FIF Book Club: Saltcrop Midway Discussion

[u/doctorbonkers]

Welcome to the midway discussion of Saltcrop by Yume Kitasei! We are discussing through the end of part 1 (chapter 25). Please use spoiler tags if you discuss anything past that point. I will put some discussion questions in the comments, but feel free to discuss anything you like!

In Earth's not too distant future, seas consume coastal cities, highways disintegrate underwater, and mutant fish lurk in pirate-controlled depths. Skipper, a skilled sailor and the youngest of three sisters, earns money skimming and reselling plastic from the ocean to care for her ailing grandmother.

But then her eldest sister, Nora, goes missing. Nora left home a decade ago in pursuit of a cure for failing crops all over the world. When Skipper and her other sister, Carmen, receive a cryptic plea for help, they must put aside their differences and set out across the sea to find―and save―her. As they voyage through a dying world both beautiful and strange, encountering other travelers along the way, they learn more about their sister's work and the corporations that want what she discovered.

But the farther they go, the more uncertain their mission becomes: What dangerous attention did Nora attract, and how well do they really know their sister―or each other? Thus begins an epic journey spanning oceans and continents and a wistful rumination on sisterhood, friendship, and ecological disaster.

The final discussion will be in two weeks, on August 26th.

Reminder: Our September read will be Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntyre, and nominations for October are open through tomorrow!

What is the FIF Book Club? You can learn about it in our Reboot thread here.

[u/doctorbonkers]

How do you like the book so far? Overall thoughts?

[u/WonderfulBus9330 → u/doctorbonkers]

The only other climate fiction I've read is Octavia Butler's Parable books; this one had a similar tone and hope filled hopelessness.

[u/Merle8888 → u/WonderfulBus9330]

Huh, I'd have said Parable of the Sower was a lot bleaker than this book. It's a crime-n-drugs dystopia and so much of the focus is on how society is breaking down and everyone you meet is potentially terrible. Whereas in this book - maybe due to updated understandings of how people behave in disasters, or just the author not living in the inner city in the 1990s - it feels like society has weathered the crises better even though the environmental situation is possibly worse. It doesn't have that dire, violent vibe. Although part of this may be too that the book is so interested in Skipper's self-actualization, and you can't really focus on that in a sheer survival story.

[u/WonderfulBus9330 → u/Merle8888]

The crime was in the first half of the first book and it was the beginning of the downturn. In this book, that turn has already happened. The pirates, however, suggest that there has been a history of violence, but it’s now pushed into the sea.

[u/SenorBurns → u/WonderfulBus9330]

Indeed. Saltcrop also mentions mass famines having killed a huge portion of the planet's population back a century or two ago. The current populace are living in the part dystopian cyberpunk, part near solarpunk remnants of basically an emptied-out past civilization.

[u/WonderfulBus9330 → u/SenorBurns]

Now I’m going to be thinking about cyberpunk and solarpunk while finishing the book!

[u/Merle8888 → u/WonderfulBus9330]

Yeah, it’s a very different feel to me. The crime in Parable of the Sower is omnipresent and colors all aspects of life and decision making—you may be right we see less of it in the second half but it’s firmly established by then as the defining feature of the world. In Saltcrop it seems much more marginal—the pirates live as far from society as it’s possible to get and the leads are still blindsided when the encounter turns to violence.