Now We’ve Done It. We Went and Woke Up the World. 🐙
📕 Climate fiction: ‘Cascade’ by Rachel A. Rosen
Cascade (The Sleep of Reason, Book I) is a really funny novel about the end of the world. A tad grim, of course, but also funny. It was published in 2022, and I’ve read it before, and I’ve returned to it because the sequel, Blight, came out today. The end of the world: Or is it?
When the first book opens, the Cascade, the climate breakdown, has started. Even the grass is shrieking. The Earth has responded by belching out magic that enters certain people; they are politely known as Magic Affected Individuals.
A generation later, people like this one are still adjusting to the new reality:
The air, for a split second, shimmered around the girl…and then he realized that what he was seeing was magic.
A Magic Affected Individual can control their power somewhat, but more likely the magic controls them or will control them. And no one has any idea what magic wants.
“We woke up the world.” A tiny explosion burst from his palms. “And it’s pissed.”
An MAI (they’re probably annoyed if you call them a wizard) may work for one side of the government or the other, or maybe for the revolution, and maybe magic will let them do so. Or maybe magic has a completely different idea for them.
This is a Canadian story, and you can read it as an allegory for real politics today. The story probably maps on to politicians in various places; it feels to me like a universal tale of human frailty and folly, plus there are demons (of sorts) hiding out where we least expect them. On the other hand, not every country has to worry about the pirate ships of the Silicon Valley Autonomous Region.
“No one wants to be governed by fucking wizards,” complains Ian Mallory, who’s in government and is a fucking wizard. He’s rather bitter about it, since this situation doesn’t work to his advantage:
No one even wants to worry that they might, in some remote, abstract, indirect way, be governed by fucking wizards. You’ll all happily surrender every bit of autonomy to data mining companies who use your private information to force you to buy shit you don’t need, but the thought of someone influencing your opinions through magic is a massive subversion of democracy?
In Cascade, Ian’s trying, with the help of his intern’s magic, to look younger, which to an image-conscious public is supposed to imply that his own magic is still strong, which in reality it isn’t. Magic’s a loop of illusions, including about itself. When we look at someone, we see double. Think not? Try taking a photograph, and compare what you see in the developed print to what you see in reality.
Anyway, climate collapse. Will the world end? Thing is, as the character Jonah Augustine puts it, “the world is always ending, for someone.” It’s a matter of perspective. Jonah’s perspective may come from his standpoint in the branches of a tree whose old-growth logging he’s protesting. The world’s always ending for some tree.
Meanwhile, something big is coming to life. Underwater, through “the hole that something ancient and unfathomable had punched in the world,” you’re forced to confront something “impossibly huge, something bleached and ancient, a twist of cartilage spiralling out from the dust, rib-like structures branching from its trunk.” Be it a Dread Cthulhu or kaiju, everyone will be “neck deep in melted ice caps” but also face-to-face with “unblinking cosmic horror.” Count on it.
Once nature manifests magic to reassert a balance with humans, a death by “natural causes” will look pretty violent. Heads up, and maybe you can help humanity survive the end of the world: “This is what a lifetime of reading dystopian YA fiction has trained you for.”
That was Book I, Cascade, and I’m psyched for Book II, Blight, which smacked my e-reader today with its bone tentacle. Today is its actual release day. Too late to put it back in the bottle now. For those who seek the second book: It’s on the big retailer, the smaller retailers, and the I ❤️ Hard Books Bookshop US affiliate.
