A Son of the Rock

Orbit 2010. 438 p.

In a US city called Los Sombres after an apocalypse known as the Fall, adults are subject to a control mechanism known as shine, which is mediated by beams of light and makes them want to take certain courses of action. Consequently they can act in strange ways and become fixated. One of the city’s inhabitants, a young woman named Roksana, is apparently immune to shine and runs a radio station called FallN which broadcasts a sort of defiance to an outside world which holds Los Sombres in a kind of quarantine. She is looking after a much younger girl named Elsa, who has lost her mother.

A boy called Xavier is living outside the city on a farm run by a native American woman. Having not attained puberty (which is being held back by means of a drug known as Kiss) he is not yet affected by shine. A stranger from the city comes to the farm and the Kiss runs out. In order to find more supplies of Kiss, Xavier steals a horse and makes his way to Los Sombres where he meets Roksana and their destinies intertwine. The section of the novel where Xavier is exploring Los Sombres for some reason brought to mind Kim Stanley Robinson’s The White Shore and The Gold Coast, except here the city is under threat from the armed forces of the “normal” USA.

The characters are convincing for the most part but since shine changes behaviour we have to take that behaviour on trust. Sullivan’s hands seem trustworthy however. In this regard Lightborn was a more satisfying read than Sullivan’s earlier Someone To Watch Over Me which I reviewed here.

Curiously given it was published last year, at the start of Lightborn the date it is set is given as 2004 which would make this an Altered History. It does not display any of the typical characteristics of that sub-genre however.