowing subjects — the appalling effects of radiation poisoning, dangers of unchecked technological advancement, systemic oppression and poverty — with the deft hand of a poet, showing the reader unexpected beauty in even the ugliest parts of humanity.
In the opening story, "The Cave," Colanzi examines the cycle of death and rebirth in a single location over thousands of years and the distinctly human need to leave a mark on the world, even if that mark contributes to its destruction. The cave becomes a microcosm of humanity's progression (and regression) through time. It is a meeting place for star-crossed lovers, a source of wealth (and death) for crystal miners, the only spot on the planet where a certain microorganism can grow, the home of a mutant colony of bats whose existence is wiped out by a single sneeze, and the final resting place of a mutated man in the far-flung future who ensures, in a way, his immortality. Finally, the cave itself is subject to thousands of years of evolution, destruction, and rebirth. Nature, Colanzi seems to suggest, doesn't care, it simply is.
There is a propulsiveness to Colanzi's writing, infusing both characters and setting with a sense of chaotic urgency that kept me enthusiastically turning the pages. Many of the characters are trapped in their circumstances, unable to extricate themselves from isolation and poverty but increasingly desperate to do so. The lush jungles are full of bugs and diseases. Magnificent rainforests hide killer animals. Skies are described as "electric," "scandalous" rain falls, and lightning is a frequently repeated image. Places are used over and over for experimental science and dangerous technology with little regard for the people or the land. But there is often a bright spot of hope that creeps in through the cracks. In "Atomito," a town almost destroyed by a mysterious factory is driven to rise up and dismantle it. In "The Narrow Way," members of a cult kept in line by electric collars and high fences brave the shocks to escape.
The most emotionally impactful story in the collection, the titular "You Glow in the Dark," is a fictionalized reimagining of a real radiological accident that occurred in Brazil in the 1980s (see Beyond the Book). The story follows the hapless owner of a scrap yard who doesn't know how dangerous the beautiful, glowing, "finer than sand" particles he has discovered are. He unwittingly infects and kills many with radiation sickness. Once the contamination is contained and the dead are buried, a kind of mythology springs up around the incident as people gradually seem to forget its devastating effects. A very human error has been twisted into an act of God. The scrap yard owner is put on display as a "miracle" who looked into the glowing face of death and now "shines in the darkness" to the awe and amazement of the crowd who pays to see him. There's a deep frustration in seeing people's willingness to distort such a tragedy into something inspiring and outside human control, yet I too found myself fascinated by the image of a glowing man lighting up the night, an angel (or demon) on Earth.
There were times throughout my reading experience that I almost felt as though I were awakening from a strange, fevered dream. Colanzi's universes are distorted and not always fully formed in the way dreams often are. I found myself dropped into what seemed like the end of a story, after the rise and fall of a great technological achievement or an apocalypse that changed the world, looking over the fallout, unsure how I got there but fascinated nonetheless. The stories are not always easy to understand, and plots don't always take a logical course, but the subjects Colanzi writes about don't either. Nature follows its own path. It can be beautiful and horribly destructive at the same time. Elements pulled from the earth and molded into power sources can turn on those who wield them at any moment.
Colanzi writes about brutal subjects but wrestles startling moments of enchanting and intoxicating loveliness from them. I was surprised to find myself using words like "breathtaking" and "stunning" to describe her desolate landscapes, deadly jungles, and the survivors who populate them. The stories themselves do not always seem to matter as much as the feelings they inspire. I was often awed at the journey I'd been taken on.
This collection is ideal for fans of realistic science fiction and dystopian stories. Colanzi calls to mind other great authors in the genre like Bradbury, Margaret Atwood, and Frederik Pohl. Though the reality she writes about is grim, there is depth and wonder to be found amidst the ruin. There are shades of Bradbury's barren Martian landscape and Atwood's broken planet where Oryx and Crake tried to remake the world. This is a collection that fascinates and dazzles, full of vibrant, darkly beautiful imagery meant to be savored and returned to again and again.
Book reviewed by Sara Fiore
In the title story of You Glow in the Dark, scrap metal scavengers uncover a strange glowing capsule in the ruins of an abandoned hospital. Dazzled by the beautiful blue particles that glow in the dark, they spread radioactive poison throughout their community, leaving illness and death everywhere they go. When the accident is finally contained, it takes on a religious quality, with the victims seen as saints and living miracles and the disaster itself an uncontrollable act of God.
The actual incident closely mirrored in Liliana Colanzi's story occurred in Goiania, Brazil on September 13th, 1987. Like in the story, two scavengers exploring an abandoned radiation therapy clinic discovered a capsule and took it to a scrap metal dealer in Goiania who purchased it for $25.
When the capsule was opened it revealed a glowing blue "salt-like" substance that was Cesium-137, a radioactive isotope and a deadly byproduct of nuclear fission processes. Unaware that he was dealing with one of the most dangerous substances on Earth, the scrap dealer gave the powder to friends as gifts and even allowed his six-year-old niece to smear it all over her body. In just a few days the powder had spread around the city of roughly one million people and those who had first handled the substance were beginning to exhibit symptoms of radiation sickness.
The Chernobyl disaster had occurred only the year before, and Brazilian authorities, when they learned about the incident nearly 16 days after the capsule was taken, moved quickly to quarantine those exposed and begin the decontamination process. They screened over 100,000 people for contamination and ultimately found 249 people who had received extreme exposure. Sadly, both the scrap yard owner's wife and niece were among the four immediate fatalities.
While not the result of an accident on the level of Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, the Goiania incident was nonetheless largely caused by extensive human error and ignorance. It began with the doctors and administrators who abandoned the clinic without alerting authorities that highly radioactive and dangerous equipment was still in the building. Leaving the site unguarded offered easy access to scavengers and a lack of education on the identification of radioactive substances likely contributed to the general public's inability to see how dangerous something they viewed as simply beautiful and delightful to play with really was.
The Goiania incident has all but vanished from history, perhaps because it did not occur as the result of a massive explosion or in an area widely reported on in the world. But it haunted the region and the people. Citizens fought to prevent the dead from being buried, in lead-lined coffins, in the local cemetery out of fear of contamination. Concern over who might be infected and how communicable the contamination was caused members of the community to be ostracized, homes demolished, belongings destroyed. Even the local economy was affected by an unwillingness to buy food or other products from Goiania.
In Colanzi's story, the scrap yard owner survives the incident to become an object of almost religious fascination. Crowds pay a fee to view his drunken, unconscious form lighting up the night with a surreal blue glow. In reality, having buried his wife and niece, he lived only another few years before succumbing to alcoholism and depression. As recently as 2018 victims and their relatives were still working to get compensation but the government has yet to recognize them.
Radioactive source of Goiania accident
Photo courtesy of IAEA (CC BY 2.0)
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.