![]() ![]() Like other dystopias, the most unsettling thing about Zumas’s poignant, poetic novel is the degree to which it’s already true. These women ache for what the others unwillingly have, and have few options for following their own desires, imprisoned by politics and biology. The teenager, a cosseted daughter and gifted student, wants academic opportunities, not motherhood. The biographer, a single woman who wants to get pregnant, faces a ticking clock in her dream. Four women ― a high school teacher working on a biography of a female polar explorer, a pregnant teenager, an unhappy stay-at-home mother and a reclusive herbalist ― with intersecting paths navigate the sudden restrictions this has placed on them. Those Personhood Amendments we keep hearing about in state legislatures have become a national reality, and abortion and in vitro fertilization have been outlawed. ![]() The other was Zumas’ Red Clocks, a novel set largely in the near-future Pacific Northwest. One was Louise Erdrich’s searing, if too-short, 2017 novel Future Home of the Living God. Severance is a scathing portrait of a society collapsing under its own ungovernable appetites, as well as a haunting meditation on family inheritance and its loss.Īround this time last year, I read a couple of feminist dystopias that barely even felt speculative. With exquisite pacing, Ling Ma alternates between Candace’s precarious present and her childhood as the daughter of Chinese immigrants, and contemplates the possibility of a future in a lonely, blasted world. Then she joins a band of survivors led by a charismatic leader who claims to be guiding them to a refuge in the Midwest. ![]() Candace becomes one of the few survivors, at first continuing to commute to her empty office and maintaining an eerie photo blog of the barren metropolis. Instead, people start dying from a virus spread from Asia. His capitalist nightmare vision of the future turns out to be wrong. He’s leaving the city for a more wholesome existence, and when she decides to stay and keep her job overseeing the production of Bibles in Chinese factories, their relationship ends. “The future is more exponentially exploding rents,” he says, and more chain stores. Before the pandemic sweeps through New York City, leaving it empty save for the zombified husks of the sick, Candace Chen’s boyfriend tells her he can see the future.
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