Tag: Post-collapse

Lucifer by Roger Zelazny

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Lucifer by Roger Zelazny (Worlds of Tomorrow, June 1964) opens with Carlson in the middle of a deserted (presumably post-collapse/apocalypse) city on his way to a building where he used to work. When he gets there he repairs and fuels the broadcast generators that power the city, and then, for a short period of time (93 seconds), he powers up the streets and buildings:

He was staring out beyond the wide drop of the acropolis and down into the city. His city.
The lights were not like the stars. They beat the stars all to hell. They were the gay, regularized constellation of a city where men made their homes: even rows of streetlamps, advertisements, lighted windows in the cheesebox-apartments, a random solitaire of bright squares running up the sides of skyscraper-needles, a searchlight swiveling its luminous antenna through cloudbanks that hung over the city.
He dashed to another window, feeling the high night breezes comb at his beard. Belts were humming below; he heard their wry monologues rattling through the city’s deepest canyons. He pictured the people in their homes, in theaters, in bars—talking to each other, sharing a common amusement, playing clarinets, holding hands, eating an evening snack. Sleeping ro-cars awakened and rushed past each other on the levels above the belts; the background hum of the city told him its story of production, of function, of movement and service to its inhabitants. The sky seemed to wheel overhead, as though the city were its turning hub and the universe its outer rim.
Then the lights dimmed from white to yellow and he hurried, with desperate steps, to another window.  p. 84

The story ends with Carlson leaving the city and promising to himself—again—that he will never come back.
An okay mood piece, I guess, but minor Zelazny.
** (Average). 1,950 words. Story link.

By Any Other Name by Spider Robinson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

By Any Other Name by Spider Robinson (Analog, November 1976)1 is a post-collapse story—this time humanity’s fall is caused by the intentional release of a virus that hugely enhances human sense of smell and causes what is known as the Hypersomic Plague:

Within forty-eight hours [of the release of the virus] every man, woman and child left alive on earth possessed a sense of smell approximately a hundred times more efficient than that of any wolf that ever howled.
During those forty-eight hours, a little less than a fifth of the planet’s population perished, by whatever means they could devise, and every city in the world spilled its remaining life into the surrounding countryside. The ancient smell-suppressing system of the human brain collapsed under unbearable demand, overloaded and burned out in an instant.
The great complex behemoth called Modern Civilization ground to a halt in a little less than two days.  pp. 29-30

This change to the human sensorium also enables the afflicted survivors to detect an invisible, gaseous race of beings called “Muskies” who, once they discover that humans can sense them, go on the attack:

It is difficult for us to imagine today how it was possible for the human race to know of the Muskies for so long without ever believing in them. Countless humans reported contact with Muskies—who at various times were called “ghosts,” “poltergeists,” “leprechauns,” “fairies,” “gremlins,” and a host of other misleading labels—and not one of these thousands of witnesses was believed by humanity at large. Some of us saw our cats stare, transfixed, at nothing at all, and wondered—but did not believe—what they saw. In its arrogance the race assumed that the peculiar perversion of entropy called “life” was the exclusive property of solids and liquids.
Even today we know very little about the Muskies, save that they are gaseous in nature and perceptible only by smell. The interested reader may wish to examine Dr. Michael Gowan’s groundbreaking attempt at a psychological analysis of these entirely alien creatures. Riders of the Wind (Fresh Start Press, 1986).  pp. 31-32

If these two gimmicks sound like they stretch credulity to breaking point, they come close, and it is a testament to Robinson’s storytelling skills that he manages to hold the story together. I’m getting ahead of myself, however.
The tale opens with (unusually for the time) a black narrator called Isham Stone accidentally shooting a cat as he enters a post-apocalyptic New York (he is on edge, has an infected arm, and acts before thinking). Stone has travelled to the city to kill a man called Wendell Carlson, who Stone’s father has identified as the man responsible for the virus (Stone’s father worked with Carlson before the Plague).
When Stone reaches Central Park he stops for a rest, and is disturbed by an old leopard. He presumes the animal is a zoo escapee so he gives it something to eat, and then collapses with exhaustion. He smokes a joint, and thinks about his self-defence training and the mission that lies ahead of him.
After a little more post-collapse travelogue Stone eventually arrives at Columbia University, Carlson’s reported abode. He waits outside for Carlson to appear and, when he does, takes a shot—he misses, and is then attacked by six Muskies. Stone manages to kill five of them with his “hot-shot” shells and grenades before he loses consciousness.
The story then cuts, after another of the data-dump chapters (these post-plague accounts of the collapse of civilization and the advent of the Muskies alternate with Stone’s account of his journey), to Stone arriving back at Fresh Start to tell his father that he has killed Carlson.
The final section of the story then flashbacks to what actually happened after Stone woke up. This begins (spoiler) with Stone seeing that his arm has been partially amputated before Carlson arrives with food and drink and the news that he has been unconscious for a week. Then, as Stone begins his long recovery, he is informed of two significant pieces of information: (a) Carlson has learned to communicate with the Muskies; and (b) Stone’s father (Carlson’s laboratory assistant before the plague) was the one who was responsible for releasing the virus.
The final scene sees Stone back in Fresh Start, booby-trapping his father’s toilet with bleach (which produces chlorine gas when mixed with an appropriate substance). Stone knows his father has had his adenoids removed and that he will not, unlike the rest of the residents of Fresh Start, be able to smell the gas.
As I said above, these plot elements (and the data-dump chapters) do not suggest a promising piece but, while the story isn’t worthy of a Hugo Award,2 it is an engaging read because of Robinson’s informal narrative style—the narrator effectively chats to the reader—and its passages of effective description:

This old cat seemed friendly enough, though, now that I noticed. He looked patriarchal and wise, and he looked awful hungry if it came to that. I made a gambler’s decision for no reason that I can name. Slipping off my rucksack slowly and deliberately. I got out a few foodtabs, took four steps toward the leopard and sat on my heels, holding out the tablets.
Instinct, memory or intuition, the big cat recognized my intent and loped my way without haste. Somehow the closer he got the less scared I got, until he was nuzzling my hand with a maw that could have amputated it. I know the foodtabs didn’t smell like anything, let alone food, but he understood in some empathic way what I was offering—or perhaps he felt the symbolic irony of two ancient antagonists, black man and leopard, meeting in New York City to share food. He ate them all, without nipping my fingers. His tongue was startlingly rough and rasping, but I didn’t flinch, or need to. When he was done he made a noise that was a cross between a cough and a snore and butted my leg with his head.  p. 35

*** (Good). 23,850 words. Story link.

1. This story forms the first six chapters (about a quarter of the length) of the novel Telempath (1976).

2. I suspect that Robinson’s Hugo was more a popularity award given variously for his convention presence, opinionated book review columns in Galaxy (I think the first one was subtitled Spider Versus the Hax of Sol III), and possibly his “Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon” story series. Robinson’s ISFDB page.

Piper at the Gates of Dawn by Richard Cowper

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Piper at the Gates of Dawn by Richard Cowper (F&SF, March 1976) opens1 with Peter, an old and itinerant tale-spinner, and Tom, the piper of the story, on the road to York as the third millennium approaches in a drowned, climate-changed, and post-collapse Britain.2 The pair pause by a stream to catch some dinner, which Tom apparently does by charming the fish out of the water with his pipe; while Tom plays Peter has a vision of a dragonfly, and then hears splashing when Tom successfully catches a huge salmon.
We see a further demonstration of Tom’s powers when the pair later approach a homestead which Peter lodged at years earlier:

They had passed almost through the herd before the farm dogs got wind of them. They came hurtling out from behind the stables, three lean, vicious-looking fell hounds, snarling and yelping in their eagerness to savage the intruders.
The boy stood his ground, calmly waited till the leader was but a short stone’s throw distant, then set the pipe to his lips and blew a series of darting notes of so high a pitch that the old man’s ears barely caught them. But the dogs did. They stopped almost dead in their tracks, for all the world as if they had run full tilt into a solid wall of glass. Next moment, the three of them were lying stretched out full length on the wet grass, whining, with their muzzles clasped in their forepaws and their eyes closed.  pp. 7-8

Shortly after this—once Peter tells the woman of the farm he stayed here before, and she realises he knows her husband—they are invited in. Then, when the young daughter of the house asks Tom to play, we learn that he was a pupil of Morfedd, The Wizard of Bowness, and that his pipe has been made for and also “tuned” to him. We also learn that Tom is now on his way to join the Minster Choir in York.
When the father and son return they all eat and, over dinner, we learn more about this primitive society, the “Drowning” that created it, and millennial rumours of peace and brotherhood that will soon be brought by “The White Bird of Kinship”. Then, after Peter tells a story of the times before the Drowning, Tom plays his pipe. After several tunes he plays a lament that he composed after Morfedd died:

To their dying day none of those present ever forgot the next ten minutes, and yet no two of them ever recalled it alike. But all were agreed on one thing. The boy had somehow contrived to take each of them, as it were, by the hand and lead them back to some private moment of great sadness in their own lives, so that they felt again, deep in their own hearts, all the anguish of an intense but long-forgotten grief. For most the memory was of the death of someone dearly loved, but for young Katie it was different and was somehow linked with some exquisite quality she sensed within the boy himself—something which carried with it an almost unbearable sense of terrible loss. Slowly it grew within her, swelling and swelling till in the end, unable to contain it any longer, she burst into wild sobs and buried her face in her father’s lap.  p. 18

The next day the pair leave and continue their journey, performing at various locations. Then, when the amount of money they start earning because of Tom’s playing wildly exceeds anything Peter has seen before, he tries to convince Tom to join him on the road. Tom says he must go to York because he promised Morfedd he would, and this was something his mentor had planned before Tom’s birth. Eventually, Tom’s playing (in particular a song about a “forthcoming”) begins to be linked with the millennial appearance of The White Bird of Kinship. This beings him to the attention of one of the church’s “crows”, and results in the appearance of a cross-bow bearing Church militiaman, or “Falcon”. Tom negates this threat by playing for him:

Whiteness exploded in the man’s mind. For an appalling instant he felt the very fabric of the world rending apart. Before his eyes the sun was spinning like a crazy golden top; glittering shafts of light leapt up like sparkling spears from hedgerow and hilltop; and all about his head the air was suddenly awash with the slow, majestic beating of huge, invisible wings. He felt an almost inexpressible urge to send a wild hosanna of joy fountaining upwards in welcome, while, at the same time, his heart was melting within him. He had become a tiny infant rocked in a warm cradle of wonder and borne aloft by those vast unseen pinions, up and up to join the blossoming radiance of the sun. And then, as suddenly as it had come, it was over; he was back within himself again, conscious only of a sense of desperate loss—of an enormous insatiable yearning.  p. 29

The Falcon—who is called Gyre—departs peacefully, apparently having forgotten that he heard Tom piping. Peter asks Tom what he did, and Tom says he told the man about the White Bird, something that, one day, he intends to do for everyone.
Eventually the pair arrive at York and the story’s final scenes drive the narrative to its climax: Peter bribes the Clerk to the Chapter to delay Tom’s entry to the Minster Choir so he can accrue a retirement nest-egg; the Chief Falconer of the Church Militant takes an interest in the increasing numbers of people arriving in York for the millennium, and the heretical rumours of the impending appearance of The White Bird of Kinship (one of his Marshalls tells him that the event is also referred to as ‘the forthcoming’ and it will offer humanity a another chance); Tom also meets Gyre again, and the Falcon warns him to leave York as he has had a premonitory dream about the boy three nights running.
The climactic scene sees Peter paying off the Clerk and then climbing the wall to see the bonfires outside, whereupon he hears Tom playing a lament for the White Bird of Kinship. Then, as Peter shares a transcendent experience with the crowd (“he too began to hear what Gyre had once heard—the great surging downrush of huge wings whose enormous beat was the very pulse of his own heart, the pulse of life itself”), Gyre shoots Tom with a crossbow bolt and kills him.
There is an extended postscript that reveals Gyre has no memory of his actions, and then, after the church tries to co-opt Tom’s death by burying him in the Minster, mourners at his funeral are seen to drop white feathers onto the coffin rather than earth. Meanwhile, one of the Marshalls tells the Chief Falconer that the end of the Kinship fable states that when the blood of the white bird splashes the breast of the black one, then the black bird becomes white itself. . . .
Finally, three days after the funeral, Peter rides out of the city with Gyre as his bonded man. Peter sets Gyre free and, to Peter’s surprise, Gyre takes out Tom’s pipe and starts playing it. Peter then has a number of epiphanies, including the thought that Tom may have arranged his own death. The last paragraphs suggest that Peter and Gyre will become the first preachers of this new religion:

A huge calmness descended upon him. He stretched out his arm and gripped Gyre gently by the shoulder. Then he walked down to the water’s edge and dipped both his hands into the sea. Returning, he tilted back Gyre’s head and with a wet finger drew across his forehead the sign that Tom had once drawn on a misty window of an inn—a child’s representation of a flying bird.
“Come, friend,” he said. “You and I together have a tale to tell. Let us be on our way.”  p. 51

I liked this story a lot—Cowper writes wonderful prose and tells a very readable and well characterised story, albeit a complex and symbolic one (I fear the synopsis and comments above barely plumb the depths of the piece). The story’s seemingly mythical or religious ending,3 and the apparent lack of an rational explanation, rather put me off this the first time around but it wasn’t a problem this time. I’d also add, for those who are not of a religious persuasion and are not interested in a replay of the Christ myth, or spotting the parallels, there are subtle hints that far-future technology or paranormal powers may have been deployed by Tom and his mentor Morfedd (the precognition of Morfedd, the tuning of Tom’s pipe, etc.). I can’t remember whether or not this climactic event is further explained in the trilogy4 that follows this story.
**** (Very Good). 21,100 words. Story link.

1. The story actually opens with a brief introduction from an Oxford academic in 3798 who, somewhat unconvincingly, sounds exactly like someone from our current day world.

2. I’m loathe to note the story’s mention of climate change and melting ice caps because most of the predictions SF writers make are usually wrong—but this is quite striking for a 1976 story:

The Drowning was the direct result of humanity’s corporate failure to see beyond the end of its own nose. By 1985 it was already quite obvious that the global climate had been modified to the point where the polar ice caps were affected.  p. 38

3. The writing and tone of this, along with the ambiguous ending, reminded me of Keith Roberts’ The Signaller (Impulse #1, March 1966).

4. This story, which was a Hugo and Nebula finalist, and second in the Locus Poll novella category, was followed by the “The White Bird of Kinship” trilogy: The Road to Corlay (1978), A Dream of Kinship (1981) and A Tapestry of Time (1982). The US edition of A Road to Corlay conveniently includes this story as a prologue.

Textbooks in the Attic by S. B. Divya

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Textbooks in the Attic by S. B. Divya (Rebuilding Tomorrow, 2020) is set in a future America that is suffering from the effects of climate change (a flooded Iowa in this case) and has split into those who live in walled communities and those who live outside. The narrator, a biologist who specialises in distributed horticulture, is one of the latter, and the story opens with her son cutting his hand and developing an infection:

The next two sunrises bring barely more light than the nights that precede them. I always kiss my sleeping child after I get up. This morning, his forehead feels warm under my lips, more than usual. I sniff at his wounded hand and almost gag. Angry red streaks radiate away from the bandage.
Jin stirs as I pull on my raincoat.
‘Where are you going?’ he murmurs.
‘Rishi’s cut is infected,’ I say softly. ‘I’m going Uphill to see if I can get some antibiotics before I go to work.’
I step onto the balcony and uncover our small boat. We removed the railing when the rain started, turning it into a dock for the wet season. I push off into the turbulent water flowing through the street and start the motor. The boat putters upstream. Four houses down, the Millers are on the roof in slickers, checking their garden. They wave as I pass by, and I slow down enough to ask if they have any antibiotics, but they shake their heads, No.
‘Good luck!’ Jeanie Miller calls after me, her brow furrowed in concern. Their youngest died last year, just six months old, from a nasty case of bronchitis.

When she gets to Uphill, the walled community nearby, the gate guard tells her, after radioing the hospital, that they don’t have any antibiotics to spare as they are saving it for post-flu pneumonia cases that may develop. The guard tells her that it is nothing personal, and that her father “was a good man” (ironically, her father used to be a doctor at the hospital).
On returning home the narrator finds her husband and son having lunch, which includes a fresh loaf from one of their neighbours. As she eats, she thinks of her doctor father, and Alexander Fleming, which prompts her to retrieve a microbiology textbook from the attic. Then she decides to try and make penicillin.
The rest of the story details the narrator’s struggle to grow the penicillin mould and purify it, a process which starts with a visit to a rundown college campus where she gets fifteen minutes of precious internet time. There are various trials and tribulations that follow, including a sub-plot where (spoiler), her husband Jin rounds up the local militia to force Uphill to give them the antibiotics they need for their son’s worsening condition (Jin is arrested, but one of the hospital’s doctors visits the narrator with the antibiotics required for Rishi’s condition).
There is a final twist when the doctor later returns with news that Jin has been stabbed while breaking up a fight in prison, and that the hospital has by now run out of antibiotics. Needless to say the narrator manages to decant and purify the antibiotics her husband needs just in time. Finally, the last scene telescopes forward in time to show the industrial process that has been set up to supply antibiotics to the surrounding area.
This piece has, unlike a lot of post-collapse stories, a refreshing can-do/pull yourself up by your bootstraps attitude and, even though the plot is relatively slight, it developed in a different way from what I expected. I rather enjoyed this story, and it struck me as the kind of piece that could appear in Analog.1
***+ (Good to Very Good). 6,350 words.
 
1. A quick skim of ISFDB shows this writer has published all over, including a couple of pieces on Tor, and one in Analog.

The Same Old Story by Anya Ow

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Same Old Story by Anya Ow (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2021) opens with the narrator programing her food machine as she remembers her grandmother making onde-onde:

Grandmother combined the flour with pandan juice from the blended waxy leaves we grew from her planter box, kneading it gently. Her gnarled hands twitched hungrily over the pots, steaming coconut, pinching out pieces of rested dough, and filling the center of each flattened disc with a thumb of gula melaka. The water she used to boil the rested dough had been distilled and recycled from household wastewater the day before. The smooth rice balls floated to the thrumming surface in restless jerks. They looked like balls of phlegm spat into the pot by the dying, restlessly jockeying for attention. Not appetizing in the least. I stared at my feet and wished I was elsewhere as Grandmother removed the rice balls with a slotted spoon and coated them in a bone-white dusting of grated coconut.
The kuih was hot to the touch, the palm sugar bursting on my tongue. My four-year-old self had been gearing up to throw an ice-cream tantrum, but I now sat stunned on my stool, chewing slowly. I decided that I did not like it. When I looked over to my grandmother to complain, I was startled to see that she had closed her eyes. Tears pursued themselves down the timeworn grooves of her face. My resentment fled. We sat and ate in silence, mourning her memory of old Singapore. I wrote the mourning into my gula melaka, twisted my grandmother’s unresisting grief into its moreish sweetness.  pp. 72-73

The rest of the story sees the narrator enter a cooking competition judged by world leaders in a Post Collapse world. She (spoiler) loses to a French chef’s imitation of a dish that she intended to present (there is probably some authentic vs. adapted or cultural appropriation point being made here).
If you like the passage above, there is more over-described food and angst here for you. I found it made for dull reading.
* (Mediocre). 3,450 words.

The Ambient Intelligence by Todd McAulty

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Ambient Intelligence by Todd McAulty1 (Lightspeed #125, October 2020) begins with the narrator, Barry Simcoe, looking at the drones flying over Chicago from the middle of a muddy expanse that used to be Lake Michigan. In the centre of what used to be the lake is a mass of steam rising up from Deep Temple, a mysterious mining project. We then learn, when Simcoe contacts a friendly AI called Zircon Border with a request for transport, that he is struggling to get to his destination because of the many interconnected pools that lie ahead (even though he is wearing a modern American combat suit):

One thing about Zircon Border: he doesn’t pepper you with needless questions. Less than three minutes later, a bird began dropping out of the sky. It came at me from the south, big and grey and nimble. It looked nothing like the massive bug I’d tracked a minute ago. This thing was more like a thirty-foot garden trellis, a big square patch of wrought-iron fencing in the sky. It looked oddly delicate, with no obvious control core or payload, just a bunch of strangely twisted metal kept airborne by a dozen rotors. A flat design like that didn’t seem like it would be very manoeuvrable, but it spun gracefully end-over-end as it decelerated before my eyes, coming to a complete stop less than fifty feet away. It hovered there, perfectly stable, not drifting at all in the unsteady breeze coming off the lake.
[. . .]
“Zircon Border, what the hell is this thing?’
“It’s a mobile radio telescope, Mister Simcoe.”
“Seriously? What are you doing with it?”
“Venezuela uses units like this to monitor deep-space communications, sir.”
“Deep-space . . . what? Communications from whom?”
“I’m afraid I have no idea. That information is highly classified.”
“Of course it is. Okay. I’m going to jump on it. Can it hold me?”
“I’m sure you’ll let me know in a minute,” said Zircon Border.
“Great,” I said dryly. “Stand by.”

As the drone takes him to his location, we learn about the post-collapse world that Simcoe lives in, and his mission, which is to take out a sixty ton killer robot called True Pacific. The robot is currently hiding in a wrecked ship but, when Simcoe arrives there, the robot comes out to kill him. There is then an exciting fight scene in the mudpools, which goes on until Simcoe finally outwits the machine and gets to a power cable at the rear of its head. When Simcoe threatens to disconnect the cable, the robot stops fighting.
Simcoe asks the robot why it has been on a rampage and, after some verbal back and forth, it eventually tells him that it has just disconnected an echo module, a comms device that was (spoiler) enabling an AI called Ambient Intelligence to control it. We subsequently learn that Ambient Intelligence is a newly aware AI born in the mysterious Deep Temple project mentioned previously. True Pacific adds that the AI is like a a child but, before we can learn anything more, Zircon Border interrupts to tell Simcoe that four drones have been hijacked by Ambient Intelligence and are inbound to their location.
The climactic scene shows the pair—now co-operating—defeating the drones, and then leaving the area for a hiding place in Chicago. Questions about what Ambient Intelligence will do next, and what is going on at the Deep Temple project, hang in the air.
This is more open-ended than I’d like (although it points to an obvious sequel), but it was refreshing to read a well-paced piece of action SF with an intriguing background and a sense of humour.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 11,400 words. Story link.

1. There is a short article about the story here, which also mentions how it fits in with McAulty’s* other novels (*Todd McAulty is the pseudonym of John McNeill, editor of Black Gate).

Callme and Mink by Brenda Cooper

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Callme and Mink by Brenda Cooper (Clarkesworld, October 2020) starts with Julie killing a chicken and feeding her two dogs, Callme and Mink. After this she gets ready to take the dogs out, and we get an early indication that matters are more complicated (or futuristic) than they first seem when “she [closes the] clothing over her joints to keep the sand out.” Then, when she drops down on all fours, and runs alongside the dogs, it becomes apparent that Julie is a robot.
Once she gets to town (they pass a couple of lesser utility robots on the way) Julie talks to a man called Jack, who tells her he has a family wanting to adopt one of her dogs. Later, after Julie and the dogs go home, the family—a woman, her son, and an adopted daughter (who has the Wasting Disease)—turn up. They talk, and the family decide to stay so Julie can teach them how to look after Mink. During this period the impression of a post-collapse situation becomes more stark:

Julie watched them all settle into bed and then took her place by the door, sorting through the synapses in her head. Five of ten evaluation flags had flipped to green. If two more flipped, she would watch the family walk away. It was likely.
She didn’t like the direction they were going. If a human reaches a different conclusion than you do, find another opinion.
[. . .]
No matter which direction they went, the girl would not survive. The woman and the boy might, and if so, Mink would love them and protect them. She slapped her thigh softly, signaling Callme to her, and then dropped to all fours, leading the border collie outside.
The night air smelled of sea salt and overripe apples from a tree in the backyard of an empty house. No threats. Her eyes showed the heat of squirrels and rabbits, of a solitary and slow cat, and of birds roosting in the darkness. She and Callme walked side by side, slow, circling the block. Julie’s head ran through the routines of snipping what she didn’t need, what no one needed. She caught herself with an image of Mink [. . .] as a puppy, two days after she found him. He looked round and soft and vulnerable. Maybe ten weeks old. The little sharp baby teeth had just been pushed free by his adult teeth, and his smile was still slightly lopsided. Do not become attached to more than one animal. Dogs are to help human hearts.
What a strange phrase to be in her programming.

The rest of the story shows Julie training the family to look after Mink—this seems to be what Julie does, rear and train guard dogs for humans—but her responses to the people she meets throughout the story show her as ambivalent at best, and possibly entirely dispassionate. That said, Julie tries to convince the family not to go South, a region she knows is unsafe. She is not successful, however, and they eventually leave.
This is a pretty good read, a slow burn with a good setting, and I liked seeing the way Julie thinks. I would have rated it higher but it peters out somewhat at the end. Hopefully the first of a series.
*** (Good). 4,300 words. Story link.