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A review by octavia_cade
The Flat Woman by Vanessa Saunders
dark
sad
fast-paced
5.0
I think that this is absolutely fantastic, but I can't help myself. Before anything else... wtf is going on with that cover? I can see that the publisher's going for the "disposable woman" elements of the text, but no one seeing this on a shelf is going to think "climate fiction".
They should. It is. Yes, it looks at climate through a gendered lens - in this world, women are deemed the primary cause of environmental degradation, and the protagonist's mother is jailed for an apparent attack on seagulls. It's classed as environmental terrorism, but of course the actual dystopian outcomes here are pretty much as they always are: the result of unregulated capitalism. The wider social relationship between women and climate blame is illustrated, in miniature, by the main character and her Elvis impersonator boyfriend, who talks a good game about environmental issues but is exhibiting increasingly exploitative behaviour himself. The end of that relationship is a clear oncoming trainwreck, not that the protagonist does anything to get herself out of it... but then she's distracted by the fact that her body periodically takes on the characteristics of the failing world around her.
It's metaphor layered on metaphor here, and it's fascinating. I'm so glad that novellas are doing so well - especially in science fiction - these last few years, because this is short and punchy and would not be served at all by being dragged out to a longer word count.
They should. It is. Yes, it looks at climate through a gendered lens - in this world, women are deemed the primary cause of environmental degradation, and the protagonist's mother is jailed for an apparent attack on seagulls. It's classed as environmental terrorism, but of course the actual dystopian outcomes here are pretty much as they always are: the result of unregulated capitalism. The wider social relationship between women and climate blame is illustrated, in miniature, by the main character and her Elvis impersonator boyfriend, who talks a good game about environmental issues but is exhibiting increasingly exploitative behaviour himself. The end of that relationship is a clear oncoming trainwreck, not that the protagonist does anything to get herself out of it... but then she's distracted by the fact that her body periodically takes on the characteristics of the failing world around her.
It's metaphor layered on metaphor here, and it's fascinating. I'm so glad that novellas are doing so well - especially in science fiction - these last few years, because this is short and punchy and would not be served at all by being dragged out to a longer word count.