Maureen F. McHugh

Slow, scattered, and compulsively readable.

In a near-future world, China is economically and culturally dominant and Mars is the new frontier. The United States is no longer an economic force and people there work and play and dream of living in China. But only genetically pure Chinese are allowed that privilege. Everyone else is denied the Middle Kingdom and must make do by emulating its culture, its fashions, and by riding its economic coat-tails.

The book is divided into chapters/sections show more that each follow different protagonists - three on Earth and two on Mars. The bulk of the narrative follows the titular character, Zhang but there is overlap between all of the storylines. None of these characters find much in the way of resolution and, in truth, not much happens with most of them. The conflicts are mostly (but not all) internal.

What elevates this book is McHugh's writing; it is evocative and her world-building is breathtaking. There is a melancholy and almost desperate feel to each character as they muddle along looking for improvement and envying others their status. With each step forward, they come to realize that, despite their advancement, there will be no escaping themselves. That seems to be the common thread here. It does not sound like very compelling stuff but, once I began this book, it was difficult to stop. China Mountain Zhang is not action-packed by any means but it is a very memorable and intriguing novel. show less

A very sad SF novel about the obligations of culture, family, and situational necessity, set in a future Morocco. Hariba is biologically programmed to be an indentured servant; Akhmin is an artificial person bred to serve humans. They're drawn to one another, but even if they can find freedom, it's difficult for either of them to distinguish love from obligation.

I read McHugh's short story "Nekropolis" years ago and adored it. The prose is spare and beautiful and the characters are alive on show more the page. The novel, with its multiple points of view, is bleaker but more complex. Akhmin emerges as the most interesting character; his perspective is brilliantly alien, yet we empathize with them during his toughest decisions.

Additionally, I have now read a few romances featuring androids, cyborgs, etc. (hint: have written one) and I was so relieved that Akhmin had a complex inner life and was not merely an object on which our oppressed protagonist projects her fantasies of desire and control. (Obviously he's that too.)

The plot has the trademark McHugh elements of structural oppression, prolonged suffering, bad things getting worse, and characters muddling through to a possibly but not necessarily brighter future. It's probably her darkest novel, and I can't say I found the end totally satisfactory, partly because of the shape of the story. We never return to Akhmin's perspective, and the story felt incomplete without it.

Alas, I have now read every novel by one of my favorite writers! Someone pay this lady to write another book. show less

After The Apocalypse" is a collection of nine short stories that look at events in different near-futures after a disaster of some kind.

As you'd expect with Maureen McHugh, the stories tell us as much about the world we live in as the possible future being described.

She has a flair for looking at the world through the eyes of the disadvantaged, the marginalized and the at risk and an impressive ability to build future worlds and believable characters using very few words. Almost every story show more describes a near-future that stimulates, surprises and convinces and populates it with characters that I recognize and care about.

If you're not familiar with Maureen McHugh's work, this is a good introduction. If you're already a fan then these stories are a treat not to be missed.

I've given short comments on each story below to give you a flavour of the collection. Some of them are available on line if you want to sample them but to get them all, you'll need to buy the book.


The Naturalist

This is dark, surprising and not at all your average zombie story. In this tale of a Zombie Preserve being used as a prison compound cum death-by-zombie execution sentence, the walking dead are not the thing you should be afraid of. I enjoyed the way this story makes the Rational Observer, so beloved of many science fiction stories, into something quite chilling.


Special Economics

This near future story is set in a post-plague China, faced with a scarcity of workers for the first time. It describes a brand of Corporate Slavery that was once common in the US and is now rumoured to be used when the US outsources work to less regulated nations. It appealed to me because it showed how ordinary people will find a way to overcome the economic obstacles in their way.


Useless Things

This is one of the simplest and most powerful stories in the book. It is permeated with a sense of threat, of the real possibility of imminent loss. It captures the quiet desperation of living a life on the edge of an unstoppable slide into poverty and homelessness; of wanting to help others but being afraid that they will do you harm; of having little control and less hope; of having enough to lose to cause worry but not enough wealth to buy security. It's the perfect tale for Trump's America.


The Lost Boy: A Reporter at Large

This one didn't engage me. It felt like an essay on disassociative states and what they imply about identity. It was interesting but it didn't hook my emotions.


The Kingdom of the Blind

This is the most plausible story about the possible emergence of an AI "awareness" that I've read. It's mercifully free of anthropomorphization. There are also so nice points made about women in the coding world that made me think of the recent Google embarrassment.


Going to France

This is the shortest story and the most bizarre. I felt its pull but it was just a little too far out for me.


Honeymoon

I loved the first line of this:



"I was an aggravated bride."


It got me straight inside the head of the woman telling the story. She's a forceful working class woman, who's been working in McDonald's plus two other jobs that paid for her wedding. At first, it seems that she's leading a relatively unexplored life but as the story progresses and she faces some abnormal events, it becomes clear that she is making informed, even philosophical choices because that's the kind of person she is.


The Effect of Centrifugal Forces

This is told from multiple points of view. Unfortunately, the narrator didn't demonstrate this very well and I got confused from time to time. It's focused on people under pressure who can't hold themselves or their lives together.


After the Apocalypse

This is the strongest story in the collection. It showcases Maureen McHugh's ability to help us see the people in the situation and then help us to see the situation differently.

We've been saturated with post-apocalyptic worlds where we revert to something less than we used to be in order to survive. We've been fed tropes about tough survivalists and ruthless raiders and the crumbling remnants of an order that doesn't know it's already extinct. It's like we're practising for something that we expect to happen soon so that we'll know what to expect and what choices to make.

We've been saturated with post-apocalyptic worlds where we revert to something less than we used to be in order to survive. We've been fed tropes about tough survivalists and ruthless raiders and the crumbling remnants of an order that doesn't know it's already extinct. It's like we're practising for something that we expect to happen soon so that we'll know what to expect and what choices to make.

The achievement of this short story is that it humanises the tropes we've been taught. It shows us that, in other parts of the world, the apocalypse has already arrived and that the flood of refugees we are so used to seeing on the media could one day be us.

The story is told from the point of view of a woman on the road with her daughter, heading through an America without electricity or fuel or clean water or food or any of the things that Americans take for granted.

As they travel, the woman slowly comes to realise that everything she knew is gone. That even though she's an American, she's now just another refugee. Then she decides what to do about it.

Her situation, her reactions and her final choice seemed very real to me. After the apocalypse, we're still there, only the future we assumed we were entitled to is missing. Dealing with that realisation would tell each of us a great deal about who we have always been. show less

This book was on one of the featured theme endcaps at the library and caught my eye. I've been wanting to read more female authored scifi, and the list of awards on the back -- Tiptree, Lambda Literary, Hugo, & Nebula? Some awards, some only nominated, but seriously? The Chinese influence, which I've become more interested in as my kids learn the language, was just icing.

And then! The whole passage on Baffin Island! Totally polar fiction!

(mild spoilers ahead)
This book shifts narrative focus show more between loosely connected characters -- Zhang - a construction tech engineer who struggles with his in-between status as an American Born Chinese, Angel - a flyer in the kite races Zhang loves to watch, Martine - a military vet who has settled on Mars, raising goats and bees, Alexi - a single father at the bottom of Mars' hierarchy, San-xiang - an unattractive girl whose father tried to match her to Zhang (not knowing Zhang is "bent" or gay), whose life changes when her face is reconstructed. (Her story was physically painful for me to read. She has no idea how to handle the new ways people treat her, I wanted to scream at her through the pages.)

This is such an interesting world to live in through this book. I loved immersing myself in corner after corner of it, it was so well imagined. I kept expecting, though, for all the characters to come crashing together somehow in some crisis. In the final third of the book, I kept racing, faster and faster, turning pages expecting the crisis to come at any moment. It never did.

As I turned the final page, I exclaimed both, "What the holy crap was that?" and "Oh, dear Lord, I loved it!" Hugging the book to myself, even as it had defied so many of my expectations of what an sf novel should be, I was calculating and weighing whether I could bear to return this book to the library without buying a copy of my own.

The perfect mesh of literary fiction and speculative fiction. I adore. show less