No Golden Solis Rises for Yesterday
Begin an End for a World? Series
In a climate-changed world, a sensitive boy wonders about the world as it was in the ruminative novel No Golden Solis Rises for Yesterday.
In M. G. Brown’s haunting science fiction novel No Golden Solis Rises for Yesterday, young people try to save the natural world.
After global warming reshapes the planet and restricts human activity, requiring that people stay out of nature, several young people come of age in a sterile setting, Willowburb, where they are patrolled and must stay out of the Wyldernasse. They have limited means of understanding humanity’s lineage as they form their personal identities, though. Their elders don’t speak about what the world used to be like, offering little guidance, and their parents eke out a stark existence.
Among this group, Jymkenzo is a sensitive teenager. While working on a farm, he craves the feeling of rain on his skin, even though the rain is sometimes acid. He ruminates on water, calling the river “beautiful and inviting,” and seeks spiritual connections with nature. He wonders about the world as it was, too, as tries to imagine what traffic was like as he rides his tricycle. Throughout the book, he struggles to live by his society’s rules, and he also tries to help others get more in touch with their pasts in the name of generating hope. But others accept their lot more—fighting, flirting, and making mischief as they perform required activities together. Their dimensions are underexplored, and they blend together.
The book’s worldbuilding is loose beyond the pervasive sense of loss. Little is described in full; there’s a sense of oddness, with the group surrounded by relics whose purposes they must now guess at. Related musings stretch out and impede the book’s progression, as does extended coverage of technical details, such as a long passage about a summer job treating animal waste. The language that Jymkenzo and others use is is familiar but altered, as with “felin” for feline, leading to distractions. Partial sentences, including when people speak, are also interruptive.
There is little activity in the book beyond people’s daily duties. As Jymkenzo and his peers grow up and play, argue, and tease each other, the story stagnates. Jymkenzo’s hopes that they can reverse their situations are underattended to beyond the sense that he alone holds onto past wisdom. No momentum is generated in relation to his revivalist goals; his concerns are earnest but do not compel real action.
In the iconoclastic fantasy novel No Golden Solis Rises for Yesterday, a hopeful young man works to save humanity.
Reviewed by
Gale Hemmann
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