In the grim darkness of the far future there is only fish.
That's Mir's life after The Great Inundation, which saw the oceans advancing across the land and wiping out almost all of the human race. And with the waves came prehistoric creatures, trilobites and coelacanths that are slowly becoming amphibious and coming after people on the shore.
What they've left behind is a world that feels like nothing so much as Cormac McCarthy's The Road, a depressing land of Road People and Blister Rot, in which people subsist from day to day on what they can catch or kill, with the occasional supply from what remains of a government.
Mir, a young girl trying to keep her father alive through his illness and odd fascination with the new crustaceans, must also do her part to keep the human race going, with anyone human enough to breed.
It's bloody miserable. There's personal tragedy, mixed with a society that's falling apart and some rather hideous body horror. The grim details spread across the page are impressively nasty, and manage to set the tone with just a few small scenes.
It's a very dense story in general, running in at only a few dozen pages, but getting a lot done in the time and managing a powerful arc with a fitting ending.
Damned good. Go read it - handily online.
Tagged: Book Horror Environmental disaster Novella Print