105 pages
Published 2023
Read from June 7 to June 11
Rating: 4 out of 5
Combing through my library for quick reads, I happened upon this near-future sci-fi novella from the author of The Woods All Black. The plot feels like something from turn-of-the-millennium Asimov’s: Scientist Sean gets tech bro capitalist funding to implant a neurological interface between herself and a gray wolf. She argues conservation would benefit from affective understanding, but deep down she questions whether she sold out her own anti-corporate principles in order to make her lifelong dreams of becoming a wolf come true. That’s certainly what her wife Riya thinks.
Mandelo brings queer messiness and climate-change-is-now pathos to the concept, grief for the world already gone beyond our power to save. Silence is a story about connection and alienation in the world capitalism and unchecked colonial destruction have left to us, rendered beautifully in Mandelo’s expert prose.
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