"walk the vanished earth" by erin swan
Jan. 16th, 2024 01:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
isunshowerwell, the rich text box on dreamwidth is fucking broken, so if this post is formatted like shit you know who to blame! but anyway, i read erin swan's "walk the vanished earth" over the past three days, so let's talk about it.
"walk the vanished earth" is very much a book about climate change. it's told by seven members of one lineage over time--which is part of why i wanted to read this book, i love time-jump inter-narrative things like that--and i think the worldbuilding is something that swan did pretty well. the rough sketches of samson's dust bowl life, bea's time in the institution, paul and his floating city, and of course [spoilers, obvi] humanity shipping itself off to mars to repopulate and believing that that's the only human left even though there are perfectly good island civilizations and colorado theatre troupes right here on earth. it's just good and neat. i also appreciated the different voices for each character.
however i do think swan has a propensity towards leaving absolutely no question unanswered. i think we could have gone without learning what exactly happened to michelangelo. i think we didn't need the pov of eva in colorado and the EXPLICIT FLASHING LIGHTS NEON ARROW LOOK HERE connection to the woman we'd later learn is ivy's mother. i think we didn't need as much of kay and penelope's povs as we got--or, if their narrations were ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL to the story, i wish we didn't get all of it all at once. i wish that, like with moon's storyline, we got bits and pieces of everyone else, having the answers to the story drip-fed rather than it spooling out in big chunks like falling down a flight of stairs.
that comparison doesn't make much sense. whatever. it was all in all a pretty good book.
"walk the vanished earth" is very much a book about climate change. it's told by seven members of one lineage over time--which is part of why i wanted to read this book, i love time-jump inter-narrative things like that--and i think the worldbuilding is something that swan did pretty well. the rough sketches of samson's dust bowl life, bea's time in the institution, paul and his floating city, and of course [spoilers, obvi] humanity shipping itself off to mars to repopulate and believing that that's the only human left even though there are perfectly good island civilizations and colorado theatre troupes right here on earth. it's just good and neat. i also appreciated the different voices for each character.
however i do think swan has a propensity towards leaving absolutely no question unanswered. i think we could have gone without learning what exactly happened to michelangelo. i think we didn't need the pov of eva in colorado and the EXPLICIT FLASHING LIGHTS NEON ARROW LOOK HERE connection to the woman we'd later learn is ivy's mother. i think we didn't need as much of kay and penelope's povs as we got--or, if their narrations were ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL to the story, i wish we didn't get all of it all at once. i wish that, like with moon's storyline, we got bits and pieces of everyone else, having the answers to the story drip-fed rather than it spooling out in big chunks like falling down a flight of stairs.
that comparison doesn't make much sense. whatever. it was all in all a pretty good book.
