Suncatcher: Seven Days in the Sky By Alia Gee

Suncatcher: Seven Days in the Sky

By Alia Gee

Suncatcher is another fine example of what the internet can do, in some ways. Published in 2014 by a Print on Demand company called Booklocker.com (which for a wonder isn't owned by Random House [For now]). So the odds of finding Suncatcher in a bookstore or library are at best vanishingly low, that said you can find the book on Amazon which sells a paperback or kindle version. Suncatcher is Alia Gee's first and at the time of this review only novel. Mrs. Gee, who was named after Alia Atreides from Dune (YAAASSS!) by her parents according to one story, graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio and currently lives in New York with her husband and children. She is politically active and while I did not speak to her for this review, I'm sure she wouldn't mind me reminding you to vote this year.

Suncatcher is set in the year 2075 AD, taking place mainly in the free city of Miami. The United States and frankly the world have gone through a lot. Peak oil has left the world mostly devoid of fossil fuels. Pandemics have made travel a lot less common and severely pruned the population of the world. Climate change has turned cities like Miami and New York City, into islands huddled behind great sea walls of concrete and metal holding back the newly risen seas. Indentured servitude is back as people sign life debts to corporations to ensure that they have three hots and a cot (to be honest this doesn't really seem like something corporations would do, reclassifying all their employees as “contractors” so they only have to pay them on a job to job basis seems more in character for a modern corporation). People have found ways to deal with the new stresses and problems of life, but others have found themselves going insane and committing terrorist attacks as part of “blood cults.” Committing mass murder while screaming that God needs blood for atonement(Guys, guys! No! Don’t kill your fellow workers, kill your corporate overlords!). Civilization has however survived (That is debatable. Depends on your definitions I suppose.) and is slowly but surely rebuilding from all of this. People are traveling by airship and train. Cities and states are recreating economies and the education system is roaring back to life. This is all aided via communicating through the Internet 2.0 called the aether, which is accessed through VR goggles or wearable bracelet computers and seems to create a very subjective experience, where each user can visit the same site and see something completely different. I have to admit this kinda fascinates me a bit because the sheer software resources needed to do this alongside the profiling and interactive programming requirements speaks to a civilization that has managed to greatly outdo our own mastery of computers and communication networks. At the same time I am wondering what an aether reddit or facebook would even look like. Maybe Mrs. Gee can address that another novel.

We see this world through the eyes of Professor Radicand Jones, a Muslim women. She is an American of Pakistani and Welsh origin and survivor of the plague that caused the entire American Northwest to be quarantined. That plague took a heavy toll on her family, killing Professor Jones younger brother and her older sister's fiance. As part of a response to that tragedy her older sister Professor Pari Jones took off with an airship she designed with a bunch of graduate students and... Kinda never came back. In fact Radicand and Pari hadn't really seen each other in ten years as of the opening of the novel. If that wasn't enough, their father is also in a coma, with a possibly malfunctioning cybernetic implant that no one seems to be sure how to fix. Despite this, the Jones family has managed to keep moving and build up. Radicand has become a respected professor in New York City. The now Admiral Pari Jones has build a “flock” of airships from that one single ship she built. They move from port to port collecting solar energy in their sails, selling to the cities they visit to pay for supplies while making decisions based on consensus instead of a top down command structure (which means they vote on things instead of Pari just giving orders). However both sisters feel something missing in their lives. With Professor Jones feeling increasingly trapped by her role as a professor but unable to explain her feelings to anyone around her. This, of course, makes her feel more trapped. So when Admiral Jones invites Professor Jones to join her flock for a little vacation and a possible sisterly reunion Radicand jumps at the chance.

However Professor Jones is walking into more then a chance to repair her relationship with a long absent sister. Admiral Jones has attracted some unwelcome attention as her habit of selling energy for the amount of money she needs instead of at what the market will bear has attracted attention from the companies that she's undercutting. As the flock approaches the free city of Miami that’s holding back the seas with walls and hope, they attract pirate attacks, blood cult rampages and ever-deepening mystery. On top of this Radicand has met a perfectly nice young man in the flock named Toby, who also happens to be a martial artist capable of killing you with his toes. So she finds herself trying to reconcile with her sister while juggling the demands of a new romance and keeping pirates and more from killing them all. Of course the Jones aren't the only ones in trouble, that would be too easy. An old friend of Radicand’s from college, a young lady named Charlie whose genetics are about 10% canine is also in trouble as a corporation using bounty hunters and lawyers attempts to kidnap her under the stance that she isn't a person but missing property (Kill Them All).

Charlie is an interesting character in her own right. Charlie is what we refer to as a chimera, in genetics that refers to a creature that has two different sets of DNA, but I’ll let my editor, the man with a PhD, go into that. In Charlie's case she has the DNA of a human spiced with that of a dog.

Ok, there is a distinction we need to make. A chimera is a mix of cells from different sources. They can be naturally occurring in humans. From time to time, two eggs get fertilized and instead of becoming twins, they fuze. When this happens the system of position-based regulation we use during gestation to determine what cells go where means that while the skin or blood might be from one genetic sibling, the liver or brain cells might be from the other. This is occasionally an issue in paternity tests and criminal investigations. If, in this case, the term Chimera is accurate, then she is a human who had dog cells somehow integrated into her embryonic tissue that then, somehow, developed normally into a person who has some dog tissues, or even entire organ systems or gross anatomy in some ways (like her eyes or something being dog eyes). A transgenic would be where dog DNA was inserted into Charlie’s genome likely as an embryo. This might be to give her physiological functions that a dog has that humans don’t (for example: the ability to synthesize vitamin C) without affecting her gross anatomy, or at 10% it might affect her gross anatomy, but it would likely be less… targeted, in a way. It would affect regulatory functions rather than cell fates and for something that disarate would likely end up with something kinda… Ripley-Clone-esque. Given that Charlie is basically human but with certain dog anatomical parts without begging for death, I’d say Chimera is accurate, but talking about her percent of dog DNA is probably an authorial brainbug or cultural shorthand.

That said, she is fully a person here even if her mannerisms and abilities aren't fully human. However in the United States, this is a matter of some dispute. It appears much like in The Water Knife, the federal government is weaker then in our modern day (no shit). In northern states, Charlie is a person and a citizen of the US and is accorded the full protections and rights under the law as such. She is even married (although her husband doesn't appear in the story, he is often mentioned). In the Southern states however, there is a fair amount of resistance to the idea of treating people like Charlie as... People (Because...The South. I can see it, but that might just be my utter contempt for the CSA speaking.). Interestingly enough this appears to be a minority position, likely buttressed by the fact that Charlie makes her living as a roving reporter, using aether technology to live cast a good amount of her travels and investigations. It is however enough of a position that armed bounty hunters can make an attempt on someone in broad daylight and seem to expect support from the government in their kidnapping. Radicand finds herself drawn into Charlie's problem and wondering how it intersects with her issues. For that matter, they have to look into Charlie's most recent investigation into a traveling Evangelical preacher who leaves a trail of violence behind him and what strange connections he might have. Radicand also finds herself puzzling over why all of this reminds her of father, but he's been in a coma for years so what connection could he have to these events? Just in case dealing with, corporate harassment, pirates, bounty hunters, and more isn't enough; Radicand finds herself drawn into her new boyfriend's past as well and what is Toby hiding in his desperate street-rat past? Radicand has to work fast to save her best friend from college, her boyfriend, and her sister's life’s work while trying to repair her relationship with said sister. Why does she need to work fast? Because she's in Miami, living on an airship and it's hurricane season. I bet you thought your deadline issues were serious huh?

While you might think that the world I've outlined is a grim and dark one, it’s Radicand Jones and the other characters around her that keep this from dissolving into a grim dark world. While the world she lives in has many problems, she shows us a good number of people, like Charlie, her sister, and even Toby working to make the world a better place. Whether it's Peri Jones attempt to bring clean cheap solar power to communities that might not have access to it, a Quaker run cafe providing food and shelter to those in need (I’ve always had a deep and abiding respect for Quakers). Or Radicand Jones' attempt to enforce her friend's innate personhood, opposition be damned. There's plenty of that here. One thing that often escapes people when discussing when a setting is grim dark or not is that it’s not the problems that beset the world presented to us, it's whether they can be solved and whether the actions of the characters to address those problems are allowed to matter. I'm going to argue that this is one of the driving themes in Solarpunk; the idea that people and communities working on both the small and large scale can make things better. That in the end, your actions do matter and can change the world one way or another. When you think about the settings where nothing is allowed to change for the better, that's an interesting theme to embrace.

I enjoyed Suncatcher but it does have what I will call “first novel problems”. There are points where the dialogue hits the point where you can write that line but you can't say it. While how people speak to one another does change over time, it still needs to be believable to your audience. I also feel the storyline with her father could have been better foreshadowed and I also find myself wondering if she didn't put in much story for one novel at certain points, as all these problems coming together at once seemed to be stretching it a bit. That said, she does a good job with Radicand and the supporting characters and her world building was downright amazing; she was able to use a breakfast menu to really show the massive difference between the world of 2075 (with 50$ pancakes) and today.  So Ms. Gee is able to build an interesting world and fill it with engaging and compelling characters. Honestly, Suncatcher is a pretty good novel and a great example of Solarpunk. I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in the emerging genre or to anyone would like to see more a woman-focused story, as most of the main characters are ladies. All things considered I'm giving Suncatcher: Seven Days in the Sky by Alia Gee a B. This is really good for a first novel and if Ms. Gee is reading this review. I would really like to see you write more novels, set in the Suncatcher universe or elsewhere.

So this Sunday I'll be talking about Solarpunk itself at last and you should join next week for Implanted by Lauren Teffaeu. Keep reading!

The dark text is your reviewer, Garvin Anders.
The red text is your editor, Dr. Ben Allen.