I’m taking some time away from the office so ripped through this one in a day. I just finished Alderman’s The Future a few days ago and there’s enough thematic similarities between the two that they can be compared; after reading them back-to-back they’re fresh enough in my mind to try! Both books take place in an imagined period of climate catastrophe with strong queer lead women whose fates are at least partially in the hands of enigmatic billionaires who build tech-enabled fortresses as insulation from environmental disaster (interestingly, neither author identifies as LGBT). Where Alderman’s book is a bit of a romp written in the vernacular, though, Zhang’s is a literary affair with writing that is often poetic and is the more substantial and thoughtful novel. I enjoyed the sensory overload of Zhang’s dystopian future. Tempting as it must have been to locate “good” in the body and “bad” in the absence of body, her descriptions of both the world gone awry and the world as one wishes it might be are both all the more accessible for being mapped through the senses. I was very struck by how effective even the most languid passages in Zhang’s work drove the novel to its conclusion (relying just a little bit on some deus ex machina chicanery) so effectively, while Alderman’s struggled to achieve a resolution (leaning hard on some deus ex machina chicanery). The Future, I thought, got caught up too hard in trying to be clever. Land of Milk and Honey was the more satisfying exercise.