He sat with me for an hour. Fed me chocolate. Kept saying I was an idiot. I kept saying I was an idiot too, and that he was. I don’t know why we said that to each other so much all through our lives. Maybe because we both always knew we weren’t. Somehow he managed to make me laugh too. We both laughed. I can’t remember what about. Fear, euphoria — they’re weirdly close together sometimes.” (P. 298)

Dreamland by Rankin Gee Rosa - AbeBooks Dreamland by Rankin Gee Rosa - AbeBooks

It is proof that while these two qualities are often rendered as rose-tinted, heartwarmingly light and bright things, they are in fact incredibly robust and tenacious, as far from a sweet ditty in a cloying animated feature film as its possible to get. In the coastal resort of Margate, hotels lie empty and sun-faded ‘For Sale’ signs line the streets. The sea is higher – it’s higher everywhere – and those who can are moving inland. A young girl called Chance, however, is just arriving. There’s even a tubthumping fringe politician who “says it like it is” and keeps saying it like it is until he’s manoeuvred himself into power, ready to turn on the people he’d hoodwinked to get him there. It’s set in Margate in the near future. In the coastal resort of Margate, hotels lie empty and sun-faded ‘For Sale’ signs line the streets. The sea is higher – it’s higher everywhere – and those who can are moving inland. A young girl called Chance, however, is just arriving. That book is very different in tone, but it’s similar in its brilliance, and that you have a female narrator in her teens. In How I Live Now, the narrator’s mum has died and her dad has sent her to England to stay with her cousins who are wild marauders who live in a large country house. War breaks out while she’s there. The interesting thing in this novel is that—unlike Ann in Z is for Zachariah who is quite self-contained and quite spartan throughout—the How I Live Now narrator has very teenage preoccupations and energy and spunk, and the war is happening at great remove from them until it suddenly intervenes.It took Rosa 7 years to write this novel. I’m guessing a lot of the time was spent polishing the similes, which are laid out aplenty and are very good. It’s the first novel I read where COVID-19 is mentioned – it must have been worked into the plot towards the end, just before the final proofs were signed off. Here are some of the similes I really liked: Pessimistic forecasts put 2037, which is where the main part of the story takes place, at 2 ft+, but it’s not linear or predictable. There are lots of terrifying potential tipping points. Steady declines, and then cliff-edges. I looked out of the window and along the coast. There was this spreading out of light, all of it like fern unfolding in a nature documentary.” Dreamland is a harrowing look into what happens when your country gives up on you and removes its responsibility for citizens as a whole. London is aptly described as a "fourth world country" by the protagonist. The story begins when Chance and her family receive a monetary incentive to move out of London to the deprived seaside town of Margate. New laws slowly come into place including Localisation, which is the total divestment of control to local councils. The result - abject poverty. What kept me going was Chance, the main character of the book. The book is filled with complicated, difficult to like people but Chance loves all of them in her own way. She has this desperate desire to trust and to help, even when it's clear that she shouldn't. Nobody thanks for it and it ends up hurting her in many different ways, each more heartbreaking than the last. But her perseverance and loving heart is properly inspiring.

Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee | Goodreads Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee | Goodreads

I’m not an AI scientist, but it feels very convincing to me. The discussion takes the form of instant messaging, kind of like a Gchat transcript, between these two researchers. And it feels very human, very sure-footed the whole way through. Another frustration I can feel is that, often, the books without hope are considered stronger or more literary or realer—as if the books with hope have somehow been airbrushed. But I think the latter are actually more realistic. Dreamland’s main problem is tangential to this, and more specifically to do with its use of speculative materials. Rankin-Gee’s novel is no cosy catastrophe, and its focus on communities, on the fraying social fabric of a divided nation, is to be commended. However, as a regular reader of science fiction I feel like I’ve read literally dozens of novels like this, stories that follow the same basic trajectory: things were kind of OK for us, then they got worse, then some unprecedented event from outside (asteroid strike, Kraken, zombie war, megatsunami, whatever) made things so much worse. And they kept on getting worse until we died or were saved. Rosa: A book takes a long time! Or it does for me anyway. You have to be interested in – close to obsessed with – so many different elements of the world and story to get through the marathon of it. Place was, as it often is for me, the starting point. Margate, past and present, weird and hard and beautiful, emblematic of the tidal high-and-low nature of the British seaside. I knew I wanted to write that. I knew I wanted it to be in the close future, I knew I wanted to write a love story between two young women, and really try and pin down in words the extraordinary, blinding power of that. The abject horror of current political leaders, and the way the class system affects every element of life in Britain – I want to write socially realistic novels, so those things can’t be avoided. And throughout this accomplished book, the reader is frequently reminded that a new empire is relentlessly extending its sinister reach – the superpower that is China, exploiting every opportunity to gain power and undermine its rival, the US.Franky’s arrival awakens something long lost, if it was ever present at all, in Chance, the sense that one person can unconditionally change your life and make it better in a way that a hundred broken-into homes cannot. This combination of circumstances built over time to turn Thanet into somewhere ripe for exploitation by populist dog-whistlers. The region became fertile ground for UKIP to the extent that in 2014 an in-depth analysis of the area’s issues in the London Review of Books was titled “In Farageland”. The Australians also face the challenge of climate change and the risk of large-scale population shifts. Marshall explores the fascinating possibility of governments being forced to build new major cities on more hospitable territory.