CHALLENGING SCI-FI NOVEL BUSTS GENRES
Vancouver-set cyberpunk dystopia a deep and entertaining mash-up
“Even if she is our last doubler, I don’t want Auntie Radix to have Peristrophe Halliana’s eyes. Auntie Radix took Peristrophe Halliana’s liver a week ago, and one of her kidney’s four weeks before that.”
This ominous and enigmatic reflection is voiced by Kirilow Groundsel, one of the protagonists in Larissa Lai’s resonant new cyber punk/queer/science fiction novel, The Tiger Flu.
Lai tells several braided stories, all set in an imagined Vancouver in AD 2145 (or 127 TAO, Time After Oil.) Lai, who currently teaches at the University of Calgary, is an award-winning author of several earlier novels and volumes of poetry.
She comes by her knowledge of her Vancouver setting honestly, having served as writer in residence at Simon Fraser University, and a lecturer in literature at University of British Columbia. She brings the setting to life in a novel of speculative fiction that is both an exciting read and a challenging reflection on race, gender, the fragile and humanpoisoned environment and the dreamlike nature of human consciousness.
In the ruins of Vancouver and its plague-ridden environs, Kirilow goes on a quest for a new “starfish,” the term in her world for an individual who can re-grow the organs surgically removed by “grooms” like Kirilow and used to extend the lives of “doublers,” who in turn produce new individuals parthenogenetically.
Along the way, she meets Kora Ko (a potential starfish) and flees with her across the blasted urban landscape and down into surreal depths beneath the city and beneath day-to-day consciousness.
This is an ambitious work and Lai is wonderfully successful in her effort to mash up cinematic science fiction, magical realism elements and fascinating characters with a fierce concern for gender and racial justice to produce an impressive text.
The only outstanding flaw in the book is that with an ornately complex plot, with layers of both personal and historical backstory and multiple characters, it is sometimes a daunting task for the reader to keep clear about just what is happening, and to whom.
“What is called for, then, is the deepest possible attention one can give to the fast, medium and slow movements of the world. Sometimes it is better to keep quiet and listen,” Lai told interviewer Fazeela Jiwa in 2014.
On the evidence of this luminous and challenging novel, the author has been following this difficult path of attention, and as readers, we have reason to be grateful.