The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 19 June 2008
by Pat Murphy
Another global plague has hit planet Earth, wiping out very close to all of the population. In San Francisco, once a city of 750,000 people, only a hundred or so remain. The plague came about as a dire side affect of a sincere, if naive, attempt to bring symbols of peace to people all over the world. The result, of course, is a vast ruin of civilization. In The City of the title, the survivors comprise an anarchic village of artists, free-thinkers and creative tinkerers. They are symbolic of this city's image of itself. From the outside, though, San Franciscans, even after this brutal plague, are seen as too liberal, too funky, too much the free-thinkers. A group of more or less fascist military types from the far more conservative San Joaquin Valley are trying to reassemble their own vision of America, and decide that subjugating or destroying San Francisco is a necessary step in that project. (OK, so enough of this sounds enough like present-day politics. Aren't we all supposed to be terrified of "San Francisco values"?) This is the story of a young woman, just a teenager, who is born in the days after the plague wipes out everyone else. She lives in the valley, but her mother is from the city. Eventually, she too ends up in the city, where she meets Danny-boy and a number of other offbeat characters who make their art and their home in the ruins of downtown San Francisco. Danny-boy, for instance, is just getting ready to repaint the entire Golden Gate Bridge in shades of blue. The girl comes to the city to warn the inhabitants that war is coming their way. Their reaction is as low-key and offbeat as their lifestyle in the ruins. The city itself is haunted by the ghosts of all those sudden deaths. Eerie creatures, some of them manufactured, lurk in the empty streets. There is a mechanical angel looking over everyone, and monkeys like little shadows. There, also, the girl is mystically given her name, Jax, written in Scrabble tiles abandoned in a Nob Hill house. Pat Murphy, in an afterword, tells us that she based a lot of her book on the spirit of the artists and scientists who run the Exploratorium, a science museum in San Francisco. This reader, himself, worked at the Exploratorium back in the 1980s (this book was first published in 1989), and recognized some of the characters, names in the acknowledgments and the overall tone and personality of the story. What results is a science-fiction story with a very definite personality of its own. It is infused with the character of the city, the kind of place it is and its specific landscape. Something very much like this has been done before, in both George Stewart's Earth Abides and Jack London's The Scarlet Plague, and is also reminiscent of Kim Stanley Robinson's Three Californias trilogy. The telling of life during and after the plague is vivid, and life after the plague, and even during the war, quirky and ghostly. The "magical realism" aspects of the story are less convincing, but the overall tale is an engaging fantasy.
See Also: [Earth Abides by George Stewart] [The Wild Shore by Kim Stanley Robinson]