Loyalty is a fascinating virtue. A necessary substrate in the psychology of social animals, it is capable of compelling us to act against our own best interests in order to lend aid to those for whom we have this feeling. It's not difficult to imagine how such a powerful force helps bind us to families and communities, but does it have a place in modern life? Our world seems ever-more-dominated by self-interest, by analytics that seek to reduce to economics the unquantifiable magic of relationships and the emotions that underpin them. Loyalty is a leap of faith, an act of generosity given in gratitude,or in hope of a return. How can that be quantified? Clearly Mr. Bacigalupi is musing over this question as well for it dominates this blood-soaked companion to Ship Breaker.
In a future America ravaged by environmental decay, political collapse and tribal warfare, life along the Potomac river is as humid as it is difficult. Every inch of ground for hundreds of miles around the capital of the sundered United States is claimed territory, turf for gangs and warlords to hold, abuse and contest until their dying breaths. Efforts by foreign governments, who've had more success weathering the decline of human civilization, to intervene on behalf of the innocents, to bring order and peace to a war-torn land, have spectacularly failed. And now those assets have been withdrawn, leaving behind a tangled web of hardcore capitalists who can find a market for anything from kidneys to salvaged steel.
The biological product of happier times, when the UN and China were still attempting to disarm the warring factions, Mahlia is a castoff, a half-American, half-Chinese female left behind by the exodus. Her parents, who once traded in art and souvenirs from the Accelerated Age, are gone now, dropping her out of the relative privilege of her upbringing and into an adolescence of hardship and turmoil as a nursing assistant to a humanitarian doctor practicing on contested ground. When her best friend, Mouse, is taken hostage by a half-man, a transhuman hybrid trained up to be a super soldier, Mahlia's so desperate to liberate her friend that she does not pay the proper respect to the soldier boys who've encamped at the doctor's practice. And so, when she resists them and all they want from her, she begins a long and troublesome odyssey that will take her to the heart of the old America in search of the only boy whose ever earned her trust.
Though the author, at times, does his best to wear out his work's central theme, The Drowned Cities is, nonetheless, emotive science fiction. Mr. Bacigalupi is a talented builder of worlds, conveying cultures of meaning with but a few telling paragraphs. The result is an engrossing experience that will leave only the most cynical readers unmoved by the hardships the novel's characters are forced to endure. The cities of the novel's dramatic title refer to the metropoli that once dominated the southeastern United States, cities now swallowed by rising tides, swollen rivers and unimaginable storms that rip and tear at the Atlantic coast. The images of streets and squares, office towers and highways, transformed into 22nd century swamps are haunting suggestions of a possible future.
For all of the novel's imagistic force, Mahlia is its most potent weapon. An innocent plunged into a degraded world, she is an outsider, a creature branded as much by her Asian appearance as by her humanity. But as much as she might appear to be naive and exploitable, her will is formidable. Setting great store by human decency, she is loathed to surrender anyone who has demonstrated to her a measure of kindness and gentleness in a world of harshness and war. This steely determination rescues Mahlia from the trope of the princess in rags and positions her as a futuristic heroine, a creature of necessity who refuses to abandon her humanity.
For all its virtues, The Drowned Cities is a more laborious novel than the smoother Ship Breaker. Here, Mr. Bacigalupi has essentially two aims; to perform an autopsy on loyalty and to give his western readers an idea of how the other half live. The former manifests in the form of Mahlia's quest to save Mouse after he'd once saved her from a brutal fate at the hands of zealous soldiers. The latter resides in Mouse who is forced to be a child soldier in a rebel army. The former seeks to understand what we owe to those who've been kind to us. The latter tries to demonstrate the anatomy of an army fuelled by all of the recklessness of untamed adolescence, their cunning and their savagery. With these two strands, the author has summoned the spector of the LRA, packaged it into science fiction and used it to tell a tale about the nature of humanity and kindness that, while effective, is heavy-handed.
There's brilliance here, passages that fans of Mr. Bacigalupi's work will devour. But there are low lights as well, lulls that I have not seen in his other fiction. Still, well worth the read, especially for those interested in a science-fictional take on some of the darkness that stalks our own world. (3/5 Stars)
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