Novella Review: These Prisoning Hills, by Christopher Rowe

Review: These Prisoning Hills, by Christopher Rowe

a review by Rich Horton

Here's the first of a few reviews I plan, on short fiction from 2022. I'm still behind on that, mind you! But these are some good ones, as Hugo nomination season is upon us. (I've actually already reviewed one 2022 novella, a fine one, Kelly Robson's High Times in the Low Parliament.)

Christopher Rowe first made a big impression on me with a remarkable and very strange novelette called "The Voluntary State", back in 2004. It’s set in a very altered future Tennessee, with radical biological engineering affecting everything from art to cars to politics -- and the hero, unwitting, is witness to a revolution of sorts. It’s a story that describes itself far better than I can hope to describe it. I will quote Jonathan Strahan however: "reading ‘‘The Voluntary State’’ was not unlike reading ‘‘Scanners Live in Vain’’ for the first time – you were either jazzed or mystified" -- that is remarkable (and justified) praise.

Rowe has now returned to that milieu twice -- back in 2017 with "The Border State", and now with this 2022 Tor.com novella, "These Prisoning Hills". This latest story centers on Marcia, a 60-something woman serving as county agent for her Kentucky county, which is still sparsely populated decades after the end of the First Athena War. Now a Federal agent has shown up, needing a guide into a still quarantined area, where there seems likely to be a terrifying piece of Athena tech -- and the previous Federals to try to recover it have not returned.

The novella proceeds on two tracks -- one is a series of glimpses into Marcia's time fighting in the First Athena War, which gives hints of nature of the AI Athena Parthenus that created the "Voluntary State", based in Tennessee, and of the strange tech this AI created; as well as a look at some of the fighters on the Federal side, especially the Kentucky based Owls and Crows. The other track follows Marcia and some Federals as well as some low-level AIs called dependents, which have been used to help "reseed" places destroyed in the war, as they track down the missing Federals, and the Athena tech they were after. This proves to be something worse than they had feared, and the story resolves with a scary and exciting conclusion, in which Marcia must make a risky gamble -- with perhaps ambiguous results.

This is a powerful story of a strange future grounded with by the believable characters, especially Marcia and her ex-husband Carter: people of a certain age (OK, my age!) who've been through a lot and just keep going, with no illusions. There is a wildness to this future, and clearly both menace and promise. Among the most interesting characters are a group we hardly hear from -- except their wonderful last line. Highly recommended.