The Nature of Things

I remember the thrill I got the first time I read Frank Herbert's  Dune, lo those many years ago. After that, I waited impatiently for each new entry that Herbert made to the series. Arrakis was real to me. The characters who contended to control it were real to me.  I was reminded of all that while reading The Book of Joan ; it gave me that same kind of shiver along my spine. Lidia Yuknavitch has created a post-apocalyptic world of our not-too-distant future, but a world where evolution and technology have been speeded up exponentially by the effects of incessant warfare and uncontrolled global warming. It is a world where the surviving "humans" have lost everything corporeal that made them human. Their heads are "white and waxen. No eyebrows or eyelashes or full lips or anything but jutting bones at the cheeks and shoulders and collarbones and data points, the parts on our bodies where we interact with technology..." Their "skin is Siberian. Bleak and st...