There’s a moment in the ’90s movie Independence Day where the Americans lead the charge against the alien invaders by rallying the various nations of the world together. In its rally-raising way, you can almost see the cultural change that came in the following decades. The move away from the centering of Western perspectives to a blend of voices which better represent the world as it is that’s still happening. This book feels like it’s sitting in that ’90s apocalypse window, where the enemy was not so much among us as outside of us, but from the frame of a first nation community, the Anishinaabe, in remote Canada. It very much sits in Stephen King’s The Stand genre of end of the world fiction
There’s a moment where one of the main characters, Nicole, reflects on what the end of the world means to a people who’ve already experienced it before. For the Anishinaabe, they stared down the end of days before: being forced from their land, squeezed into a white colonial mold, and battles with community alcoholism. Her people are still working through the generational traumas created by those epochs but also have a level of resilience that the rest of the world doesn’t.
We see these positions most clearly in Nicole’s husband, Evan, a rez-lifer family man who is (re)-learning how his ancestors survived in concert with nature. He openly admits to struggling with his mother tongue, his grandparents being forced to only use English. Like all of his people, he’s learning how to live in tandem with the land he lives on, it not being the land of their ancestors. His Anishinaabe perspective saves him from being a bland “salt of the earth” caricature.
This is a world which ends not with a bang but with a whimper among a community that knows they should know how to survive. There’s no cataclysmic event here, merely a cutting off with the outside world and a dawning realisation they’re alone again. Contact with the outside does come later on in the simmering malevolent form of a white prepper with a rictus grin and a colonial invader charm. He has hints of King’s Randall Flagg, but the more fantastical elements of Anishinaabe culture help to make him something different.
In a world where the Doomsday Clock ticks arbitrarily closer to midnight, the climate crisis is beginning to show its fangs, and #WW3 seems to be permanently trending on social media, the idea that ultimately we can be resilient is a powerful one. This is the first in a series of books and I’m curious to see where Rice goes next.
