Sons of Adamah – review & author interview

In the science fiction novel Sons of Adamah, author Catherine Genton weaves a spell-binding tale of the future.

The story begins when we meet John Macabee Jr. In an isolation tower on the planet Andropida. He has been placed there by the colony’s leadership to await a decision on how to deal with his anomalies. Soon we discover he must decide between compassionate care in isolation on Andropida or a return to earth. His decision is to return to post-World War III planet Earth that has been devastated by climate disaster as well as human conflict.

Genton’s imagination in creating a well-developed setting is compelling. The distant Andropida is detailed in its other worldliness. Later I enjoyed the familiar part of earth to which John returns (the greater Vancouver area of southwest BC, Canada).

Her characters are complex and layered, some sympathetic, others, not so much. Their interesting names (e.g. Wymry, Brutus Captain Pomeroy, Celestin Leoni) help us discover their personalities and highlight their uniqueness.

There are many incredibly described action scenes that reminded me of video games.

The culture of the space colony is a soup of earth memories and idealism. The story deals with a myriad of themes including coming of age, gender identity, love, family, community, ecology, faith, religion, robots and artificial intelligence.

As someone new to reading science fiction, I found the story a little confusing in places. A glossary with definitions of vocabulary, defining terms like “genners,” “progs,” “trads” etc. would have been helpful.

I believe Sons of Adamah is the first book of a series. Its ending certainly leaves the door open for more fabulous adventures!

---

*******

I have the good fortune to knowing the author Catherine Genton. We met in a local writing group. She generously agreed to do an author interview by email. That interview follows. (We’ve done our best not to slip in any spoilers!)

VN: I would classify your book Sons of Adamah as dystopian science fiction. How do you classify it and why did you choose to write in that genre?

CG: Sons of Adamah is science fiction, but I’m trying to avoid the dystopian classification. Dystopia is “an imagined world or society in which people lead wretched, dehumanized, fearful lives” (mirriam-webster.com), whereas Sons of Adamah was conceptualized within a hopeful Christian framework, which will grow more evident with each sequel. I currently call it apocalyptic sci-fi.

VN:  I assume you read science fiction. Who are your favourite science fiction authors and what books would you recommend for someone who is new to the genre?

CG: I should be reading current sci-fi books, but I don’t, and that’s a weakness. However, it’s because I do very poorly with graphic violence, sex, and just plain weirdness. (I hated Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, but liked her Maddaddam trilogy.) In choosing fiction, I aim for non-traumatizing stories of any genre, so that leaves me with classics, middle-grade books, and retro sci-fi (i.e. Ray Bradbury).

I do recommend CS Lewis’s Space Trilogy, however. It’s retro, but, with his typical salient theology, he brilliantly presages the current dominance and devastation of scientism. Stories that are entertaining and challenge our culture are my favourites.

VN: What sort of research did you do to create the Andropidan and Earth worlds of your story?

CG: I first created Sons of Adamah to accompany my major seminary theological paper, “The Narrative and Iconography of Gender and Sexuality” (on academia.edu.) To prepare, I took a year off school and read dozens of books and wrote hundreds of pages of notes, which became the foundation for the paper, as well as for Sons of Adamah’s patriarchal galactic colony and non-gendered Earth.

The novel’s science bits came from following endless bunny trails, i.e. nasa.gov. As a kid, I read encyclopedias and loved science in particular, so that research was fun.

My husband, retired paramilitary, helped me with the fight scenes. (All implausible manoeuvres are mine!)

VN: How did you come up with your cast of characters and their interesting names?

CG: It took me a long time to pick those names, and I’m glad you find them interesting. Initially, I wanted unusual names for the two main characters, but then chose John and Ann, which have rich meanings but are more Every Man and Every Woman in my Canadian culture (changing fast with immigration).

The other names suggest something about the characters: Brutus is a hulk, Berta Blodger is homely, and so on. I made up the names, Wymry, who is soft, and Pomeroy, from Pomme de Roi. I did discover that Pomeroy is a real surname, though uncommon. Some names were more random. For one, I named Tilde VanPelt after Lucy VanPelt. (If you recognize the latter name, then I congratulate you on your classical education.)

I also avoided main characters’ names that started with the same letter, to ease reader confusion. Then I realized my minor characters would become major characters in the sequels and had to do another big round of changes.

“Adamah” is Hebrew for the soil from which Adam was made, and “Andropida” has Greek roots.

VN: Some of the action scenes in your story remind me of the action of video games. Am I right—did video game action sequences (or what else) help you envision these very physical interactions? If you are a gamer, what games do you enjoy?

CG: That’s just my natural brain on public display, ha ha! I’m not a gamer, only neurodiverse. In my younger years, sports provided me the relief of intense brain/body engagement. Ditto for motorcycling in my later years. I loved the hyper-alertness required in my motorcycle racing course or while riding through crazy downtown cities, both like being inside live video games. I’m no longer able to do sports and finally decided that being alive was preferable to getting squashed on a motorcycle, so I’m left with . . . intense writing.

VN: In Sons of Adamah you touch on some of our society’s preoccupations: ecology, climate change, family, identity, gender identity, religion to name a few. I thought you did it with subtlety, not preachiness or didacticism. Talk about your handling of some or all of these topics and what you hoped to achieve.

CG: That’s a big question!

First, I’m glad to hear Sons of Adamah isn’t preachy or didactic. Moralistic stories don’t ring true, and they’re no fun to read.

Our society’s big issues involve a complex interplay of ancient familial and spiritual forces, personal choice, and cultural strongholds. And the arts have the potential to help us arrive at truth. That’s why Jesus told parables.

I grew up during the Cold War, with nuclear bomb drills in elementary school and the fear I would get blitzed before adulthood. Climate change is the new Cold War—except our enemy is now the average consumer rather than the Russians. I felt unable to avoid climate issues in my apocalyptic series.

I also had the luck to have a mother and father, and to experience their rich, complex Catholicism full of sinners and saints, angels and demons. Binaries are essential for identity and purpose.

When I came of age, the “sexual revolution” of the seventies had saturated the media and arts. It was no revolution at all, however, but simply the age-old shucking of healthy bounds and reaping of deadly consequences. My embrace of my culture’s hedonistic pursuits flattened all the deep layers of meaning built into my life, and my identity disintegrated. That’s a devastating thing to experience. Worse, identity disintegration is becoming widespread, paralleling the erosion of the Judeo-Christian worldview of man and woman in the image of God.

However, many people like myself, on discovering our centres cannot hold within identity “freedoms,” are surrendering to Christ and allowing Him to redefine us. That’s not a rigid, fundamentalist book of rules, but the trading of death for life.

So that’s the complexity from which I write. I aim to create fiction that offers beauty and hope to our darkening culture.

VN: In Sons of  Adamah one object that kept appearing was the apple. It seemed to operate like a symbol. Why this object and what did it mean?

CG: At the advice of my seminary supervisor, I spent six weeks reading only the first three chapters of Genesis. It was a profound experience. The story of Creation, the Fall, and the Promise has so much resonance throughout the Bible—the dichotomies of truth/lies, serpent/Christ, life/death, and man and woman striving for illicit experience beyond the Creator’s good bounds.

VN: I have heard that Sons of Adamah is the first in a series. Is a sequel in the works? When might it come out?

CG: Yes! If all goes well, the next book, Cities of Adamah, will go live in about a year, followed sometime by Daughters of Adamah, then Children of Adamah.

To stay updated, people are welcome to subscribe through cmgenton.ca. I keep my newsletters infrequent and short, but also interesting and fun. I just held a Subscribers Party with lots of treats!

VN: Sons of Adamah is available for purchase!

• Sons of Adamah on Amazon.ca

• Sons of Admah on Amazon.com