Strange Labour
a novel by Robert G. Penner
Available from Radiant Press Chapters Indigo Amazon
The story of a world in which almost everyone has left the cities and the towns to work themselves to death in the construction of monumental earthworks. The only adults unaffected by this mysterious obsession are a dwindling population that survives in the margins of a new society they cannot understand. Isolated in an increasingly deserted landscape, living off the material remnants of the old order, trapped in antiquated habits and assumptions, they struggle to construct a meaningful future for themselves.
One of them, a young woman called Miranda, travels across what had once been the American West, meeting people who, like herself, are trying to make sense of their situation, and who, like her, fail to do so. Strange Labour is a mesmerizing and uncanny meditation on the meaning of humanity in a universe that is indifferent to our extinction and a provocative reimagining of many of the tropes and clichés that have shaped the post-apocalyptic novel.
Praise and Reviews
Publishers Weekly :
One of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books 2020! “With this brilliant debut, Penner thoughtfully upends the tropes of postapocalyptic fiction” — Read the full review
Strange Horizons :
"This novel’s strength and readability lie in the way Penner shows humanity searching for explanations... [He] suggests that the deep and lasting anxiety at the heart of the ‘post-apocalypse’ is that we might not even comprehend the Apocalypse when it comes along." — Read the full review
Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars Trilogy :
“This is one of those powerful science fiction novels that is both intensely realistic and strikingly symbolic at one and the same time; a marvelous accomplishment, written so beautifully as to be etched on the eyeballs.”
Sofia Samatar, author of A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories :
“A post-apocalyptic road novel with the gnomic quality of a parable, Strange Labour shimmers with a meaning just beyond reach.”
David Bergen, award-winning author of The Time in Between :
“What a vision this novel has. It is at once startling, smart, dark, and full of ache and humour. An amazingly spot-on evocation of our times. I cannot help but use the novel’s last line to say that it made me ‘inexpressibly, unaccountably happy.’ Brilliant.”
Rudy Rucker, author of The Ware Tetralogy, Philip K. Dick Award winner :
“Robert Penner’s Strange Labour is a road novel of crystalline exuberance — populated by mindless diggers, resourceful scrabblers, evil drifters, and the heroic Miranda. In the majority are the diggers, eternally bulldozing vast earth-works: cryptic nests of grooves that fill valleys with fluid patterns. Might the diggers be an objective correlative for today’s info-tech workers? Individualists tend small farms or scavenge the deserted towns. Mad-Max-style bikers roam the the landscape with dog-skulls on their handlebars. Resourceful Miranda has our sympathy throughout. Penner adorns his narrative with poetic evocations of this fallen world. A sample: “The sun did not so much rise above the scene, over the dark serration of the treetops, as it formed there, a growing intricacy of light, a concentration of heat and energy drawn up from the world around it, a vortex.” Strange Labour is a book to savor and to love.”
Christopher Brown, author of Tropic of Kansas and Failed State :
“Strange Labor is a beautifully written and intensely smart journey through an abandoned America peopled with fascinating characters who conjure the folklore of the future in the flickering light of frontage road campfires. It captivates you with the charismatic melancholy of its penetrating voice, and takes you right to the edge of the revelatory, in a story that combines gritty realism with the long echoes of deep history and the alienated apocalypse of the right now.”
Natalia Theodoridou, winner of the 2018 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction :
“Penner proposes an original, quiet apocalypse of labor that resists comprehension; a great metaphor for our socioeconomic predicament. But also much more than that: a bleak, beautiful, even — why not? — inspiring vision of humanity's future. In what feels like an echo of our post-post-world, human industry — and the mythology around it — is driven to absurdity. This is the evolution of humans into creatures defined by their labor: a new evolutionary directive, a novel organization of the human psyche. The origin story of a new species told from the perspective of those bound for extinction. Brilliantly, it's the diggers, the non-violent turned, the meek plagued who are organized and efficient. At least they're building something new. The rest, the survivors, are decaying, self-destructing, clinging uselessly to their ghosts. The novel bears quiet witness to the extinction of the bourgeoisie and the strange labor of an apocalyptic proletariat.”
Steven Shaviro, author of The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism and Discognition :
“What do you do when it's after the end of the world? What does it mean to survive the annihilation of everything you formerly took for granted? Strange Labour offers us a beautiful, wavering meditation on these questions. The novel moves through all the usual post-apocalyptic fantasies — a romantic road trip among the ruins, a desperate clinging to vestiges of the past, new forms of community — but it finds all of them wanting. It's a book whose tone continually changes: lucid and observant at some moments, harshly pragmatic at others, and dreamy and dissociated at still others. We are left at the end neither with hope nor despair, but perhaps with a vague sense of making do that is more valuable than either.”
Robert Kiely, author of simmering of a declarative void :
“What strange labour are care work and companionship, folklore-ing and child-rearing. How obliquely they appear in whatever it is we sometimes call SF. What is it that stops anyone from doing only this social work, only what needs to be done? Robert Penner’s wonderful novel brings this work front and centre. A woman wanders the desolate US, stays at a care home, meets a man and travels with him, they briefly stay at a commune of liberal aesthetes, then make their way to a camp named Big Echo. Miranda and Dave, Dave and Miranda, Dave delivering improvisational yarns, Miranda accruing eerie topographic patternings, Dave telling stories, Miranda telling stories. Digging, getting down, they try to avoid the overtly and not so overtly fascistic remnants of what was. Where does that get them? Miranda says to Dave, at one point, that there is nothing post-apocalyptic about violent men getting what they want. The problems, they are the same. There is nothing post-apocalyptic about this novel. And yet it devastates me”
Mark Bould, author M. John Harrison: Critical Essays and The Anthropocene Unconscious :
“With crystal clear prose and exquisite restraint, Strange Labour conjures an apocalypse and an aftermath, the meanings of which are always just beyond reach. As Miranda road trips across the US, she meets multiple survivors, all desperate to retain purpose in a world which is no longer and can never again be the same. Can they escape the spectral structures of the past? Do their actions matter? Do ours?”
Chauna Craig, author of The Widow’s Guide to Edible Mushrooms :
“Though Westerners often flock to post-apocalyptic tales for escapist entertainment, this novel takes us where the best literature always does: into the heart of our own darkness. Strange Labour is a story about stories — what we tell ourselves, what we tell others, and what kind of endings humans are willing to endure. Robert Penner has crafted a compelling, disturbing vision, not only of a bleak American future stripped of any real sense of purpose, but of the questionable values and comforting lies defining the current cultural landscape.”
Robert Minto, published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Interzone, Beneath Ceaseless Skies :
Strange Labor is a post-apocalyptic road trip story. It's also a tour of the political subconscious of American capitalism. The two levels of the novel exist gracefully side by side in a narrative that wends its way matter-of-factly between whispered riddles, unknown hieroglyphs, and the musing dialogues of its damaged and searching characters. I loved it.
James Tate Hill, author of Academy Gothic :
I want to tell you Strange Labour is beautiful and original and wise, and it is, but I’d rather tell you how much fun I had reading it. Penner’s world filled me with the teenage wonder of my favorite video games.