Welcome to the Speculative Chic Book Club! Each month, we invite you to join us in reading a book that will sometimes be picked beforehand and sometimes be voted on by you, our readers. We’re still working on the format, so following the review of the book and some starter questions, we invite you all to discuss your thoughts in the comments.

Bannerless (2017)
Written by: Carrie Vaughn Pages: 290 (Trade Paperback)

Series: The Bannerless Saga Book 1

Publisher: Mariner Books

Why I Chose It For Book Club: I’m trying, at least at first, to keep the books to an easy read. Not all of us read at the same pace or have the same amount of free time to devote, and at 290 pages this wouldn’t be too big of a time investment. Plus, Carrie Vaughn’s Hugo nominated short story “The Games We Played During the War” reminded me that I quite like her writing and I wanted to read more.

Premise:

Decades after economic and environmental collapse destroys much of civilization in the United States, the Coast Road region isn’t just surviving but thriving by some accounts, building something new on the ruins of what came before. A culture of population control has developed in which people, organized into households, must earn the children they bear by proving they can take care of them and are awarded symbolic banners to demonstrate this privilege. In the meantime, birth control is mandatory.

Enid of Haven is an Investigator, called on to mediate disputes and examine transgressions against the community. She’s young for the job and hasn’t yet handled a serious case. Now, though, a suspicious death requires her attention. The victim was an outcast, but might someone have taken dislike a step further and murdered him?

In a world defined by the disasters that happened a century before, the past is always present. But this investigation may reveal the cracks in Enid’s world and make her question what she really stands for.

This review is spoiler-free.

Discussion: This book is an incredible bit of worldbuilding in the small number of pages it has at hand. No, we aren’t given the nature of the Fall of civilization, but we are shown its effects on the population, and how the Coast Road in particular has carved civilization out of the ruins. We’re shown this both in the present narration, which is the murder investigation, and the past storyline, which is woven into the present storyline through interweaving chapters and is about a trip that Enid takes with an itinerant musician in her youth.

Grown-up Enid is an Investigator, a law enforcement role that takes the place of police, jury, and judge. She and her partner are called down the Coast Road to investigate this murder, and one of the inhabitants of the town happens to be a man she knew long ago. The murder investigation is not the strongest part of this story, though it was interesting to see civilian reaction to Investigators, as they are sort of given ultimate power in this scenario.

Bannerless is a quiet story. There’s not a lot of bombast, there’s no epic battles for survival against impossible odds. Society has already been reborn, of a sort, in this agrarian ideal. It reminded me a lot of Station Eleven, though that book had more depth and breadth than this did. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Bannerless is that the society created in this post-apocalyptic era isn’t dystopian, it’s a society that actually works for its occupants and is based on trust, sharing, and responsibility. For all that it’s about a post-apocalyptic world, it’s ultimately a rather hopeful ending for civilization, that something of it might survive, in however strict a society.

Discussion topics: (A reminder, these are just a jumping off point for discussion, and you don’t need to actually answer them to comment. You can just kick off with whatever floats your boat in the comments!)

  1. I actually really liked the way the plot jumped back and forth between the present and the past. It was an effective way to draw out the world building without having to do narrative dumps. But based on a perusal of Goodreads, that device can be divisive. Do you think it helped or hurt the narrative to jump around in time? What did you especially like or dislike about the jumps? Was the past narrative truly necessary to understanding the murder investigation?
  1. There were a few aspects of the book that I didn’t necessarily think were the best thought through. The fact that a lot of their police work was based on guesswork because no one had survived that could tell them how to do it, but does that actually make sense? Literally no cop survived? Anyone who had ever mainlined one of the ubiquitous formula police procedural shows? And the solar cars? How is this society able to keep solar powered machines going for decades with no means of manufacturing replacement parts? Was there anything that stuck out like that for you?
  1. Strict population control has been done before, probably most famously in A Brave New World. It’s generally shown in a negative light though, where Bannerless clearly contrasts the almost utopian society of the Coast Road with those starving further south in the city with unchecked population growth. What other ways is this shown to be a good thing? Is population control like this sustainable over time? What are the benefits to a society like the Coast Road?

November is National Novel Writing Month! For this month, we’re choosing from past NaNoWriMo projects. Pick your poison!