Having uncovered a secret that could bring down corporate overlords, a scavenger in post-apocalyptic America goes on the run with an itinerant train-hopper in this novel.

In 2195, 20-year-old Elsa lives with her great-grandmother Granny Lee in SoCal (formerly Southern California), a political prison-cum-slum defined not by guards or walls but rather by economic privation and the bullying oversight of GreenCorps. This corrupt, exploitative organization rose to power under the pretense of salvaging the environment and upholding civilization after the plague-driven societal Collapse. Elsa and Granny Lee work the Heap, a mound of garbage whose layers date back to the early 21st century. Elsa digs while Granny Lee stands guard with her shotgun, “which she wasn’t shy about using.” They trade scrap metal for food and water tokens. Life is tough but bearable until 22-year-old Walker and his adopted brother, Hayden, come along. The men are “hoppers” (itinerants who sneak passage aboard trains), and Hayden has a drug habit. In trying to rob Granny Lee, Hayden leaves her injured and unable to work. Without Granny Lee’s protection, Elsa is forced to take a job serving drinks in a brothel. Walker, too, has found work there (as a bouncer). When he saves Elsa from being brutally raped by a GreenCorps man, the two flee SoCal on the trains, taking with them her last find: a metal tube that contains maps to six pre-Collapse seed vaults. With a price on their heads, can Elsa and Hayden keep clear of their GreenCorps pursuers? Gibson writes in the third person, primarily from Elsa’s and Walker’s perspectives but occasionally from those of teenage pickpocket Tatsuda and widowed ex-rebel Caitlyn. In this series opener, the prose is polished, the dialogue unobtrusive, affording no distraction from Elsa’s bleak life. The world portrayed, while one of extreme hardship, seems very much in keeping with current societal trends. One particularly sobering aspect of this is the disproportionate helplessness experienced by women, especially regarding sexual violence. Elsa’s matter-of-fact wariness of vigilante rape is a disquieting precursor of what she faces in the brothel. Elsa and Walker are relatable characters in whose plight—and romance—readers will invest. Though downbeat in content, the story is light on its feet and moves with assurance toward the sequel.

This engrossing and gritty survival romance pulls no punches in revealing its enviro-economic dystopia.

In a blighted America in the late 22nd century, a small band of rebels travels the western states, guarding the key to secret underground vaults of precious, viable crop seeds.

Gibson continues the dystopian SF Train Hoppers trilogy commenced with Switching Tracks: Out of the Trash (2024), forecasting the bleak year of 2195: What used to be the western United States is now a struggling police state of territories left by the “Collapse” brought about by a climate change/asteroid strike combo almost 200 years earlier (“With seventy thousand inhabitants, Utah was one of the most populated areas remaining in what had once been America”). South of Canada (which remains intact and civilized), people subsist under the jackboot of the powerful GreenCorps, a corporate dictatorship commanded by the baronial McCoy family that forces settlements and cities into submission via ruthless control of water and food supplies and squads of brutal soldiers. Elsa Lee, a barely tolerated McCoy sister-in-law, has killed a McCoy son in self-defense and fled to the protection of anti-GreenCorps rebels. She brings with her a key to precious seed-vault bunkers that were sequestered centuries earlier. If the seed secrets can be safely smuggled into Canada, there is a chance of breaking the GreenCorps monopoly on agriculture. Another fugitive is 17-year-old Ginger McCoy, daughter of the thuggish GreenCorps CEO Malcolm McCoy. Educated and literate (privileges only the wealthy have), she is fleeing her Denver fortress to escape a cynically arranged marriage to another odious boss-chieftain—the union is Malcolm’s gambit to accumulate yet more wealth and power. Despite being set more than 150 years in the future, the novel’s milieu is a techno-throwback one, with little to no advanced science accessible to the nomadic heroes; railroad trains are the primary mode of transportation. The result is something like a Louis L’Amour western crossed with “prepper” dystopian fiction, thankfully lacking the hyper-machismo and gun-mania that tend to characterize both genres. Action balances effectively with emotion, and a satisfactory wrap-up still leaves enough dangling threads for the upcoming conclusion.

Sympathetic protagonists propel a solid dystopian SF adventure.