With more than seven billion people on this teeming planet, it’s hard to imagine the times when the earth’s population was much smaller. In the afterword of his new novel, The Ancients, John Larison writes that he took his inspiration from a period in our species’ history about 195,000 years ago. Rapid climate change pushed humanity to a small corner of what is now South Africa, where they weathered desertification until more favorable conditions returned. The handful of primary characters in this novel are pushed to and fro by rising sands and tides, declining schools of fish and herds of elk, and worse in a world that might be a future version of our own.
The Ancients opens with two children whose parents have disappeared. This would be distressing enough if it weren’t for the fact that the only adult in the vicinity is their older sister. The village that used to be full of friends and family left a few years earlier to follow the elk herds that sustained them. The children—Maren and Kushim, and older sister Leerit—stayed behind because their parents told them that the fish and elk would come back. When their parents fail to return the next day, the trio set off after the village. Meanwhile, chapters that follow Lilah reveal what happened to the children’s parents. Their father was murdered by slavers and Lilah shipped to a surprisingly large city somewhere to the south. Another protagonist, Cyrus, finds himself struggling to step into his deceased father’s shoes and burdened by an impossible task laid on him by the emperor of the sprawling city and its withering territory.
Each of these perspectives shows us the different pressures an increasingly inhospitable landscape puts on the people who try to live there. The children struggle to find food, water, and shelter as they follow what they hope is the village’s route to the elk herds. Disaster strikes when an equally hungry and desperate bear attacks. Lilah is enslaved by people who haven’t quite realized that their current way of life isn’t sustainable anymore. Only people like Lilah—slaves and poorly paid laborers—know that it’s all going to end in starvation or revolution (or both). Cyrus is one of the people who, at the beginning of the book, has no idea how bad things are until he steps out of his privileged upbringing and really see what life is like for the lower classes.
Larison takes his time bringing these characters together. The slow burn of the plot only starts to speed up towards the end but I’m glad that this story takes its time. As I read about Leerit, Maren, and Kushim, I got a strong sense of what it might mean to live so close to the earth that people would have to follow their prey in order to live another season. Lilah and Cyrus’s chapters aren’t any less stressful. The stresses of living in a big city are different but even these characters start to wonder where their next meal is coming from.
There are hints that the world these characters inhabit is some version of our own. Cyrus comments on the plastic beads in his mother’s tiaras and the plastic mines in the hills and mountains around the unnamed city. Later, he is shown a battered document that leads him to question the empire’s origin myth. Kushim and his sisters discover a metal structure that made me think of the reentry capsules that astronauts return to Earth in. The world wasn’t always as harsh as it is in The Ancients, though none of the characters have any idea of what life was like before or what might’ve happened to change the environment so drastically. Readers who are more au fait with climate change will have more than a few guesses. The Ancients manages to avoid falling into the trap of preachiness and even, to my surprise, offers a bit of hope that humanity might figure out a way to band together to survive the worst the weather can throw at us.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.
