Displacement, Bruce Holsinger
Future catastrophe novels tend to create some distance between where we are, where we were, and where we fear we are heading. Margaret Atwood states that her 1985 dystopian masterpiece “The Handmaid’s Tale” contains nothing that hasn’t happened yet. Octavia Butler claimed to have been partially inspired by her method of news addiction to write her “Sowing Fable” (1993), but hoped it would never have a ring of prophecy. I was there. In JG Ballard’s 1962 novel The Drowned World, set in 2145, the author imagined the harsh climate that the ice caps had completely melted and left for humans to study them. It was a wonderful laboratory and the submerged city was nothing more than an elaborate pedestal. “
In Bruce Holsinger’s fourth novel, The Displacements, the space between our past and our speculative future has finally collapsed. The world’s first Category 6 hurricane, Luna destroys Houston and turns Miami into a collection of islands. The storm suddenly, but not without warning, appears in a world drawn from headlines that may not be out of place today, or at any time in the last few years. Climate change is causing more powerful hurricanes, and many of the recent hurricanes are cited on the “Displacement” page... “ The current cultural climate also threatens Holsinger’s novels. A faithfully reproduced tweet thread. Terms such as “intersection”, “burnout”, “white fragility”, “wife … this is Wendy’s” all appear. The novel may be set this summer or next summer. Reading that reminded me of the joke from the movie “Sideways”. In this joke, the failed novelist, the protagonist, tells a woman who is trying to flirt that his latest effort is entitled “The Day After Yesterday.” “Oh,” she says, “Is that today?”
The central story of “The Displacements” is the story of the Larsen Hall family, a wealthy inhabitant of Miami. Through a series of failures and bad investments, they will live in Oklahoma’s FEMA camp for several months. Daphne is a potter who listens to NPR and drives Volvo, and is exercising with her controlling husband, the surgeon Brantley. They have two young children, Mia and Oliver, and Gavin, the son of Brantley’s first marriage, who is absent from undergraduate courses at Stanford University and lives at home. It is estimated that Brantley disappeared and died during a miserable hospital evacuation when the storm struck. No one can escape from Miami and no one can return. “In a day, four million Florida people decanted into the upper half of the peninsula.” Daphne and her children accidentally left all their credit cards at home, but with the Mega Shelter (“Tourie Farm”). Called), he discovered that Brantley broke, lost his home insurance payments, and ran out of his son’s college funds.
