The Past Is Red, by Catherynne M. Valente » (Reviewed by Wil C. Fry)

Photo by Wil C. Fry

★★ (of 5)

Full Title: The Past Is Red
Author: Catherynne M. Valente
Year: 2021 (mine was library hardcover)
Pages: 146
Genre: Science Fiction
Publisher: Tordotcom Books (Macmillan)
ISBN 978-1-250-30113-0 (hardcover)
Author’s Wikipedia page

This wasn’t my favorite Valente work (that pedestal is still occupied by Space Opera), but it’s still interesting. Famed author Ken Liu calls it “The Candide of our #@$*%?! age”, though I really didn’t get that impression while reading (it’s been 30 years since I last read Candide however).

It’s the story of Tetley Abednego, a woman who lives on a floating garbage patch the size of Texas, more than a hundred years in the future after climate change caused sea level rise that inundated all land. People before Tetley’s time sorted all the garbage so Garbagetown is now divided into sections named after their contents, like Candle Hole and Electric City. It seems Tetley is the only person satisfied with her life in Garbagetown; everyone else yearns for life as it once was — on solid ground.

There were some interesting ideas here, and of course Valente’s imagination and vocabulary are extensive, but the book fell flat to me.

One thing that abruptly caused me to stop enjoying the book early is the common trope that sea level rise is somehow going to cover all the land surface of the Earth. Remember that one Kevin Costner movie in which he had gills? People who go along with this trope don’t understand elevation and/or have never seen topographic maps. Even if sea level rose five hundred feet (unimaginable by a scientific way of thinking), the tallest buildings of coastal cities would still stick out over the ocean’s surface, and most of the places I’ve lived would still be on dry ground. (My current city sits about 900 feet above sea level, and so would be just fine, although overrun with refugees.) All of the world’s high plains and mountain ranges would still be above water. There just isn’t enough water (or liquid of any kind) on Earth for everything to be covered.

The second was the fact that I’ve already read about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and so I know it’s not actually a Texas-size landfill floating around in the ocean. What it is is an area of the ocean with an unusually high concentration of plastic particles and wood fibers (likely from dissolved toilet paper) — but still mostly water (the trash floating out there still isn’t concentrated enough to be seen in satellite images). So there aren’t, say, piles of candles or plastic blister packs full of batteries (which, of course, in real life would simply sink to the bottom of the ocean). So when those things are described in this book, well, it lost me. It ceased to be a science fiction story and became instead a fable or something.

The third downside, which probably would have been enough on its own, was the non-linear chronology, in which most of the story takes place as flashbacks and the “present” is a moving target. The only real indicator of whether we’re in the present or the past is the change in verb tenses. This back-and-forth was made worse by the several times the author began a chapter with: “But none of that really happened” (referring to the previous chapter) and the reader is never sure if she meant none of the previous stuff happened, or only the final scene.

Finally, the story itself wasn’t as interesting as I had hoped. Tetley finds an old smart device that magically still works after a hundred years (despite the whole problem with most of the garbage in the first place being caused by manufacturers making things that don’t last very long) and tries to connect with a satellite network. Eventually, it DOES connect to a satellite and raises a human girl on Mars, which is when Tetley learned that the really rich humans escaped the global apocalypse in spaceships and colonized the red planet. Strangely, earlier in the book, the girl on Mars (or someone with the exact same name) was said to be visiting Tetley on her boat, so it was a bit confusing to find out that all those earlier “visits” were actually via satellite radio and not in-person — and this confusion was of course compounded by the non-linear storytelling.

There were a few funny moments and turns of phrase. One is that all the residents of Garbagetown refer to their ancestors as “Fuckwits” — the people who knew they were destroying the climate and causing their own doom yet did it anyway. That’s me and you, by the way.