After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall: A Novel [Paperback]

First I have to say the story itself is very well written. It's a suspenseful 200 or so pages that kept me dashing through it, hoping the end wasn't as cliched as it seemed it would be.

Alas it was.

First, briefly, the plot. There are three intertwined threads. One is an omniscient thread about happenings around the world. The second takes place in the future, where a handful of survivors of some great catastrophe have been placed in a sterile prison of sorts. Their only option to save the human race is to send children back in time using machinery their captors provided, to kidnap other children.

The third thread takes place in the present, from the point of view of a statistician named Julie, trying to piece the kidnappings and other statistical data to figure out what's happening.

As Julie approached the answer I felt a growing dread -- not because the answer was horrifying, but because it's something I might have seen in an old sf TV show that didn't care too much about science. I suppose this might be considered sf, but it goes into that realm of 'not really science' that I can take in Star Trek but which annoys the heck out of me in a sf novel.

Actually, it works more as a modern morality play or fable than science fiction, a cautionary tale that while unrealistic can teach some valuable lessons. That just wasn't what I expected or wanted to read. And the vehicle was something I'd seen too many times before.

I was talking to a friend recently -- whining, really -- about how little wonderful science fiction I've read in the past few years. Too much of it is self-conscious lit-er-a-chuh, instead of stories that put me into an alternate world or situation, with people I care about. In this short novel, Nancy Kress gives me confidence all over again.

It's a post-apocalyptic story, in which 26 survivors of the earth's destruction -- put into a protective Shell by mysterious aliens -- are trying to ensure the survival of humanity. Twenty years after everything went to hell in a hand basket, back in 2014, the older generation is dying off, and the youngsters -- including 15-year-old Pete -- struggle with everything from teenage angst to the need for supplies (with a uniquely SF-ish "answer").

The story switches back and forth from Pete, in 2035, to math professor Julie, in 2013, who is disturbed by statistical trends of break-ins and child abductions. The two characters inevitably converge, and we glimpse a future that is... well, I won't give anything away.

What makes this novel so satisfying isn't just the SF set-up. It's that Kress is really an excellent storyteller, creating characters who -- with just a few swipes of writing charcoal -- makes people come off the page. Julie is as worried about childbirth as about those statistical anomalies; Pete holds onto an irrelevant bit of technology because he wants something that is HIS, alone. That's what being human is -- not just aliens and the world ending and all that stuff.

How can I give this OTHER than five stars? I started reading the book last night, and when I woke up I grabbed it off the bookstand and read until I had finished it. You probably will, too.

In the year 2035, all that's remaining of humanity is a group of twenty-six people who live in the Shell, an enclosure built two decades ago by the alien race known as the Tesslies when an environmental cataclysm made our world uninhabitable. The six genetically mutated children who were born inside the Shell are mankind's final hope of survival, also because they are the only ones who can use the Tesslie technology known as the "Grab": a brief ten minute trip back into the time before the Earth's environment was destroyed, during which they can gather precious supplies and capture other young children to augment the survivors' gene pool.

In 2013, Julie Kahn is a talented mathematician who is helping the FBI investigate a series of mysterious kidnappings. Thanks to her algorithms, it gradually starts to become clear that the strange break-ins and disappearances follow a pattern, allowing investigators to close in on the next crime.

And in 2014, a new bacterium appears deep underground, setting off a far-reaching chain of events....

Superstar SF and fantasy author Nancy Kress returns with After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, an elegant novella that combines several wildly different science fiction ideas into a tight package. There's a little bit of everything here: time travel, hard science, environmental collapse, aliens, post-apocalyptic dystopia. It may sound hard to combine all of these in such a short format, but Nancy Kress makes it work.

The novella's slightly unwieldy title refers to the three plot lines described above: the survivors in their Shell in the future, the mathematician trying to solve the "crimes" happening in the present, and the environmental changes. What makes this much more than just another story told from three separate points of view is the time travel angle: as the novella progresses, the stories occasionally connect and weave through each other. After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall is really a series of interlocking flashforwards and flashbacks that continuously provide new information and different perspectives about each other to the reader.

Pete, one of the six children born in the Shell, is the story's most interesting character and one of the most tragic figures I've encountered in SF in a long time. He's a fifteen-year-old boy born in the surreal captivity of the Shell. His only knowledge of life as we know it is based on a few scavenged books and the brief jumps back in time. With a spindly neck and a too-large head, he's at one point mistaken for a demon when a panicked parent catches him in the process of kidnapping two young children -- something he considers a normal activity. He deals with all the confusion and hormonal urges of a typical teenager, but his world is limited to the Shell and the twenty-five other people living there with him. Pete's story is simply heartbreaking and unforgettable.

The entire mini-society inside the Shell is a dystopia that's been boiled down to its highest concentration level. There are a few high tech amenities such as endless streams of clean water and disinfectant (and obviously the "Grab" time travel device), but there's no furniture or, for that matter, no toilets, so people are forced to collect their own waste. Everyone lives together in claustrophobic proximity, which is a constant source of tension because the survivors were obviously not picked based on mutual compatibility. The habitat has such an institutional, barebones quality that this part of the story feels as bleak as a prison drama. The relationships are complex and dysfunctional in the extreme, but thanks to the duress the characters are under, the tension frequently remains under the surface, taking a backseat to the need for survival.

After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall provides two main stories -- the survivors in the future and Julie Kahn's investigation in the present -- but the third one, which connects the others and shows how we got from here to there, is its real strength. This is one of those novellas where the reader, who has the benefit of knowing all sides, gradually loses the misconceptions built into the story by the author. The characters eventually lose them too as everything inexorably works its way to a convergence, but until that happens there's constant tension between the three plot lines. It's this tension that ultimately makes After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall a great success. Expect to see this one on the final ballots of the major awards next year.