Future Girl by Asphyxia

Allen & Unwin, $24.99 pb, 373 pp

Future Girl is about a lot of things: deafness, environmental collapse, corporate influence, and domestic violence. It is a great read about growing up, accepting your identity, discovering your tribe, falling in love, and having a positive impact on your community. There is also an apocalypse happening quietly in the background.

Piper, narrator and protagonist, is deaf but grew up oral, her mother insisting that she speak correctly and wear uncomfortable (seldom useful) hearing aids so that Piper could ‘fit in’. She doesn’t. Much of the novel is concerned with Piper’s attempts to navigate a collapsing world indifferent to her difference. Asphyxia’s prose is clear and fluid, but at times Piper’s deafness reduces the dialogue to a one-sided, halting mess as she attempts to understand others through a mix of lip-reading, guesswork, and context. The effect is just shy of overwhelming but never overdone. The reader’s struggle to understand is only a shadow of Piper’s. It is the point, and it is well made.

Future Girl is presented as Piper’s art diary, each page bordered by patterns and colour while wonderful, disappointingly infrequent illustrations emphasise her visual acuity. The conceit is used to best effect when Piper’s scratchy handwriting and incidental sketches interject on the stark visual formality of the printed text to drive home an emotional point.

Things change for Piper when she meets Marley, who teaches her sign language and introduces her to wild food, or actual food as opposed to ‘recon’, the food replacement invented by Piper’s mother to prevent things like cancer and obesity. Recon is made from unappetising BioSpore and may be wrecking people’s immune systems. Meanwhile, oil is running out, tree vandals are plaguing Melbourne, and councils are destroying community gardens, while food is becoming scarce.

In sharp contrast to the typical bombast of apocalyptic teen fiction, Asphyxia presents a gradual decline towards dystopia, dancing around cynicism to focus instead on personal stories, local communities, and practical action. Future Girl is effective because Piper is not a teen warrior out to save the world but a regular girl trying to make her corner of it a little better.

The Other Side of the Sky by Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner

Allen & Unwin, $19.99 pb, 471 pp)

The Other Side of the Sky is set between two apocalypses. Nimh is a living goddess, the latest in a line of untouchable divine beings left to watch over humanity when the gods decamped a thousand years ago. North is a prince from a technologically advanced city floating in the sky. The world below is a wasteland, where only monsters dwell and mists imbue the world with magic but also deformity. The world above is the home of the gods, unreachable and unknowable, though possibly sinking and plagued by political stagnation. The Lightbringer is fated to return to the surface to reunify, destroy, and remake world, hopefully for the better.

In Kaufman and Spooner’s precisely painted world, half-truths blend with myth, children’s tales with reality. Science is as wondrous and unknowable as magic. Magic operates scientifically. The effect is grounded yet enchanting. This decayed world is teetering on the edge of something better, or possibly worse, but it holds within it a human story about connection and the pressures on young people expected to fix the mess of a world they’ve inherited.

There’s a quest to find the Lightbringer and fulfil a prophecy, but at its heart The Other Side of the Sky is a tale of star-crossed lovers, blending action and world-building with romance. Nimh and North are from very different worlds, separate yet linked, either predestined to be together or unable to touch. The ensuing tension is delicious. Chapters alternate perspective between the two characters, offering insight into the foibles of both as well as the tantalising miscommunications and tenuous trust that generates the tension between them.

While compelling throughout, the novel eschews resolutions in favour of offering a glimpse into a sequel. Readers will be clamouring to find out if Kaufman and Spooner can top this first instalment and deliver a satisfying conclusion.

Indigo Owl by Charlie Archbold

Wakefield Press, $24.95 pb, 336 pp

Indigo Owl is narrated by Scarlet, Dylan, and Rumi, three teenagers attending the Arcadia Institute on a barely liveable ice planet controlled by the Galbraith Corporation following the Earth’s destruction. The Institute trains citizens in one of four socially approved hierarchical functions: the ruling Cardinals; the empathic Solitaire; and the Willows and the Malachites, who don’t figure into the plot. Physical labour is performed by helpful bots, ready to right fallen pots or to electrocute undesirables.

Social hegemony is in – subversion or questioning authority is out: taken too far it will get you banished to the horrific Tundra. Rumi is out. She’s a Cardinal-in-training who knows far more about what’s going on than Scarlet, Dylan, or the reader. Dylan’s synaesthesia lands him, against his father’s wishes, in Solitaire, training with Scarlet, with whom he forms an instant connection. Scarlet is even more out than she realises. Her only motivation is to find her missing mother, but there’s a conspiracy afoot that gives the novel its narrative tension.

Scarlet and Dylan don’t do much in the first half of the book other than wait for Rumi to steal another moment away from Galbraith’s listening devices to deliver yet another information dump. Frustratingly, the reader doesn’t get to witness Rumi’s adventures firsthand, hearing about them only when she alludes to them or relates them offhandedly to Scarlet and Dylan. It gives the effect that there’s a more interesting book happening off the page, with Rumi less a character than a plot contrivance. This is a shame because she’s far more interesting than the passive Scarlet and fades out in the latter half of the book once Scarlett and Dylan finally develop some agency.

The action accelerates midway through the book. While Archbold does nothing new with the trope of the evil corporation running a post-apocalyptic future, the tension ratchets up nicely and the climax is thrilling. Unfortunately, so many subjects are introduced amid the action-packed final third – addiction, family estrangement, kidnapping, biological control, and psychological warfare – that none of it has time to land.

The worlds in these novels are imperfect, shattered, doomed, but the hope for each is the ability of their young protagonists to question, reject, embrace, renew, and, ultimately, fix everything the older generation stuffed up. So, no pressure then.