Maximalist dystopian that enchants
Fifty years from now, 100. Picture the possibilities. Will it be Atwood’s Crakers? The Nexus-6 units of Philip K. Dick? The Road’s “nothingness and night?”
How about a heaving, chaotic world of drawn and redrawn borders, where holograms, clones, bio-ships and consciousness transference technology clash with deprivation, cults, matriarchal gangs and psychotropic drugs, all while a pandemic rages?
Starting with an atmospheric opening page, in The Tiger Flu, Larissa Lai goes wholly maximalist in her world-building.
“The tendril information scales Kora’s got plugged into the single-band halo that circles her head wave gently”: adjusting to its norms takes time.
The sheer invention of Tiger Flu rewards a patient reader with an engrossing (if at times confounding) vision of the marvellous (yet disastrous) century following Peak Oil.
With its telltale Woodward’s W, Lai’s otherworldly Vancouver (a.k.a. Saltwater City, first mapped in her previous novel, Salt Fish Girl, well over a decade ago) is viewed beginning in 127 TAO (Time After Oil), which is also Year 42 (Wood Snake Year) and a few decades from now, in 2145.
The assorted calendars in use are indicative of the era: society is tribal and fractured and well past any two-tier system. Ancient ways vie with new outlooks, traditions mutate, worldviews compete; high above, space stations and satellites in decaying orbits are regarded as deities or relics or portents.
In alternating chapters, Kora Ko and Kirilow Groundsel, two young women on enemy territory-crossing quests, allow Lai to survey the wonders and ruins while relaying the region’s (and globe’s) past, present and future.
Though at moments plot and, especially, character development take on a distinctly YA fiction flavour, the pit stops Lai conjures — including a school for girl criminals, a parking garage rave and a conservancy for seeds, spores and cells run by a creepy sisterhood — are captivatingly cinematic.