Lea Tassie, Green Blood Rising

The book-publishing ecosystem is weird.

Today's post is about old-school eco-apocalypse fiction, a novel that feels a bit like an SF classic, and that's Lea Tassie's Green Blood Rising. As the back cover says, we're in 2050, and life is difficult, but in a moment everything changes: "Trees suddenly develop a powerful electrical system which zaps anything metal, including people wearing or using it. Young trees sprout up, promising to destroy farms, roads, airports. On Wescara, a small Vancouver Island holding, a family fights to keep from starving."

Now, I can't be sure which house Lea Tassie imagines that her protagonist family lives on, before they move out to their parents' farm at Wescara, because she doesn't give much detail about the house's exterior, and presumably it's fictional. But I do know that the short street they live on is about 2km from my home, and also that the street (in the world, as it is in the novel) is named after my mother-in-law's family. Maybe that's a conflict-of-interest worth declaring? Hard to say.

Anyway, when I say that Green Blood Rising is like old-school SF, I mean that it feels a lot like classic SF where there's some kind of environmental collapse, either before or during the novel. Among the many books I've blogged about here, I'm thinking, for example, about Poul Anderson's The Winter of the World, or George Stewart's The Earth Abides, or Frank Herbert's The Green Brain, or even Kim Stanley Robinson's Three Californias trilogy, but it's been a popular theme for decades. As it happens, these novels by Anderson and Herbert are both utterly bonkers, as befits the decades in which they were published, and that's one reason that they've fallen out of the canon, but still: they were published to relative acclaim, by full-on mass-market publishers. Lea Tassie self-published hers, as she has done for all her books, and while Green Blood Rising shows some marks from that process, it's not less worth reading as a result.

In the year of our lord 2024, really, you'd be a whole lot better off reading Lea Tassie's Green Blood Rising than a whole lot of classic eco-apocalypse SF.

"The last thousand hectares of old-growth forest on the British Columbia coast basked in April sunshine," says the novel's first sentence (p1), but we don't spend long there. UVic forestry biologist Richard Donner is visiting the trees because some loggers were lightly electrocuted while trying to cut them, and after the same thing happens to him, on the drive home he realizes that all around him are rapidly growing young trees. As the trees begin rapidly reclaiming virtually all infrastructure, knocking out or killing everyone who touches a tree while wearing or touching metal, society begins collapsing as rapidly as trees are growing.

In the expectation that things are about to go terribly badly, Donner and his family move from Cadboro Bay to Wescara, a small farm in Metchosin next door to Witty's Lagoon park. Wescara is owned by Donner's wife's parents, with her grandmother's mother living there as well, and it's fortunate that they've built a mostly underground house and have long been planning to live sustainably off the grid. Almost as soon as they arrive, things do indeed go terribly badly. We see some killings, some natural deaths, the aftermath of some suicides, and a wide range of violence, all while society collapses around the family.

I don't know whether you'll find the novel believable, but I ended up immersed in its world, and overall the characters ring true in my ears. Admittedly one always wants an explanation for very large plot points, and it remains a mystery just why trees have become electrified and why they're resprouting and bursting rapidly upward wherever they'd grown historically. Still, these kinds of novels will often leave their premise clear in shape but obscure in its detail, and the metaphor works just fine: something humans rely on is taken away from us, seemingly both irrevocably and permanently, and the extent of our reliance destroys us. Here, Lea Tassie takes away our access to timber and to cleared land, but she could've taken away insects, or fish, or rain, or the Goldilocks temperature range. In every case, the result would be the same, or that's what we're taught by the great majority of classic CF dealing with these conceptual lessons.

That's not to say there aren't issues with the novel, as some of its few other reviewers have noted, because there are some, but who among us etc. (If you want to see detailed complaints, Kate Onyett has you covered.) I was all kinds of unclear and uncomfortable about how Tassie chose to embed Cree characters and perspectives in the novel, for example, and it's hard to cheer for an upper-middle-class family's ability to not mind all that much when the population of southern Vancouver Island shrinks from 500,000 to around 500: that's 499,500 deaths for our characters to get over, and they do. Still, this is a novel of apocalypse, and it's no less of an apocalypse for having most of it occur a very long way off-stage, so why object when it turns out to depict an apocalypse?

I'm looking forward to the two subsequent books, namely Red Blood Falling (set around 2070) and Shockwave (set around 2080). Dunno if I'll track them down before the September maelstrom hits, the outer edges of which are already tugging at my feet, but we'll see.

Recommended.