I have completely enjoyed the two books I've read by Lily Brooks-Dalton before (see links above). She writes climate fiction, but in a way that comes off as almost hopeful. So when I heard Ruins was coming out, I was immediately onboard and ordered it from my library as soon as I could.
Ember Agni is going nowhere in her job as a professor of archeology. Her students don't like her, she doesn't like them, and she refuses to make nice with administrators. Her marriage is failing, she doesn't have any friends, and she's still thinking about that expedition she didn't go on years earlier. It's 3000 years from now and most humans have been pushed north to avoid the deadly heat. When one of her former students sends her an artifact (a tablet with a piece of fruit on the back - what could it be?) from Pre-Crisis, Ember is determined to prove that Pre-Crisis humans did have technology and developed societies.
Ember is terrible. Really, really terrible.
...she was struck by a sudden, arresting sensation that she didn't belong here, in this chair or this job or even this city. How had all of it happened? How was any of it hers?
The most obvious answers did not seem to fit the questions - she had left the Summit dig willingly, applied for a job at the university of her own volition, said yes when marriage was proposed, and so on and so forth. She made these choices freely and with care, but without knowing that all of it would lead her here. She couldn't' tell whether that was naivety or just how life worked. Shouldn't she know the difference by now? (page 20)
This is actually sort of fine. I mean, we all sometimes look in the mirror and wonder at how Teenage Us became Grown Us and how disappointed Teenage Us would be, right? But then.
"I don't know what I want," she finally said. And this was, in some ways, true and in some ways not. She wanted to be cared for and to care for no one. She wanted to have everything she needed and not be responsible for reciprocating any of it. (page 101)
This is not how the world works. I don't think feelings have to reciprocated, but I do think that if you want people to care about you, you have to care about them. Right?
Anyway, we spend SO LONG with Ember as her life falls into (ahem) ruins that it's anti-climactic by the time Ember leaves for a trip on page 219. TWO HUNDRED pages of her wallowing in her misery instead of just deciding to leave.
So what I'm saying is that if I had written this book, I'd have started on page 219 and just done a few pages of flashbacks for us to see what Ember's life was like pre-trip. Then we could have spent more time doing archeological things. Alas, no one asked me about pacing.
I'm really sad that this one didn't hit it out of the park for me. 2.5/5 stars
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Passage of note:
Across societies separated by geography, language, and technological means, a recurring phenomenon emerges: the segmentation of time. The division of days, months, and years is rooted in celestial rhythms: the sun's arc, the moon's phases, the drift of the constellations. Calendrical systems are instruments of coordination, yes, but also of ideology: they encode assumptions about recurrence, continuity, and control. To standardize time is to assert its knowability.
Still, periods of disruption - be they environmental, political, or epistemic - produce anomalies: lost days, doubled years, durations reset or abandoned or revised. These aberrations in the record can be difficult to detect. The question, then, is not only how time has been measured, but why certain measurements persist while others vanish. What, or who, sustains a calendar? (page 289)
I have so many issues with calendars. SO MANY. I hate them. That is all.
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Hat mentions (why hats?):
There in the foyer, crowded by a selection of coats and shoes and hats that belonged to one or both of them...(page 179)
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Do you like cli-fi? What's your favorite?
I in fact do not like cli-fi. It makes me anxious. Although, I suppose I could enjoy a really good cli-fi book (same could be said for any genre). This one sounds both interesting and annoying. I've heard good things about The Light Pirate though. If it's the one I'm thinking of, it's about Florida... that one would definitely make me anxious.
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