Book Review | Seed, by Rob Ziegler

Seed

Author- Rob Ziegler

Hardcover

Page Count: 350 pages

Publisher: Night Shade Books

Release Date: November 3, 2011

ISBN-10: 1597803235

ISBN-13: 978-1597803236

In Rob Ziegler’s debut novel Seed, the future is grim. A dust bowl has swept through the Americas, leaving the land parched and weak of resources; life as we know it has officially been left unchecked; the government (if you can call it that) is a pale reflection of what it once was, and the Tet, a disease that resembles tetanus with symptoms similar to that caused by multiple sclerosis, rips through the countryside. Satori is a new global power, a bio-engineering facility that rose up and became a creation of its own philosophy; a living organism of “flesh and skin and bone Frankensteined together with old-world concrete, steel, and plexi.” (p. 314)

Satori makes the seed that feeds a hungry nation, bar-coded and rationed climate-resistant seed that is given out to see most people through the harvest.

Yet little do when the rich or powerful prey upon the weak. Brood is a migrant living on the road with his brother and a man they call Hondo, scraping out survival out in the wastes. Since they cannot really bully their way around, they steal what they can’t trade. It’s a dog-eat-dog world; a world that the characters never asked for, a world equally foreign and familiar to readers – “crumbling concrete domes protruding like the backs of half-buried beasts from farmland gone white with alkali” (p. 11) dotting the dust cities- and a world that they’ve accepted as basic fact. The author takes time to stress this, in the tools they make, the way they speak, the way they act, and the way they view themselves and others. It’s a subtle little characteristic that a lot of readers take for granted, but I really appreciated how every jagged sentence in this book felt like it reflected the dystopic setting in which it is set. The small details (for example, the DIY details showing people creating and splicing what they can find in the arid wasteland) make the inhabitants we encounter along the way seem lifelike and convincingly more adaptive, a supportive part of the world’s connective tissue,

“Hondo’s wagon- the wooden flatbed of a twen-cen cargo truck chopped free from its cab and driven by a series of electric motors geared to the back wheels of three heavy drive chains- jounced and rattled as they rolled west out of Amarillo along the broken track of the old interstate.”

(…)

“ Hondo stood and unhooked the sacks of ancient solid-core twelve volts off which they typically ran the motors. The wagon halted and he ran a chord from the Hercs through an adapter Brood had jerry-rigged from an old stereo amp, and plugged that into the motors. Immediately the wagon jerked forward. Hondo made his way back, joining Brood at the tiller. He pushed the throttle forward. The wagon built speed, the Hercs pushing serious amps from barium nitrate cores.”

(p. 40-41)

Aside from Brood, there are two other perspectives present: a tough African American ex-Ranger turned government agent, Sienna Doss, and Sumedha, one of Satori’s high-ranking Designers.

The first holds the brunt of the book’s crunchy action, reminding me why its publisher has elevator-pitched this as a “military version of The Windup Girl”. (It’s no wonder Seed has been labeled in the same sector as Bacigalupi’s debut; it was his novel that got Nightshade Books turning heads in the first place, and Seed conveniently sits within its radius, in what critics are coming to call “ecopunk”.)

It’s nice to see a female effectively carry the epitome of American hoorah- Doss is positively badass in every fight- yet she is perhaps a bit too indifferent to the whole situation for me to really empathize with all the shit she deals with, even if she does it with the American patriotism of a war vet who clearly puts her country before herself. The pocket of government that she is hired by wasn’t described enough for me to ever really understand its political body (surely it consists of more than two representative people?) their motive, and their purpose in the story; it’s as if the author used them as a means to get Doss to go do something exciting, yet that plot thread resolves as quickly as the time it takes for her to be briefed on the assignment itself, which is all of one chapter. The second (Sumedha) acts as a conduit to give readers a sense of what Satori is and why it exists, exploring genetically manipulated plants and humanity’s reliance to nature, and though the living city stinks of weird and odd estrangement, the truth is clearly science fictional. Sumehda’s chapters are presented interestingly as a bizarre organic mind-trip towards alienation, and while that was interesting enough, he proved to be a cipher as an individual. This lack of connection to his perspective (one that was supposed to be all about Satori’s connection) was slightly frustrating.

However, these flaws are to be expected in a first novel; though looming, they never actually become issues that affect the product in any way, leaving the reader to enjoy a good story that can stand eye-to-eye with the best of the rest of the apocalyptic books that smudge store shelves. Rob Zeigler seems to have come out of nowhere; having little short stories to his name, he completely surprised me with Seed. It has the kind of angry storytelling found in novels that are disturbing but grow on you because of it- a pseudo blending of Paolo Bacigalupi, Harlan Ellison, and Richard K. Morgan- feral prose that, while not exactly ‘pretty’, fits with the decadent dangerousness of the American heartland shown on the page, and a varied, ethnic group of characters that go through their own circles of hell just to fight for the few things they have left worth fighting for.