Skip to Content
Radiant Press
Home
About
News
Submissions
Ordering
Contact
Shop
Shop All Books
Shop By Author & Title
Recent Releases
Fiction
Creative Non-fiction
Poetry
Sale
Ebooks
Subscription
🔍
0
0
Radiant Press
Home
About
News
Submissions
Ordering
Contact
Shop
Shop All Books
Shop By Author & Title
Recent Releases
Fiction
Creative Non-fiction
Poetry
Sale
Ebooks
Subscription
🔍
0
0
Home
About
News
Submissions
Ordering
Contact
Folder: Shop
Back
Shop All Books
Shop By Author & Title
Recent Releases
Fiction
Creative Non-fiction
Poetry
Sale
Ebooks
Subscription
🔍
Shop Strange Labour
104489120_10158539253056613_4299791687481388071_n.jpg Image 1 of
104489120_10158539253056613_4299791687481388071_n.jpg
104489120_10158539253056613_4299791687481388071_n.jpg

Strange Labour

$22.00

by Robert G. Penner

Paperback (Fiction)
8.5" x 5.25" · 212 pages
Release Date: September 2020
ISBN 9781989274354

Buy the eBook version.

Quantity:
Add To Cart

by Robert G. Penner

Paperback (Fiction)
8.5" x 5.25" · 212 pages
Release Date: September 2020
ISBN 9781989274354

Buy the eBook version.

by Robert G. Penner

Paperback (Fiction)
8.5" x 5.25" · 212 pages
Release Date: September 2020
ISBN 9781989274354

Buy the eBook version.

The majority of the global population have left the cities and towns to become diggers and work themselves to death in the construction of monumental earthworks. The adults unaffected by this mysterious obsession are part of a dwindling population that survives in the margins of a new society, struggling to construct a meaningful future for themselves. Miranda travels alone across what had once been the American West. After taking care of, and then abandoning a group of dementia patients, she meets Dave, who becomes her travelling companion. Dave recounts his many theories about how and why the apocalypse happened, as they search among the dispossessed for a place called Big Echo. A mesmerizing and uncanny meditation on the meaning of humanity in a universe indifferent to our extinction. This is the unforgettable first novel of Robert G. Penner.

“A post-apocalyptic road novel with the gnomic quality of a parable, Strange Labour shimmers with a meaning just beyond reach.”
— Sofia Samatar, author of A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories and winner of the World Fantasy Award
“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.”
— Robert Kiely, Poet-in-Residence at University of Surrey, Guilford, England.\
“Penner proposes an original, quiet apocalypse of labour that resists comprehension; a great metaphor for our socioeconomic predicament. But also much more than that: a bleak, beautiful, even 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 labour: 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 labour of an apocalyptic proletariat.”
— Natalia Theodoridou, winner of the 2018 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction and the 2018 Nebula Award Finalist
“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 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 savour and to love.”
— Rudy Rucker, author of The Ware Tetralogy
“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.”
— David Bergen, Giller Prize-winning author of The Time in Between and Here the Dark
“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 roadtrips 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?”
— Mark Bould, author of The Anthropocene Unconscious

Robert G. Penner

Robert G. Penner is a Canadian living in western Pennsylvania. He has published short stories in numerous speculative and literary fiction journals under various pseudonyms and is the founder and editor of Big Echo: Critical Science Fiction (bigecho.org). He is on twitter @billsquirrell.

You Might Also Like

cover+final+Adam's+Tree+June+28.jpg
Adam's Tree
$22.00
Danceland Diary
Danceland Diary
$22.00
All the World's a Wonder
All the World's a Wonder
$25.00
glimmer-+final+cover+(1).jpeg
Glimmer
$22.00
I Think We've Been Here Before
I Think We've Been Here Before
$25.00

back to top

 
 

We gratefully acknowledge the support of

 
 

Radiant Press is a literary press located on Treaty 4 territory in Regina, Saskatchewan.

Designed by Elan Morgan.