7. Amnesia Moon by Jonathan Lethem

My paperback's cover

AMNESIA MOON
By Jonathan Lethem

Whew! So that happened.

Lethem is a favorite author of mine. His creativity is always on display as he toys with sci-fi concepts and twines literary sensibilities to what, in other hands, would be just "clever" genre works. Instead, he writes classics in whatever genre he dabbles.

AMNESIA MOON is an early book of his, before he hit it big with the major critics (that would be Motherless Brooklyn, National Book Critics Circle Award winner, four years later). It came out after the trippy future-noir Gun, With Occasional Music, and was also a bit "out there," as the old fogies might say.

We are arriving on the scene after the apocalypse. Chaos, our protagonist  lives in an abandoned megaplex on the outskirts of town. The world has been ravaged by nuclear war, and food is hard to come by. Mutants are prevalent. A warlord by the name of Kellogg controls the food and surrounding area that was once Wyoming.

Or this is how it appears when Chaos first looks at it. How it's always been to him, but...has it? Every night he has the same dream, but further away from the town, he dreams his own Dream. And so does everybody else.

Original cover...or at least a better one

Reality is a plaything to Lethem, as Chaos leaves (along with a fur-covered "mutant" girl who just wants to get away) and discovers the nuclear war didn't happen and that everything is different just a little way down the highway, and beyond that and beyond.... There are snippets in the background, glimpses of something "before," but it's so difficult for him to grasp it. So he keeps on traveling.

What is "real" alters from community to community, and the mystery of why this is happening and how Chaos (or is it Everett Moon?) fits in drives this series of linked tales (as originally drafted; they work more/less seamlessly as a novel).What is apparent is that, at some point in the near-past, there was a global event, a cataclysmic event that also heralded what I will refer to as a meta-crisis (to borrow from the 10th Doctor), splintering the perception of reality, where Dreams can take root in the real world.

One version of  "what's happening" has everything covered in a green fog and vision a high commodity. Another is a reality-TV centered suburban dystopia. Yet one more features an alien invasion. And this is all in corridor between Wyoming and the coast.

It's probable you won't find a piece of apocalyptic lit quite like this.

4/5

-Erik