After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall

Nancy Kress

Completed 8/10/2019, Reviewed 8/10/2019

4 stars

This is my second novella by Nancy Kress, and I liked this one almost as much as the first, Yesterday’s Kin.  This one is a multi-threaded story that takes before, during, and after a cataclysmic event takes place that destroys most of the earth.  The three different parts progress until they all converge at the end.  It’s interesting, fast-paced, and gut wrenching.  It won the Nebula and Locus Awards for Best Novella in 2013, and was nominated for a slew of others.  I have another book of hers on the docket, a full-length novel, which I am now looking forward to on the strength of these two books. 

The book begins in 2035 where a small group of adults and teens are living in a bubble called the Shell.  They were put there by aliens called the Tesslies, named because they appear in a shower of sparks that look like those produced by a Tesla coil.  The problem is the adults are dying and the teens are deformed and infertile.  The Tesslies have provided them with the Grab machine which sends them back in time where they abduct children to bring to the future where they can reestablish the human race.  The narrative is told through the eyes of Pete, one of the deformed teens who travels back in time through the Grab machine.  The book also follows Julie, a mathematician in 2013 who has developed an algorithm that seems to predict the place and time of these seemingly mysterious abductions.  The narrative also has short chapters in 2014 that illustrate how the earth seems to be trying to cause its apocalypse. 

As I said in my last entry in this blog, I’m coming to love novellas.  They are longer than short stories, but generally faster paced than full length novels.  This one was no exception.  It was very fast paced, but still had time to flesh out the two main characters, Pete and Julie.  Pete is a very realistically drawn teenager.  At fifteen, he is obsessed with sex, filled with the drive to compete, and full of anger at the Tesslies.  He’s stubborn, yet cooperative, and still somewhat malleable in this near future world in the shell.  Julie is an academic who would prefer to be alone.  She’s on a special task force to get to the bottom of the disappearances of the missing children.  While on the force, she gets pregnant by a married coworker, but is determined to have the baby herself.  She has some friends who just don’t quite get her need for solitude. 

This novella being short, I can’t go into too much other detail, or I’ll be giving it all away.  Already with what I have described you can see where the story is probably going.  So I’ll just conclude here with my rating of four out of five stars.  Kress can write a terrific yarn and I hope to see how she fairs in longer works.  But if you see one of her novellas for cheap, which I did, it’s definitely worth the investment.