- Publisher: Tor.com
- Publication date: 03/13/2018
- Language: English
- Pages: 240
- ISBN-10: 1-250-16384-4
- ISBN-13: 978-1-250-16385-1
- Author: Kelly Robson
Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson is a time travel story. It is part ecological, part historical, part technological, but the center of this story are the characters and their interactions.
In 2267, some people are trying to help Earth recover from an ecological collapse that drove most of the population below ground. Minh lost her legs as a child, and has been outfitted with almost octupus-like prosthetics. She is one of the few who have returned to the surface and has been working to restore river ecosystems. After time travel is invented, she has joined a small team to go back about 4,500 years into the past to survey the Tigris and Euphrates rivers of the time to better understand how to restore them in her present.
Most of the book is spent on the planning stages of the trip, first in trying to win approval for the project to allow the team to go to the past, and then to plan for the trip. Each chapter also has a small sneak peak from the point of view of some of the people of 2024 BCE as they encounter the team and their equipment. These two story lines converge by the end of the book to show the ultimate interactions and altercations.
Robson has created two rich and interesting worlds in this novel. There is the devastated, bank-run world of 2267 and the lush, thriving Earth of 4500 years ago. With a larger than expected population and pollution of its rivers, ancient Mesopotamia shows some seeds of the eventual destruction of the future. The juxtaposition of these two worlds and their inhabitants enriches both of them.
Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach is a different sort of time travel tale. These worlds are described, but they are not over-explained. There are concepts like ‘fat babies’ and ‘plague babies’ and some of the technology, etc. that are presented and the story moves along. You are dropped into the societies and you can pick up the necessary understanding from context. Robson trusts her readers to understand enough.
Check it out. I think you’ll enjoy it.
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by Matt Truxaw Anthrophobia: A Teacher’s Tale
