In The Girl in the Road, Monica Byrne crafts a gorgeous future world where big business has
perfected "wave energy", the solution to the global energy crisis and a
death knell for the West's economic hegemony. Set in India in the
2060s, The Girl in the Road attests to the gracefulness and power of
technology. For example, her main character majors in "nano and comp
lit", and the novel's most dazzling passages take their beauty from the
interactions between humans and their innovations. Bryne writes with a literary gift to beguile with her scenery. So The Girl in the Road is a real literary treat.
But it also asks an important moral question: What happens after we save the world?
And it's the answer to this question that makes The Girl in the Road a real literary treat. While the book is probably classified as "science fiction", there's not one collective bad guy to be found -- no Big Brother or rogue virus.
Instead, the novel centers on individuals, influenced by their societies, coming to terms with their pasts. It affirms that out of the billions of possible futures, there are worlds that balance between dystopian terror and utopian perfection where our descendants continue to delve into their very human hopes and anxieties. In some futures, we'll have time to interpret our dreams, quibble about our motivations, and analyze our childhoods. This, even more so than its prose, is where The Girl in the Road's beauty lies.
This is a novel you'll simply have to read.
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I received a free copy of this book as part of the Blogging for Books program in exchange for my honest review here.