James Nicoll Reviews

Claudia O’Keefe’s 1990 Black Snow Days is a stand-alone post-apocalypse novel. Black Snow Days was the eleventh debut novel published in the Third Ace Science Fiction Specials. Editorship of the series was assumed by Damon Knight following the untimely death of editor Terry Carr.

Eric Pope was cognitively enhanced by his mother (whom Eric unsurprisingly thinks of as Mother); she feared that her son might other languish with a merely average intelligence. Eric Pope didn’t choose to be who he is and expresses his discontent by behaving badly. His story comes to an abrupt and violent end as an ill-considered car race ends in a catastrophic crash.

Cut to 2058.… 

Eric wakes from a twelve-year coma to discover that Mother was not content to leave Eric a shattered ruin. While Eric was unconscious, missing limbs were replaced, wounds were healed, and his resistance to environmental harm enhanced. His mother even managed to upgrade Eric’s already impressive cognitive architecture. She couldn’t do anything about his deep-seated angst, which would no doubt have been be a huge disappointment to her if (by the time Eric woke) Mother were still alive.

Shortly before Eric returned to the world of the waking, mistakes were made. Having spent more than a century on the brink of nuclear war, the world finally stumbled into a global thermonuclear exchange. Most humans died, either immediately or in the horrific aftermath. Eric’s mother was among the casualties. Eric (and his doctors) survived only thanks to the medical facility in which they cower.

Most people stop actively shaping world history once they’re dead. Eric’s mother, on the other hand, saw opportunity in the war and being one of its victims wasn’t going to stop her from putting her plans into action. For her plan to come into fruition, Eric will have to make an epic cross-continental journey. Eric isn’t a willing participant but, as so often was true in his life, the durable young man doesn’t get a choice.

Eric discovers he shares his mind with a phantom, an imaginary woman named Vivian. Subjected to Vivian’s relentless prompting, Eric leaves the safety of the facility and begins a long car ride. Between him and his destination lie many kilometres of radiation-soaked ruins, desperate survivors, and the occasional incoming nuclear weapon from a war somehow not quite finished. Death would be sweet release. Of course, Eric isn’t that lucky.

~oOo~

This may seem an unnecessary warning for readers of a novel in which a considerable fraction of Earth’s life is expunged, but … there’s some violence to animals that readers may find off-putting.

Mother is the sort of person who in other novels would have been the protagonist. Faced with a potentially disappointing son, she resolutely provides him with the enhanced abilities a son of hers should have had. Unable to do anything about his disappointing personality, she provides him with a mental companion, and an automated car that follows her directives. Death itself cannot prevent her from working to rebuild the world according to her exacting standards.

Unfortunately for the reader, Eric’s mother isn’t the protagonist. Eric is. Any time at all spent with Eric makes it clear just why she felt the need to comprehensively upgrade him. The only things he’s really good at? Self-pity and poor life choices. Too bad for the world that so much depends on him.

The rest of the cast is nearly as unlikable. Unlike Eric, however, they have the reasonable excuse that by the time Eric wakes, most of them have lost their entire families and are aware their survival in the cold, radiation-and-disease-raddled world of 2058 is likely temporary. They’re traumatized. Eric is just spoiled.

Readers may wonder why Mother opted for the convoluted method she did, and why she depended on Eric when better tools were not only at hand but necessary to ensure his success. However, what is extremely clear is the bleak, hopeless nature of the world following the exchange. Doomsday is, it seems, not fun at all.

Although Black Snow Days managed to place sixth in the Locus Best First Novel competition¹, I cannot say I loved it. Still, points for never wavering from its tale of an irritable grump forced against his will to get out of his mother’s basement and out into a horrible world.

Black Snow Days is very much out of print².

1: Edged out by In the Country of the Blind by Michael F. Flynn, Winterlong by Elizabeth Hand, Arachneby Lisa Mason, Golden Fleece by Robert J. Sawyer, and An Abyss of Light by Kathleen M. O’Neal.

2: Although this is a very small set, there’s a definite correlation between an author’s debut in the Third Ace Specials being out of print and that author having had no further novels (3).

3: Howard Waldrop is a weird edge case, as his other novel predated his Third Ace Special entry. As I understand it, Carr argued that since Waldrop’s previous novel had been co-authored, it didn’t count as a debut.