Semper Augustus by Nancy Kress (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2020) opens (after a somewhat irrelevant introductory passage where a young woman gives birth in the back of a truck) with a grandmother telling a young child called Jennie to stop repeating what is said to her (Jennie turns out to have “selective savant memory” or “echo-memory”).
We then see that the grandmother is highly protective of Jennie and has never lets her go out to play but eventually, when the child turns eight, she has to go to school. Before this Gramma shows her, as a warning about the world, a graphic news clip about a young girl who has been murdered. On the way to school Gramma continues the child’s education when they pass wealthy professionals helicoptering into their workplace:
Gramma stopped tugging at Jennie’s hand. “Okay, I guess you need to know some things before you start school. I should of said it before. The aliens, ‘Lictorians’ the government calls them, have all kinds of fancy tech. They landed in China, so the Chinese got the tech and then sold some of it to companies in America. All that means is rich people got richer, like always. But this time, way way richer. And those of us on the bottom lost more and more jobs to the Likkie robots and AI and supertrains and all the rest of it. I used to have a good factory job at Boeing, before automation. Between the Likkies and your grandfather, I lost everything. And welfare just gets less and less. So now you understand.” p. 135
This future world of economic inequality is the backbone of the story (although the explanation for the way things are is fairly superficial and never really explored in any detail—why would the masses not vote for change, for example?)
Jennie is tested at school and put into Ms Scott’s class for gifted children, where she meets Imani, the alpha female of the class, and then Ricardo, who modestly identifies himself as a “genius.” As Jennie settles into her education we find out more about the world around her, and her grandmother’s precarious financial situation. Then, one day on the way to school, the nearby robot factory blows up and Jennie learns about “T-boc”, the Take Back Our Country rebels who target the wealthy or “blingasses” living with their robots behind Q-field force shields.
In Jennie’s teenage years there are more significant developments. On one occasion she is told by her grandmother that her mother is being prosecuted for murder. Gramma takes Jennie to the city where the trial is but leaves her alone in a rented “coffin room” with instructions not to leave, but Jennie slips out to an internet café and finds that her mother, apparently a prostitute, is on trial for the murder of a client. Later Jennie also learns about an aunt called Grace, but Gramma refuses to tell Jennie anything about her. Then, in her final teen years at school, she comes home one day and finds that Gramma has been murdered.
All these events take place against a background of closer bonds with her school friends, gang problems at school, and what is now an insurgency between T-boc and the government/rich.
The second part of the story sees Jennie discover a valentine card (presumably sent to her mother) in her dead grandmother’s papers, which prompts a car journey with her friends to two log cabins in the middle of nowhere, one of which is burnt out. On return she meets Grace at her grandmother’s house. Grace has inherited Gramma’s property, and Jennie ends up going to stay with her.
Grace is a dress designer and Jennie eventually becomes, over the next couple of years, a famous and wealthy model with a rich boyfriend. We now see how the rich live behind their Q-shields, and later get a brief glimpse of one of the enigmatic Lictorians at a fashion show (which suffers a T-boc cyberattack that sets some of the models’ clothes on fire). Grace and the friends that Jennie makes in this rich society are, needless to say, selfish, shallow types unconcerned about the welfare of the less well off.
The third leg of the story sees Ricardo tell her (in a rare call—she has lost touch with her childhood friends) that Imani’s mother and brother have been murdered in a gang-related incident. Jennie visits them and there is some social awkwardness. Then, after her trip, when a wealthy boyfriend’s robofactory is blown up (along with a demand for UBI—universal basic income), and a T-boc supporting village razed in reprisal, his vicious response (“Barbecue T-boc! Yum!”) provokes Jennie to leave him, give up modelling, and join T-boc.
Jennie becomes increasingly involved with the group, and eventually takes part in an operation that kills sixteen humans. When a pro-UBI Senator is shot, however, Jennie confides her growing doubts about T-boc’s strategy to an elderly woman psychologist, who tells Jennie she also wants T-boc to change direction. Their conversation is overheard by one of the other cell members, and they are eventually put on trial. During this the cell leaders get Jennie to use her echo-memory to repeat every conversation that she and the old woman have had.
It’s in this part of the story that my interest began to fade. Before this it is a reasonably good piece about a young woman growing up in a deprived and challenging environment, but the T-boc section is boilerplate resistance/us-and-them material populated with two dimensional characters. Unfortunately much worse follows in the final part, where (spoiler) Jennie flees T-boc and goes back to the log cabins to hide with her friends. When T-boc sends a helicopter to bring them back, and the pilot moves to kill them, who should pop up but her mother Cora, who shoots the pilot. If this co-incidence isn’t enough, she also commits her own terrorist attack on the rest of the story, blowing it up with revelations of her infection by a meteor-borne space virus in the 1970s, which made her near-immortal and of interest to the Lictorians (who seem to be the ones that were behind her earlier jail break). And we also learn that Cora was Gramma’s mother!
More plot explosions follow, including an extraction by the Lictorians, and Jennie telling their alien ambassador about her echo-memory, which indicates she also has the mutation. After negotiations she agrees to co-operate with the aliens and help with their research (we find the reason they are here is to try and get the secret of immortality for their own people) but only if they agree to several demands—at this point in the story we get Jennie’s mini-manifesto: nullify Q-shields, unless the government taxes robots and provides UBI; set up a foundation to aid small business; sell the US advanced tech like the Chinese; etc., etc. Oh, and the Semper Augustus/tulip mosaic virus stuff mentioned by Ricardo early in the story gets trotted out again.1
As I mentioned above, for the first half/two-thirds or so this isn’t bad but it goes spectacularly off the rails at the end. Jennie’s naivety about what T-boc becomes isn’t convincing, and the story never really has anything sensible to say about how to fix the structural inequalities of the world it sets up, short of trotting out the idea of UBI, which sounds like a good idea but may have its own problems (Finland trialled it and then stopped2).
The main problem, though, is that the final immortality section is just a huge deus ex machina that creates an ending at odds with the rest of the story, and introduces a huge new subplot in the last few pages. A kitchen-sink piece, and probably longer than it needs to be too (by the time you get to the end of the story a lot of the preceding detail about Jennie’s life is completely irrelevant).
* (Mediocre). 40,300 words.3
1. The Wikipedia page on the Tulip mania, perhaps the first speculative asset bubble, is here.
2. The Wikipedia page on Universal Basic Income is here.
3. As this is on the borderline (40,000 words) between a novella and a novel I’ve gone with Asimov’s categorisation as a novella.