22. Emergence by David R. Palmer

This was a real find.  I can't even remember where I first heard about it.  It had been on my hunting list for a long time until I found it at the excellent Fireside Books in Parksville, B.C. (well worth a visit; a huge and varied stock with many paperbacks and incredibly well-organized).   Emergence is a lost and well-regarded semi-YA post-apocalyptic novel from 1985.

I probably would have loved this book if I had known about it in my adolescence.  I still quite enjoyed it as an adult but some of the plot elements and an unwanted theme of sexuality were too apparent for me to appreciate it as some still do.  Nevertheless, it's a lot of fun, with some cool ideas packaged in a novel format.  11 year-old Candida is the narrator (for most of the book), writing in a journal in Pittman shorthand.  This gives it a clipped style, generally without the subject article, which is not pleasant at first, but you get used to it.  Furthermore, she is a prodigy, which I guess Palmer equates with being a nerd, because she has this very nerdy extreme logic approach to her life.  This is kind of cool, but also in light of the heel turn that nerds took with the internet, also feels unpleasantly tech-bro.

The tech-bro stuff gets really icky and creepy with the weird need for her to think about her sexuality.  It shows up briefly in her own thoughts, but then gets disturbing when she is propositioned by almost every male character she encounters.  These propositions come in these weird, pseudo-rational offers which is supposed to be justified because these are all this new super race of post Homo sapiens, so they are all hyper intelligent.  Today this reads as the horrible new nerd-reworking of classic mysogyny.  It would be bad enough if it were just the dudes doing it (the main one being this dude in his 40s) but the Candida character herself seriously contemplates negatively and positively in this weird "rational" manner which even moral issues aside, just seemed completely out of place for an 11 year-old, not matter how intelligent.  It felt like this was some kind of fantasy of the author to meet this hyper-intelligent, soon to be hot, 11 year old ass-kicker and want to have a romantic relationship but would of course respect her wishes (which she would rationally consider).  Gross.

Getting that unfortunate business out of the way, I can say that the rest of the book was quite fun.  The apocalypse was quite clever: a lurking disease bioweapon that is only triggered by low-level radiation so that it requires bombs to be detonated above the target which do no damage, leave minimal radiation but get everywhere so there is no escape.  The concept of a new species of human was cool as well and generally an elite highly-trained 11 year old girl driving around empty North America looking for other survivors was a lot of fun.