Two very different stories on Interzone Digital last month – a madcap action film mash-up, and a low-key solarpunk tale. Here’s what Jonathan thought.
‘Amber Alert’ by Alex Souza
Alex Souza’s ‘Amber Alert’ is a love letter to manga and anime, to Kill Bill, and to Escape from New York and it mostly works, because all of those things are mostly awesome, and so the story is mostly awesome too.
Gogo is a teen killer/bounty hunter in school uniform bounding across rooftops hopped up on combat drugs, beheading drug-addicted zombies, fighting giant robots, and rescuing kidnapped children (the ‘amber alert’ of the title, a play on the US missing child notification, and a character named Amber). The setting is Taipei island, now a lawless prison. Gogo is stuck there, when not at school (this bit isn’t too clear). She undertakes challenges, scoring points and credits to work her way off the island back to her home and her powerful family. Her father appears to be a stern patriarch, letting his child learn valuable life lessons in the most dangerous way, a trope that I know from Japanese pop culture, but you will doubtless know it from other stories
If I had a quibble it’s that naming your violent schoolgirl protagonist Gogo is too on the nose, too obviously a Tarantino reference. The story doesn’t set out to interrogate its source material but to play with it, nod to each influence, and then wrap up before it outstays its welcome. Fun with a capital FUN.
’The Barricade’ by Joyce Ch’ng
I am in two minds about Joyce Ch’ng’s ‘The Barricade’. On the one hand Ch’ng can damn well write, and her solarpunk vision of a post-collapse future is well-realised and engaging. On the other hand, solarpunk is a subgenre that occasionally stumbles because of its very nature – where does one find narrative and character conflict in an optimistic (sometimes utopian) post-collapse/reconstruction narrative? I’m not sure this story answers that question.
A weak solarpunk story can be didactic and hectoring, at best a walkthrough of the low-tech solutions humanity has found that enable us to live after climate change. People are happy with a back to nature, pre-complexity, prelapsarian return to a mythical garden of eden, without technology or capitalism. Farming with your own fair hands is morally good for you, don’t you know? Of course, you won’t have time to want more or want to travel because you’ll be exhausted.
The ‘Barricade’ of the title stops the raised sea levels from recovering land the islanders have reclaimed, because space is at a premium, but beaches and shores have been lost. Mansions have been replaced with hospitals. Everything is recycled, everyone volunteers, or takes a turn. Solar panels are shared, but some days everyone use candle light to save energy. Transport is with solar power or pedal power. A revolution has happened, a new mindset is born – “There is no quick fix” realises our protagonist – Ida – as she muses on history lessons, and attends a festival where stories are used to pass on communal history that is both local and personal (“history and her story”).
All these things are described as Ch’ng walks us through a rather idyllic new way of living. It certainly sounds wonderful. Capitalism is gone, the rich have fled. “Life isn’t a competition or a contest. Competitions and contests had led to the almost-destruction of this planet they lived on”.
I found myself looking for the cracks in this wholesome new world, where is the conflict? Ch’ng keeps it well hidden, but there are people who choose to live on the monstrous hulks of pre-fall cargo vessels, creating “gardens out of the metal”, we learn from the adults that they had to “unlearn” many things, and the implication is that this is a good thing – unlearning mad, bad, capitalist ways, but it hints at censorship, at forbidden knowledge. I also found myself wondering about the recurring and poetic line, “The sea is ours”. It is used in the story to show stewardship, husbandry, but that hint of ownership is interesting, but not really explored.
Ch’ng writes well, and I particularly liked the quiet descriptions of Ida’s disability, the understatement of “He loved a good discussion” when describing her father. But then, it’s a quiet story, which eschews the normal beats of a science fiction narrative and shows us just the epilogue, what comes after the end of the world. This is both a strength and a weakness. A strength in that it makes the story uniquely gentle, but a weakness in that a huge and momentous narrative conflict has happened offstage, and by comparison there is very little here that drives Ida’s story forward. Is that what solarpunk wants to be? The epilogue?
(The illustration featured at the top of this page is by Emma Howitt for ‘The Barricade’)
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