Review: The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn in Locus

It's slightly old news by now, but as of December of last year I have joined Locus as part of their stable of reviewers. I'm still working out how this is going to work—the monthly schedule is a bit intense, and as readers of this blog know I have never felt obliged to review books as soon as they are published, which Locus prefers to do. So expect a bit of a ramp-up as I figure out how often, and on how many topics, I feel comfortable writing about for them—while, of course, continuing to post on this blog, at Lawyers, Guns & Money, and writing occasional reviews for Strange Horizons.

My first Locus review appeared in issue 767 (there's usually a month's delay between print publication and when reviews are published online) and discusses Gabrielle Korn's The Shutouts, a sequel and companion volume to 2023's Yours for the Taking. Both novels take place in a post-climate-collapse US and focus on the fallout from a billionaire's plan to rescue a select group of people and build a utopian society. I took the opportunity of this review to talk a little about the recent flowering of climate fiction, especially coming from literary authors.

As climate change has become an ever-growing and more insistent presence in our lives, it has also begun inflecting and informing works of fiction, whose authors imag­ine how the remainder of the 21st century will play out. Interestingly, it is writers coming from outside the traditional venues of SFF writing and publishing who have most readily embraced this topic, writing stories and novels about ordinary (though often relatively privileged) people facing the sudden loss of normality in the face of the disruption of natural and social systems.

One topic that recurs in these fictional treat­ments is the idea of withdrawing into a safe haven: a gated community, a secret hideaway, a bunker. Often these shelters turn out to be the personal playground of a billionaire looking to practice social engineering (not to say eugenics). Invariably, the results are far from utopian.

I have several more pieces coming from Locus in the next few months that I'm excited to share with you (another thing I'm going to have to get used to: when you write for a print publication, the lag time between when you submit the piece and when you can talk about it in public can get a bit frustrating). In the meantime, my review of The Shutouts can serve as an indicator of how this new role will work out.