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Kelly Robson's Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach is a time-travel story which takes in ecology, economics and generation gaps in its novella-length course. The protagonist, Minh, is a waterway restoration specialist in a post-ecological catastrophe Canada; frustrated at the decline in funding for restoration projects following the invention of time travel, she bids for a new project restoring the Tigris and Euphrates rivers on the basis of a survey carried out via time travel to ancient Sumeria.
There's a lot of worldbuilding packed into this novella; Robson's near-future is complex and carefully thought through, from tech to social structures to the way the global economy might look. The narrative alternates between the main story of Minh's project and short scenes set in Sumeria whose connection to the main plot only gradually becomes apparent. While I enjoyed it a lot, I did think that there were aspects of the plotting that could have done with more development, while the ending felt very abrupt and didn't really resolve the questions which the rest of the story seemed to have been setting up.
There's a lot of worldbuilding packed into this novella; Robson's near-future is complex and carefully thought through, from tech to social structures to the way the global economy might look. The narrative alternates between the main story of Minh's project and short scenes set in Sumeria whose connection to the main plot only gradually becomes apparent. While I enjoyed it a lot, I did think that there were aspects of the plotting that could have done with more development, while the ending felt very abrupt and didn't really resolve the questions which the rest of the story seemed to have been setting up.
