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Home is a Verb
Our climate has been transformed, and so have we. We can’t go back to who we were, and we wouldn’t want to. My life now is spent between the land and the sea. The walls of my cave are cool on the warmest of days, and wave-song enters my dreams at night. My closest friends are gulls and the salty wind.
The world turns again.
Leaving home feels like danger, but there are forces stronger than fear. And my gut knows – in the way that bodies always know – there are more changes to come.
The air is never the same twice.
This new novel from speculative fiction author and ecologist, Kes Otter Lieffe, explores burnout and despair, collective collapse and recovery.
In a shifting world, marginalised characters must face their traumas and embrace change. In their search for healing, they are brought together, finding home in the least expected of places.
The world turns again.
Leaving home feels like danger, but there are forces stronger than fear. And my gut knows – in the way that bodies always know – there are more changes to come.
The air is never the same twice.
This new novel from speculative fiction author and ecologist, Kes Otter Lieffe, explores burnout and despair, collective collapse and recovery.
In a shifting world, marginalised characters must face their traumas and embrace change. In their search for healing, they are brought together, finding home in the least expected of places.
- GenresQueer
230 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2023
1 person is currently reading
44 people want to read
About the author
Otter Lieffe
8 books62 followersKes Otter Lieffe is a writer, ecologist, and community organiser currently based near Berlin. She is the author of a trilogy of queer speculative fiction novels, several short stories, and a colouring book series on queer ecology. Kes writes from a working-class, chronically ill, transfeminine perspective.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 25, 2024
I loved many things about this and disliked also quite a few.
It is an utopic story in a dystopian end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it context, a story full with anarcho-communist style grassroots organizing amidst the fall of capitalism.
I think there are several lacking narrative choices that made this novel feel more like a sketch sometimes than a polished final whole. For example, it is weird that the main character has no other friends than Adam, a flat mate, and there is no reflection on this at all. The villagers live on complex constructions on trees, but somehow I feel it would be impossible to make these constructs and the worldbuilding is not justifying how this technology is possible.
However, there are several things I loved. First of all, it is a story putting transfemme characters in the focus. A disability-perspective is also very well developed in the storyline, especially about the accessibility issues of community organizing. The reflections of the main character are written with much care and nonviolent communication is present in most instances of human interaction after and during the Shift. It is also an antispeciesist story where human-people learn to co-habitate in more just ways with other-people (they are even called like that, human-people and other-people). It is not a vegan story tho, but transition from capitalism towards anarchic organizations of societies is complex and care is centred in all human-non-human interactions in the novel. There is a lot of care about how the novel talks about gender and I loved how the gender of characters is not asumed and binaries are dismantled, a queer perspective prevails.
Overall I think it is of utmost importance to come up with stories that imagine the end of the world as we know it, that imagine the end of capitalism, AND at the same times also imagine transformation and change towards just multispecies societies after capitalism. There are many dystopic stories around us in mainstream media and very few utopic ones. It is also very hard to imagine utopias and a lot of care is needed not to imagine an utopia of the few but which is a dystopia of others. I highly appreciate this transformative endeavor and at the same time I feel the lack of more development in the writing and storyline.
It is an utopic story in a dystopian end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it context, a story full with anarcho-communist style grassroots organizing amidst the fall of capitalism.
I think there are several lacking narrative choices that made this novel feel more like a sketch sometimes than a polished final whole. For example, it is weird that the main character has no other friends than Adam, a flat mate, and there is no reflection on this at all. The villagers live on complex constructions on trees, but somehow I feel it would be impossible to make these constructs and the worldbuilding is not justifying how this technology is possible.
However, there are several things I loved. First of all, it is a story putting transfemme characters in the focus. A disability-perspective is also very well developed in the storyline, especially about the accessibility issues of community organizing. The reflections of the main character are written with much care and nonviolent communication is present in most instances of human interaction after and during the Shift. It is also an antispeciesist story where human-people learn to co-habitate in more just ways with other-people (they are even called like that, human-people and other-people). It is not a vegan story tho, but transition from capitalism towards anarchic organizations of societies is complex and care is centred in all human-non-human interactions in the novel. There is a lot of care about how the novel talks about gender and I loved how the gender of characters is not asumed and binaries are dismantled, a queer perspective prevails.
Overall I think it is of utmost importance to come up with stories that imagine the end of the world as we know it, that imagine the end of capitalism, AND at the same times also imagine transformation and change towards just multispecies societies after capitalism. There are many dystopic stories around us in mainstream media and very few utopic ones. It is also very hard to imagine utopias and a lot of care is needed not to imagine an utopia of the few but which is a dystopia of others. I highly appreciate this transformative endeavor and at the same time I feel the lack of more development in the writing and storyline.
Displaying 1 of 1 review