"With this brilliant debut, Penner thoughtfully upends the tropes of postapocalyptic fiction" -- Publishers Weekly
Strange Labour is a powerful meditation on the meaning of humanity in a universe that is indifferent to our extinction, and a provocative re-imagining of many of the tropes and clichés that have shaped the post-apocalyptic novel. Most people have deserted the cities and towns to work themselves to death in the construction of monumental earthworks. The only adults unaffected by this mysterious obsession are a dwindling population that live in the margins of a new society they cannot understand. Isolated, in an increasingly deserted landscape, living off the material remnants of the old order, trapped in antiquated habits and assumptions, they struggle to construct a meaningful life for themselves. Miranda, a young woman who travels across what had once been the West, meets Dave, who has peculiar theories about the apocalypse.
Genre: Science Fiction
Strange Labour is a powerful meditation on the meaning of humanity in a universe that is indifferent to our extinction, and a provocative re-imagining of many of the tropes and clichés that have shaped the post-apocalyptic novel. Most people have deserted the cities and towns to work themselves to death in the construction of monumental earthworks. The only adults unaffected by this mysterious obsession are a dwindling population that live in the margins of a new society they cannot understand. Isolated, in an increasingly deserted landscape, living off the material remnants of the old order, trapped in antiquated habits and assumptions, they struggle to construct a meaningful life for themselves. Miranda, a young woman who travels across what had once been the West, meets Dave, who has peculiar theories about the apocalypse.
Genre: Science Fiction
Praise for this book
"What a vision this novel has. It is at once startling, smart, dark, and full of ache and humour. An amazingly spot-on evocation of our times. I cannot help but use the novel's last line to say that it made me 'inexpressibly, unaccountably happy.' Brilliant." - David Bergen
"This is one of those powerful science fiction novels that is both intensely realistic and strikingly symbolic at one and the same time; a marvelous accomplishment, written so beautifully as to be etched on the eyeballs." - Kim Stanley Robinson
"Robert Penner's Strange Labour is a road novel of crystalline exuberance--populated by mindless diggers, resourceful scrabblers, evil drifters, and the heroic Miranda. In the majority are the diggers, eternally bulldozing vast earth-works: cryptic nests of grooves that fill valleys with fluid patterns. Might the diggers be an objective correlative for today's info-tech workers? Individualists tend small farms or scavenge the deserted towns. Mad-Max-style bikers roam the landscape with dog-skulls on their handlebars. Resourceful Miranda has our sympathy throughout. Penner adorns his narrative with poetic evocations of this fallen world. Strange Labour is a book to savour and to love." - Rudy Rucker
"A post-apocalyptic road novel with the gnomic quality of a parable, Strange Labour shimmers with a meaning just beyond reach." - Sofia Samatar
"This is one of those powerful science fiction novels that is both intensely realistic and strikingly symbolic at one and the same time; a marvelous accomplishment, written so beautifully as to be etched on the eyeballs." - Kim Stanley Robinson
"Robert Penner's Strange Labour is a road novel of crystalline exuberance--populated by mindless diggers, resourceful scrabblers, evil drifters, and the heroic Miranda. In the majority are the diggers, eternally bulldozing vast earth-works: cryptic nests of grooves that fill valleys with fluid patterns. Might the diggers be an objective correlative for today's info-tech workers? Individualists tend small farms or scavenge the deserted towns. Mad-Max-style bikers roam the landscape with dog-skulls on their handlebars. Resourceful Miranda has our sympathy throughout. Penner adorns his narrative with poetic evocations of this fallen world. Strange Labour is a book to savour and to love." - Rudy Rucker
"A post-apocalyptic road novel with the gnomic quality of a parable, Strange Labour shimmers with a meaning just beyond reach." - Sofia Samatar
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