Carrie Vaughn’s Bannerless
I just recently finished Carrie Vaughn's Bannerless. The novel is interesting to me for a number of reasons, but particularly because it is one in a string of recent books that takes place after a series of seismic world changes that have had both good and ill effects.
Bannerless largely a police procedural set in a post-"Fall" America where local governments oversee reproduction in a world of returned resource scarcity by handing out "banners" to those households they deem ready to raise new children. The main character, Enid, is an investigator who travels town-to-town to keep the peace—often looking into cases where people have taken too much for themselves.
Obviously, there are components to this that are clearly dystopian. One chapter sees Enid enter the ruins of an old city, where she meets malnourished children barely hanging onto life. Although some towns in Bannerless have an old "solar car," most modern technology has been lost. Enid reflects often on what she's heard about
Yet the book doesn't quite fit into what we think of when considering Mad Max-style dystopia. Mankind's renewed focus on limiting runaway use of resources, for example, is something that would be a huge "plus" for people today, and is probably a necessary shift in our fight against runaway climate change. Bannerless reminds me of Malka Older's Centennial Cycle; although there is massive surveillance and a globalized world order that is subject to manipulation, Older herself has resisted classifications of her trilogy as dystopian. Her books also see technology that has effectively ended interpersonal gun violence and guaranteed individual voting rights across the globe. In both author's worlds, there have been seismic shifts in the world, and they have both good and bad effects.
Undoubtedly, our current moment is a tragic and dark time for us all, both on a global scale and individually. Covid-19 has resulted in over 200,000 deaths worldwide—that's 200,000 tragedies. And that isn't counting the many, many more deaths that will follow the damage done to our economy because of necessary social distancing measures. It's a well-established fact that in America and many other countries, unemployment correlates strongly with malnutrition and death. It's hard to think about what the lasting repercussions of the Covid-19 crisis will be in the coming months and years.
But I took a certain degree of comfort in Vaughn's Bannerless. It's a difficult book focused on real human tragedies, especially those created by human prejudice and greed. In the tradition of dozens of hardboiled detectives before her, Enid is increasingly frustrated and disappointed in people as she reveals more and more of the novel's central mystery. Yet she is also capable of great compassion, and she lives in a world where people have learned from the mistakes of the past. The system in which Enid lives is not perfect—the novel rightly explores if loss of personal freedom is worth a more efficient expenditure of resources—but Vaughn shows a world that has suffered greatly, and learned a lot from it.
As we're trying to support and protect the most vulnerable among us in this moment—people of color, the elderly, the unhoused, those with medical conditions and disabilities that make them particularly susceptible to Covid-19—I find the world of Bannerless not particularly dystopian, but in some ways hopeful. If one thing comes out of the current crisis, I hope that we learn how to take care of each other better, to pay attention to the inequalities that exacerbated the impact of this current moment.