Published by Tordotcom on May 31, 2022
These Prisoning Hills is a novella set in a postapocalyptic future. Christopher Rowe alludes to The First Athena War and related events in the novel’s past. He fills the reader in on a few details but never gets around to explaining how weaponized bears learned to fly. To be fair, Rowe has set other stories in the same future. I haven’t read them but I assume a reader who is more familiar with this future history will have a better grasp of the story’s background.
I did glean that an AI who integrated with a human declared war on the Federals. The AI called itself Athena Parthenos. Its forces occupied the Voluntary State of Tennessee. The AI is thought to have died or been vanquished before These Prisoning Hills begins.
The central character is Marcia. Flashbacks show the role she played in the war, having benefitted from some implanted technology that made the forces serving Athena Parthenos so fearful. That same technology is responsible for a variety of sentient combat machines, including massive “mechano-nano-biological creatures” called Commodores, not to be confused with Lionel Richie. Some of those machines are “dependents” that seed and fertilize the land, among other restoration or transformation projects.
Other oddities of the war years include rock monkeys that carry broadswords and a mystic Owl of the Bluegrass. The Owl wears a helmet and seems to be an owlish version of Hawkman, although the Owls are usually accompanied by crows. The Owl knows how to pass through the Girding Wall that separates North from South. Marcia needed that knowledge when she was sent on a rescue mission.
In the present, Marcia is a civilian bureaucrat employed by the Commonwealth, but the Federal military demands her return to service to act as a guide in the hill country, where a military team disappeared while investigating … something. Drones and low-orbit satellites that keep an eye on treaty states spotted an anomaly in quarantined territory that merited personal investigation. Once again faced with something that might be a rescue mission, the intrepid Marcia discovers a threat that had gone dormant. Events ensue that might force the Federals to reconsider the nature of dependents.
Without detailed knowledge of the earlier books, I couldn’t make much sense of the background to These Prisoning Hills. I nevertheless give Rowe credit for building an imaginative future and describing it in polished prose. Still, Rowe gives more attention to background than characterization. Marcia might be any reluctant soldier in any war. The ending is ambiguous, although ambiguity fits in with the story as a whole.
A longer story might have supplied a meatier plot and more depth of character than These Prisoning Hills achieves, but readers who enjoyed earlier works in the series will probably enjoy this one. For other readers, this is enough here to warrant a recommendation, but it might be best to start with related stories that appear in the collection Telling the Map.
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