FREEZING REIGN

In Goff’s SF series starter, a teenage Texan girl awakens after 12 years in suspended animation to a savage world of male chieftains and robots that look like idealized women.

The story begins in an alternative late-20th-century United States—or what’s left of it. The 1976 Olympic Games was a super-spreader event for a flu that’s killed millions of people, and is invariably deadly to women. In Texas, where society has already started to fragment, strong-willed 18-year-old Mirari Vega sees her best friend die and senses that women are likely to become extinct. In her distress, she agrees to a plan by her maverick-scientist father (in collusion with her love interest, Aaron) to cryogenically freeze her in a remote cave; the plan is to revive her after the plague runs its course. Twelve years later, Mirari awakens in a quasi-feudal Lone Star State led by fractious, gun-toting baronial patriarchs. Brutish humankind has turned to science and technology to find replacements for women—sometimes by employing forced sex-reassignment surgery, but mainly by creating lifelike, servile robot “feminals” whose beauty is often enhanced by fearsome combat functionality; Aaron’s family is prominent in their manufacture. As possibly the last human with child-bearing potential, Mirari’s existence can’t remain secret for long, but an early flash-forward reveals that feminals may be unexpected allies. Goff opens the narrative with a situation that’s strongly reminiscent of the real-life Covid-19 pandemic (“A global pathogen has a way of demanding attention, and believe me, that beast ravaged my life”). From there, the author further develops the premise in intriguing ways, and he keeps the pace brisk throughout. Although the protagonist’s age would ordinarily indicate that the story is meant to appeal to an older YA readership, there’s nothing juvenile about Mirari’s ordeals, and the profanity and extreme violence is clearly meant for an older audience. Over the course of this novel, readers will find the narrative’s execution compelling and the figure at its center refreshingly unsentimental. Overall, the work promises a well-developed SF series with nightmarish overtones.

A superior dystopic SF thriller with a Texas-sized scope.