In part this is because such dystopian novels lack the sense of hope and wonder he considers core to good speculative fiction, and also because it seems to be much easier to write them badly than it is to do well.
The two novels that are the subject of this review, Find Me and The Dead Lands, are examples of the best and worst this genre has to offer.
Although they both send their central characters on a quest across plague-ravaged America, the first is an intense, tightly written and thoroughly absorbing novel I found very hard to put down, while the second is a sprawling, poorly paced narrative intended for maximum shock value and, I suspect, screen adaptation.
Laura van den Berg has already published two well-received short story collections and her debut novel, Find Me, is an accomplished, intense and moving exploration of memory and identity.
It opens in an isolated hospital in the heart of Kansas where doctors are desperately seeking for a cure for a highly contagious and lethal virus.
Our narrator, Joy Jones, is one of the research subjects, selected because she seems to be immune to the disease.
But it soon becomes clear the ''experiment'' is not all it seems. Although she and the 79 other participants are monitored daily by Hazmat-suit clad staff for symptoms of the illness - silver blisters and memory loss - and meet weekly with the doctor in charge, the only treatment consists of the regular recitation of positive affirmations and, one by one, they fall ill and are removed to isolation wards to die.
Then the disease wanes across the country as suddenly and mysteriously as it first arose and the experiment is locked down, not to protect the subjects but to prevent them from reinfecting the country.
Despite a spreading disquiet, most patients and staff seem to lack the emotional strength for anything other than passive resignation, but Joy has finally found a purpose; after years of trying to forget a childhood of orphanages and foster families (an irony given the fact memory loss is among the earliest symptoms of the disease) she has finally identified the woman who may be her mother and is determined to meet her face to face.
These hospital scenes form the first half of the book and are reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, a resemblance also echoed in the novel's title.
The second part of the novel follows Joy's journey through both a convalescent America and the suppressed memories that have paralysed her life.
The echoes here are of David Lynch or Donny Darko (her travelling companion is her rabbit-masked foster brother Marcus) and are sufficiently surreal that I was never quite sure whether the events she describes are real or whether, in reclaiming her past, Joy has rendered herself susceptible to the virus and these are fevered dreams of her imploding mind.
I prefer the former interpretation, but either way the novel ends not with a plunge into darkness but a flowering of forgiveness that satisfies my, if not Spinrad's, criteria for a quality work of speculative fiction.
In The Dead Lands the devastation wrought by a deadly viral epidemic has been augmented by a series of cauterising nuclear strikes, the meltdown of every reactor in the country, runaway global warming, and destruction of the ozone layer. Two generations later, all that is left of American society (and possibly the world) are a series of isolated communities dotted across the country.
One of these enclaves is Sanctuary, a fortified city-state built from the ruins of St Louis and surrounded by an arid, inhospitable and mutant-infested wasteland.
Although initially it is considered a temporary haven that will one day reunite with the rest of the country, the city's new mayor, Thomas Lancer, has declared Sanctuary to be the new America and that all who oppose him are to be be executed for treason.
Then a young girl comes riding out of the surrounding desert with news society is rebuilding itself on the temperate Western Coast. Lancer orders her execution but she escapes with a small band of Sanctuary's citizens and the seeds of dissent at Lancer's administration flare into violence.
From here, the action alternates between the journey across America on the one hand and the growing rebellion in Sanctuary on the other, and most of the book is a catalogue of privation, violence and as many horrible ways to die as the author Benjamin Percy can think of (all in all, 385 pages of conflict are resolved in a mere 14, of which nine are epilogue).
The text is also shoehorned full of pop-cultural touchstones; two of the travellers are called Lewis and Clark, the death toll of named characters rivals that of Game of Thrones, and not only would the despotic Lancer make Stephen King proud, the cover is emblazed with a ringing endorsement from the Man himself.
If The Dead Lands was the work of an amateur writer I would be less inclined to share Spinrad's pessimism, but Percy is an award-winning novelist, teaches in the prestigious Iowa State MFA programme, and his skill as a wordsmith is evident in the vividly evoked wasteland in which the tale is set.
This book will certainly find an audience, but I have no wish to be part of it.
- Cushla McKinney is a Dunedin scientist.
