A review by mafiabadgers
The Cautious Traveller's Guide To the Wastelands by Sarah Brooks

mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

First read 03/2025 for the r/Fantasy book bingo (pub. 2024 square)

"The relation between organism and machine has been a border war."
—Donna Haraway, 'A Cyborg Manifesto', in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (Free Association Books, 1991), p. 150

The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands could almost have been inspired by Haraway's 1985 article, concerned as it is with the violation of boundaries and the possibilities thereof. The book sets up all sorts of oppositions: inside/outside, crew/passenger, natural/abomination, innocent/guilty, rational/superstitious, control/freedom, and has a great deal of fun toying with them. In so doing, it establishes itself first as a horror novel, concerned with the unfamiliar, the unstable, and the unsettling. (No coincidence that these are all un- words, a negation of the known point of reference.) As it goes on, it asks readers to accompany it in a giddy, headlong rush into the future and all the terrifying change caught up in that. The book's location at the end of the eighteenth century is part of this, I think.

It is said that so much had been taken from the land that it was always hungry. It had been feeding off the blood spilled by the empires, and by the bones of the animals and people they left behind. It gained a taste for death.

It is also a climate change novel, as well as one concerned with the Company and its (desire for) controls. I was particularly interested in Zhang Weiwei, who was born and grew up on the train and now worked there. This was the only life she'd ever known, and yet it was wholly dependent on the continued and consistent operation of a Company that (perhaps necessarily, given its size) did not care about her or her wishes. Quite possibly many of the higher ups in the Company felt that their hands were tied by circumstances, leaving them with little choice but to act the way they did—certainly the powerful today are unwilling to see themselves as culpable for the world's ills. Whether that is the case or not, we are all slaves of capital, the ways and rhythms of our lives subject to change by forces that are man-made and yet far beyond our control, and I would have liked to see this explored more.

Some reviewers have said that they found the characters a bit flat, and I can see what they mean, but the way the book was narrated gave it a slightly distant feel in a way that reminded me of Tanith Lee. Not being entirely certain of the characters, of who they are and what they want, was entirely in keeping with the overall effect. Others have complained that it was too slow, and certainly there were not a lot of dramatic happenings until quite far in, but the air of mystery and the short chapters shifting between protagonists more than compensated for that. This also meant that we were able to get multiple opinions on things, such as the eponymous Guide; some characters treated it like a Bible, while other thought that Rostov, the author, was little more than a crank. In a court of law, multiple witnesses are considered to shore up the truth, but here the effect is very much to destabilise it.

I love it when a particular section of the world gets super fucky, whether it's the Zone in Roadside Picnic, the Mournland from Eberron, or the Misery in the otherwise mediocre Raven's Mark. (I really need to read Annihilation at some point.) This time it is the Wastelands, another unsettling exercise in psychogeography. I liked it best when it stuck to distortions of the natural world and the train/travellers—there were a few points when it tried to go beyond that (

the big lizard monster, the character-prompted flooding near the end

) that didn't do it so much for me. The evolutionary biology concept of mimicry was very well deployed.

I also happen to like grand, imperious trains. For all my cultivated dislike of them, I cannot fully excise my fascination with the upper classes that still pervades England, and one of the ways this manifests itself is a love for the encapsulated luxury of an old-timey First Class carriage. This was a pretty good train, I have to say, and this book ranks way up there with Railhead in terms of train-based speculative fiction. It sells the old-timeyness of it reasonably well. The habit of referring to people as the Captain, the Cartographer, the Countess etc. put me in mind of Fallen London, or maybe a murder mystery, for reasons I can't quite pin down.

The only thing that I really disliked about it was the tendency to repeat lines from earlier to drive home their relevance. It was annoying when it happened in The House in the Cerulean Sea, and it was annoying here, though not nearly so egregious. I'd much rather the book trusted me to pay attention. That said, the whole time I was reading I couldn't help but imagine it as a high-budget miniseries, so the echoing felt more like a heavy-handed cinematic technique than didacticism.

The general thrust of the ending was fairly predictable, but perhaps necessary to drive home the political points it was making. Overall, it was a blast, and I'm glad I picked it up. Not quite an heir to Roadside Picnic, but certainly a worthy compatriot.