THE BOOK OF JOAN

By Lidia Yuknavitch

266 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99.

Post-apocalyptic fiction too often pays lip service to serious problems like climate change while allowing the reader to walk away unscathed, cocooned in an ironic escapism and convinced that the impending disaster is remote. Not so with Lidia Yuknavitch’s brilliant and incendiary new novel, which speaks to the reader in raw, boldly honest terms. “The Book of Joan” has the same unflinching quality as earlier works by Josephine Saxton, Doris Lessing, Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin and J. G. Ballard. Yet it’s also radically new, full of maniacal invention and page-turning momentum.

The novel opens in 2049, then looks back at a past that is our future. Earth has been devastated by global warming, a crisis exacerbated by incessant warfare over scarce resources. Orbiting the planet is CIEL, a “man-made, free-floating” colony consisting of “redesigned remnants from old space stations” and ruled by the “rage-mouthed Empire Leader” Jean de Men. (Appropriately, his name evokes men and demons alike.) Among other dubious accomplishments, de Men claims the defeat, after a battle at the Alberta Tar Sands, of the “heretic” child-rebel Joan.

CIEL carries the last remnants of humankind, intent on destroying the Earth below by siphoning off anything of value through “invisible technological umbilical cords” called Skylines. But there are dissenters aboard. One is Trinculo Forsythe, who created CIEL but has undergone years of imprisonment and torture and is now scheduled for execution on trumped-up charges. Another is Trinculo’s partner and the book’s narrator, Christine Pizan, who at 49 is about to age out, a “threat to resources in a finite, closed system.” In protest against de Men and all he represents, Pizan is determined to keep the story of Joan’s heroism alive by burning it into her skin. This is the “Book of Joan” that we are reading. “Once, she had a voice,” Pizan proclaims. “Now her voice is in my body.”

Image Lidia Yuknavitch Credit... Andrew Kovalev

“Burning is an art,” Pizan explains, neatly linking art and protest, though not without cost: “Burning epidermis gives off a charcoal-like smell.” Her physical pain symbolizes the agony caused by the ecological devastation and loss felt daily in our own time by those who suffer the most extreme effects of displacement and scarcity, of unrestrained capitalism. “Why is it that you, reading this, don’t feel that pain?” is the question implied, again and again, by “The Book of Joan.”