Genre: Sci-Fi
LGBTQ+ Category: Lesbian, Gay (side characters)
Reviewer: Scott
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About The Book
“Genocide Joe” is a marked man.
Once a highly respected corporate microbiologist, now the scapegoat for a GMO-caused ecological disaster that’s turned San Francisco Bay toxic and poisoned thousands, Joe has lost everything: his wife, his home, his career, his reputation, and most of his friends. All he has left is his 18-month-old daughter, Daphne, the clothes on his back, and a chance to start over again in a new town, where no one knows his face.
To take this chance, all he needs to do is catch the bus out of town. But an unexpected transit system outage has dumped him in Oakland, so now he needs to get to the next station on foot, while pushing a baby stroller.
And hoping to pass unrecognized through a city where everyone hates him, and a lot of people want to kill him….
The Review
I met Allan Dyen Shapiro in person at WorldCon last year, where he was selling his book, a novella called The Day We Said Goodbye to the Birds.
The title stuck with me, and when I was looking for something in the sci-fi arena, I decided to pick it up and give it a try. It’s an easy read, not too long, and not at all what I expected. And that’s a good thing.
Because of the title, and the fact that I knew it had to do with ecological tragedy, I expected a story about the birds all died off, like Silent Spring, a seminal work on ecological disaster from the 1970s.
What I got instead was a very personal story of a man on the run with his daughter, trying to escape the Bay Area after having accidentally caused an ecological disaster. One that, while it did kill some birds, was mostly killing people.
The author says the story is hard sci-fi, but I would tend to disagree. There is a hard sci-fi, backbone to it, to be sure, and the author’s science background does inform form that part of the plot. But at its heart, it’s also an intimate story of how a man copes with a disaster of his own creation, and the encounters that he has with everyday folks, many of whom want to kill him.
It’s actually two stories. The first is of Joe’s harrowing escape from the Bay Area with his adorable little daughter. The second is presented in the form of an epilogue, balancing out the bleakness of the first part with a smattering of hope. It’s a nontraditional structure for a short story – I viewed it as part one and part two. I do like that we get to see what happens to the characters after the fact.
Being from the Bay Area myself, the details all seemed right, and I appreciated that. The author shares that he once lived in Oakland – that part of the story was based on a festival in Oakland he attended that went bad, and the experiences that he had with his daughter at Lake Merritt just before they left the Bay Area.
I love it when an author takes something personal and makes it into a gift to share with the rest of us, illuminating a little bit of the world and possibilities for our future.
I recommend this story for its incisive details, its well crafted character studies, and its ultimately hopeful tone.
The Reviewer
Scott is the founder of Queer Sci Fi, Liminal Fiction, and QueeRomance Ink, and a fantasy and sci fi writer in his own right, with more than 30 published short stories, novellas and novels to his credit, including two trilogies.