As a frequent user of the library, many of my favorite Science Fiction Books I have read that were written in the 21st century were taken out from the Library. I decided I needed to have these books in my collection and take a deeper look at them. At this time, I do not have an actual ranking, but I am working through them, and one that will be high on that list is Carrie Vaughn’s Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel Bannerless.
Around the time the sequel, The Wild Dead, came out, I interviewed Carrie, the very first interview for the Dickheads podcast. I have often pointed to this novel as easily pitchable for TV. Mare of Easttown meets The Road—a murder mystery show set against a society on the California coast trying to rebuild after climate collapse. Many elements make this a compelling story, but the many messages naturally woven into the story (without coming off preachy) are what make this novel special.
Bannerless has very unique elements, mainly the time and setting. A few generations after an economic and environmental collapse along the California coast. Memory of our technological society is fading as the generations pass. The only technologies the community isolated from the rest of the world include a few solar-powered emergency vehicles. The birth control implants carefully maintain ecological balance.
Our main character, Enid, lives in a seemingly utopian village known as Haven. Her aunt, who had recently died, was the last to remember the time before. Enid is an investigator, the closest thing these villages have to law enforcement. The villages operate from an almost anarchist ideal of mutual aid, so the investigators are not often needed. They are mostly called to settle disputes.
The most important law is the one that balances the ecology. On the surface, this may seem ideal or utopian. The right to reproduce is tightly restricted by an implant that all women are given. Why this falls on the women is one of the things that keeps Haven from being ideal. What comes of those ideals to me is the idea that the entire community is organized tightly around what it will take to keep a tight balance with nature.
Haven is not a reflection of our culture; it is a new and different thing. Families are structured beyond what we think of as a nuclear family, and once they can prove they can support a child, they are given a Banner to hang outside their house. That banner is the permission. One of the biggest crimes in this world is having a Bannerless child. You have to consider this society as reformed after ours collapsed due to an inability to balance with nature. It informs the way they make up their families and laws.
“…Kath always remembered exactly when her parents died, exactly the last time she spoke with her brother, and exactly when she herself left the old world behind. Right to the end, she’d been able to tell stories about her friends, the people who’d helped her and taken care of her, and spoken of where and how they died, from accident, disease, or simple old age. The world might not remember, but she would.”
That almost mythical memory of the world before haunts the people of the coast road, who see the existence of children the land cannot support as the crime that ended civilization. Is how they handle it right or wrong – there is no easy answer in this novel.
The Banner system is imperfect as Enid will learn when she investigates a death at a nearby village; she learns the dead man was a Bannerless child. Through a series of flashbacks that parallel, we see Enid travel to the post-California ruins, which might be LA or the Bay area, not sure which. Enid’s travel partner Dak is a guitar-playing busker, and in their travels to ruins they see a very different kind of survival. “ Lots of skinny children running around. Lots of children. It shocked Enid, and she looked for where the banners would hang, on a wall or a line or a pole, but there weren't any banners. No implants.”
This is not exactly a pro-choice society; women do not have control over their bodies, but Enid believed in the system as it is. Unlike religious moral control, this is a pragmatic ecological position that is meant to save the greater culture. In the ruins she saw children starving, resources spread thin.
“Did you think of anyone else?” Enid had asked the folk of this household. “Did you think of the next generation that’ll have to work this land and wonder why they’re getting half the yield they should? Or the ones who’ll starve when the land gives up because you”—she had pointed at them, with two stiff fingers—“couldn’t be bothered to take care of it?”
This is as on the nose as the message gets, but many excellent points are made throughout the novel. Everything is complicated, not simple. Bannerless sets up a rich environment for story, very unique. A story we can compare to others but it is like nothing else. The dynamics of the collapse and the society that rebuilds in this very special location provide complications for the mystery that express challenging ideas. No matter your political leanings, there is much to chew on.
“The worst storms were the ones that changed you. The ones you remembered not for how bad they objectively were, but for how much damage they did to your own world. Banners, planted in memory.”
This novel operates as a mystery, but it also challenges readers with complicated warnings. Are Banners ultimately the salvation of the people? You’ll have to read it and consider for yourself.
While very worthy of the Philip K Dick Award, the author's work that Bannerless reminds me more of in tone and subject matter is Ursula Leguin. While Vaughn has her own voice, I mean this with the utmost respect. The Coast Road is a post-end-of-the-world setting, and there is a fine tradition of novels like this set in California like this, from Le Guin's Always Coming Home, Gene O'Neil's Cal Wild books, and Kim Stanley Robinson's Three Californias trilogy. Bannerless is a strong entry in this sub-genre.
To me, it is one of the SF novels of this century so far, not just because it rewarded a second read, although my second time through was just as powerful.
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