The world we know is coming to an end. How will we connect in the strange and frightening one that's coming to take its place?
What We See in the Smoke twists the genres of realism and science fiction to tell the future history of Toronto, a story that stretches from this millennium to the next. The novel leaps across the boundaries of time and space, as present and future Torontonians search for meaning, connection, and love in a city that grows more beautiful and frightening as its familiar characteristics fade away.
A musician is caught in an endless time loop unable to reach those he loves, two broke and desperate men plan a heist of a cannibal auction, a detective with sinister proclivities hunts for a criminal who is stealing dreams, and a college student searches for his brother in the hours before a nuclear war. All of these and more lead to a world where only rich cyborgs or the homeless remain, where teleportation has made crime impossible, and where city-sized spaceships are maintained by strange creatures while planet Earth itself is left behind.
Ben Berman Ghan spins a web of these lives and many more, blending the familiar with the surreal until both give way to the story of ordinary people in extraordinary times.
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['Do you know what Saul Bellow said about writing?']***
(@crowsnestbooks, 30 May 2019, 272 pages, ebook, copy from @crowsnestbooks via # NetGalley and voluntarily reviewed)
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Judging from the blurb, I was expecting a run-of-the-mill dystopian science fiction novel. I got something else altogether. This is not a traditional novel but a series of different yet oddly connected short stories. The stories are really linked by themes and ideas. I don't read a lot of science fiction and this is an example of the kind of stuff I enjoy the most. Each story is a bit of a mystery as you don't really know who the narrator is and if they have a bigger role to play in the book overall. No story is the same and the plot and narrators are wide and varied. One of the best stories is narrated by a building which shouldn't work but really does. Each story was a pleasure to read. My favourites were Closing Time and The war with Space. This book is a rare treat.
