Max Gladstone's forthcoming novel Last Exit is aimed straight at me.
Why me, specifically? When I turned forty last year, I had the following conversation with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
redshiftnova:
This was hilarious--and it's the precise set of baggage that the characters of Last Exit carry. The age; the scholarship to an elite East Coast college (Last Exit is about Yale, and I went to a small liberal-arts college whose students prided themselves on being smarter and working harder than the Ivy League trust fund kids, but that just means the sweatshirts came in garnet instead of navy); the math degree driven by the lure of impossible things; the exhortations to save the world; the knowledge that the world is falling apart.
The world is ending; but the world has always been ending. The question is whose world, and whose world you think matters. Last Exit is an American novel, a big sprawling ensemble-cast American road trip novel, and the question of who exactly has been fucked how badly by the continuation of America is never far from the surface.
Flip things around, try the active voice: will a terrified person fuck things over, to keep America the same? Last Exit asks the question that way, too.
This is what the novel is about, in a grand thematic sense. But what happens? The story begins in New York City, as Zelda, a grown-up gay kid from small-town South Carolina, is preparing to apologize for losing her lover Sal. Instead of Sal's mother, she meets Sal's teenage cousin June. June is a veteran of the BLM protests; she has watched cops on horses try to kill her friends. She doesn't want Zelda's apology for failure. She wants to try again.
New York City has a solid weight; it knows what it is. But Zelda has a knack for going other places, and in less populated spots, or when people are looking away, she can walk (or ride or drive) to other possible worlds. Turn The City We Became inside out, and send it on the road to Amber.
Send it back to Montana, where Zelda fucked things up the first time.
Bring the team back together: Sarah (a doctor, married, a mom, an Army brat, Sarah whose sister has gone home to the reservation), Ramón (who tried to go into finance but found his soul again fixing cars), Ish (whose Silicon Valley surveillance company watches for the serpent eating the heart of the world), Zelda, and June (who looks like Sal, and isn't). Retrace the steps of the last adventure, to the Green Glass City, and the tower where they met the princess.
Meanwhile, something is following our friends: the reason that the world is ending, growing tangible. Last Exit has a lot of horror in its DNA. Things are twisted. Bodies are twisted into non-Euclidean geometries. People die.
But the scariest thing isn't non-Euclidean geometry, is it? It's other people.
Bring the team back together. It's time to save a world.
(I read Last Exit as a Netgalley ARC.)
Why me, specifically? When I turned forty last year, I had the following conversation with
redshiftnova:
Me: I hadn't planned on having a midlife crisis, but instead I got a worldwide pandemic.
Red: YOU OVERACHIEVER!!!
This was hilarious--and it's the precise set of baggage that the characters of Last Exit carry. The age; the scholarship to an elite East Coast college (Last Exit is about Yale, and I went to a small liberal-arts college whose students prided themselves on being smarter and working harder than the Ivy League trust fund kids, but that just means the sweatshirts came in garnet instead of navy); the math degree driven by the lure of impossible things; the exhortations to save the world; the knowledge that the world is falling apart.
The world is ending; but the world has always been ending. The question is whose world, and whose world you think matters. Last Exit is an American novel, a big sprawling ensemble-cast American road trip novel, and the question of who exactly has been fucked how badly by the continuation of America is never far from the surface.
Flip things around, try the active voice: will a terrified person fuck things over, to keep America the same? Last Exit asks the question that way, too.
This is what the novel is about, in a grand thematic sense. But what happens? The story begins in New York City, as Zelda, a grown-up gay kid from small-town South Carolina, is preparing to apologize for losing her lover Sal. Instead of Sal's mother, she meets Sal's teenage cousin June. June is a veteran of the BLM protests; she has watched cops on horses try to kill her friends. She doesn't want Zelda's apology for failure. She wants to try again.
New York City has a solid weight; it knows what it is. But Zelda has a knack for going other places, and in less populated spots, or when people are looking away, she can walk (or ride or drive) to other possible worlds. Turn The City We Became inside out, and send it on the road to Amber.
Send it back to Montana, where Zelda fucked things up the first time.
Bring the team back together: Sarah (a doctor, married, a mom, an Army brat, Sarah whose sister has gone home to the reservation), Ramón (who tried to go into finance but found his soul again fixing cars), Ish (whose Silicon Valley surveillance company watches for the serpent eating the heart of the world), Zelda, and June (who looks like Sal, and isn't). Retrace the steps of the last adventure, to the Green Glass City, and the tower where they met the princess.
Meanwhile, something is following our friends: the reason that the world is ending, growing tangible. Last Exit has a lot of horror in its DNA. Things are twisted. Bodies are twisted into non-Euclidean geometries. People die.
But the scariest thing isn't non-Euclidean geometry, is it? It's other people.
Bring the team back together. It's time to save a world.
(I read Last Exit as a Netgalley ARC.)