Tag Archives: Environmental disasters

Tigerman

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Tigerman [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Nick Harkaway.

Harkaway Tigerman

Tigerman is decidedly less sfnal than other Harkaway novels I have read (The Gone-Away World and Gnomon), but it is in large measure an indulgence in costumed vigilantism with the superhero mythos firmly in its sights. In the third chapter, a twelve-year-old boy uses a rolled up copy of an Invisibles comic book to attack a bandit. And I think that Tigerman is to Aidan Truhen’s (i.e. Harkaway’s) later Jack Price books very much as Grant Morrison’s The Filth was to his earlier Invisibles work. It’s a matter of worrying at the same questions and catastrophes from two different perspectives: the criminal (The Invisibles; Jack Price) and the cop (The Filth; Tigerman).

“His perceptions of copperhood were formed by the dream of England, still. A copper was a bloke in a slightly silly hat who walked the beat, talked to shopkeepers about the price of fish, and sorted out young ruffians.” (59)

Protagonist–and eventual secret identity–Lester Ferris is an English infantry sergeant serving as brevet consul, the sole vestigial authority of the UK in the former colony of Mancreu, an island slated for eradication by the UN Security Council because of its contamination by chemical and biological hazards. Seen through a wide lens, there are many curious parallels here with The Wicker Man (1973), although this book lacks the movie’s happy ending. And of course the folk horror setting is changed for a 21st-century neocapitalist backdrop of ecocide and digital mediascapes.

Tigerman is a fast read in about twenty longish chapters, each digestible in a single sitting. It has a lot of strongly-drawn characters, none of them entirely realistic, and many quite over-the-top. There is a major twist that I was able to anticipate just a few pages ahead of its official reveal. I suspect that was by the author’s design–a pleasant experience for readers.

The Past is Red

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Past is Red [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Catherynne M Valente.

Valente The Past is Red

This book reprints the story “The Future Is Blue” from the Drowned Worlds anthology, and follows it with a further novella “The Past Is Red.” The latter was written about four years later for the author Catherynne M. Valente (in late 2020) and ten years later for her protagonist Tetley Abednego (sometime after 2133).

Tetley is an irrepressible survivor and an unreliable narrator who hails from Garbagetown on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, evidently one of the largest of remaining human communities in the 22nd century. The first story accounts for her becoming a hated outcast by age 19, and the second gives the saga by which she matures into a “trash Plato” (138) in her third decade.

The Garbagetowners have an ambivalently hostile envy for their antediluvian ancestors (i.e. us), to whom they consistently refer as “Fuckwits.” In light of the current situation in US society, it’s not hard to read this sentiment as the Millennial/GenX view of Boomers writ large.

Valente herself compares Tetley to Voltaire’s Candide (148), and there’s a little of de Sade’s Justine there as well. But the tone here is not so satirical, and the concerns of the parable are remote from those of the philosophes. The afterword and the acknowledgements claim an independence for Tetley, whom her author has gradually come to know, and the character does have an engaging voice to draw the reader into and through her world, which is enchanting to her, and ultimately, only differently horrible than ours.

The whole book is wonderfully weird but sadly feasible cli-fi that I read in about three sittings: a speedy read and a satisfying one.