Reviews with content warning for Pregnancy - The New Wilderness

The New Wilderness is brimming with interesting ideas and has a unique voice, but its persistent bleakness, clunky dialogue and ambiguity clouded my enjoyment. Basically The Walking Dead, but more bureacracy and without any of the zombies or action.

The good is that the world building is really intriguing and original. Set in a mid-future scenario where pollution makes city air fatal, a small community attempt to survive in a state otherwise set aside for strictly managed nature conservation. This state is off limits; no people are generally allowed there and even microplastics and human bodies have to be retrieved or Rangers issue massive fines, kind of like an authoritarian Yellowstone. A small community is permitted to live there as part of a trial into populating the wilderness. Even the most rebellious characters appear to recognise their personal impact on the wilderness while they are there as important. This speculative future where conservation is a powerful bureacracy in an apparently futile attempt to offset environmental degradation was really interesting, but to be honest the ambiguous style doesn't really colour this in. We mostly pick up on this through the characters arguing about the rules of the study and references to how things have become less available. Characters never seriously discuss systemic drivers of why or how the world is, and don't seem to care about these even when their children become too sick or even die from air pollution.

The central tension is between a mother and her daughter, and an additional one between an academic and a thug. Ideas of returning to nature and reorganising society in hardship are pretty clear, through a complicated and at times strained mother-daughter bond. However, we don't really know what anyone looks like; for a book inspired by indigenous culture its pretty colourblind, I think in an attempt at universality. In the same way, all characters have the same or very similar kind of clunky and simple speech. This is why it reminded me of the Walking Dead, a show not known for poignant dialogue.

Its also just really bleak. I'm all down for a depressing read but this was kind of relentless.

It opens with a miscarriage. The daughter beats her own mother and never sees her again. In the end, it is implied the world's last wilderness is destroyed (the broader implications of this are not discussed).

The Road and The Overstory were also bleak and explored similar themes, but managed to include moments of respite that this lacked.

Stacey Glemboski's audiobook narration was excellent.

Content Warnings