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A review by octavia_cade
Black Wave by Michelle Tea
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
This is a dystopian scifi piece that in many ways feels barely science fiction at all. It's set in a world of environmental collapse, but for pretty much the entirety of the book there's no real indication that this is affecting anyone's life in any measurable way. The absence of plants and animals, for instance, has no apparent consequence on food supply, and the characters eat and drink and drug their way through the end of days with what honestly seems like limited engagement with reality. The first half of the book, especially, comes across much more as a story of a young queer woman engaging with drugs, alcohol, and sex on a near constant basis. I enjoyed reading it for the prose - which slides down very easily, but the characters and story didn't strike me as anything particularly special.
Then, halfway through the book, Michelle leaves San Francisco for Los Angeles, and the novel shifts into another gear. The apocalypse has arrived, and everyone has a relatively short time to live. There's no magic escape: death is coming on a vast scale, and mass suicides become the norm. Michelle's response to all this is calmer than might be expected from her SF dramatics. She goes about her menial job in a bookstore, in some ways coping much better than everyone around her, even when she starts sharing dreams with strangers. It's almost as if this overarching apocalypse is background noise to her attempts to get off the booze and write a book, and there's something so original about that presentation of disaster, something just plain interesting. That presentation, combined with the prose, meant that I read this in a single sitting. I didn't mean to - there's actual work I should be doing! - but, frankly, I just didn't want to stop.
Then, halfway through the book, Michelle leaves San Francisco for Los Angeles, and the novel shifts into another gear. The apocalypse has arrived, and everyone has a relatively short time to live. There's no magic escape: death is coming on a vast scale, and mass suicides become the norm. Michelle's response to all this is calmer than might be expected from her SF dramatics. She goes about her menial job in a bookstore, in some ways coping much better than everyone around her, even when she starts sharing dreams with strangers. It's almost as if this overarching apocalypse is background noise to her attempts to get off the booze and write a book, and there's something so original about that presentation of disaster, something just plain interesting. That presentation, combined with the prose, meant that I read this in a single sitting. I didn't mean to - there's actual work I should be doing! - but, frankly, I just didn't want to stop.