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Corvus

Corvus is a novel by Harold Johnson.

Harold R. Johnson

CBC Books Posted: Jan 04, 2019 10:13 AM EST | Last Updated: February 5, 2019

Harold Johnson is also an acclaimed writer of fiction. (Thistledown Press )

Eighty years have passed since flash floods, droughts, and tornadoes have ravaged the North American landscape and mass migrations to the north have led to decade-long wars. In the thriving city of La Ronge, George Taylor and Lenore Hanson are lawyers who rarely interact with members of the lower classes from the impoverished suburb of Regis and the independently thriving Ashram outside the city. They live in a world of personalized Platforms, self-driving cars, and cutting edge Organic Recreational Vehicles (ORVs), where gamers need never leave their virtual realities.

Lenore befriends political dissenter and fellow war veteran Richard Warner, and George accidentally crash-lands his ORV near the mountain-sheltered haven of a First Nations community, they become exposed to new ways of thinking. As the lives of these near-strangers become intertwined, each is forced to confront the past before their relationships and lives unravel.

Taking its title from the Latin name for the Trickster bird of First Nations, Norse, and Christian mythologies,Corvusexamines the illusions of security we build through technology and presents a scathing satire of a world caught up in climate change denial and the glorification of war. (From Thistledown Press)

Corvus was on the Canada Reads 2019 longlist.

For the novel Corvus, Harold R. Johnson envisioned a thriving Indigenous community in a dystopian future

Why Harold R. Johnson wrote Corvus

"Corvusis set in 2084 in La Ronge. La Ronge in 2084 is a megacity. The world has changed. We're no longer arguing about global warming it's happened. There have been periods of droughts and floods. There have been migrations of people that resulted in two wars in North America.

I wanted to write about climate change, quite bluntly.- Harold R. Johnson

"I wanted to write about climate change, quite bluntly. The entire book is premised on what's going to happen andCorvusis my imagining of it.I had toputin some interesting science and characters to keep the reader engaged."

From the book

When God quit attacking poor people who lived in trailer parks with tornadoes and began to pay attention to mansions, those who could afford it took to the sky. At 40,000 feet there are no storms. The Kenilworth, Illinois twister boosted sales in the sky cities, but most people agree that the flattening of Gladwyne, Pennsylvania marked the beginning of the exodus.

George Taylor needed three more good years and he would have the down payment for his own condo above the clouds. Others argued it wasn't worth it, that the chance of being killed by a storm was probably less than the risk of living at the end of a tether. But it wasn't just the storms. George wasn't all that afraid of those. It was terrestrial people that bothered him. Not that they were terrestrial, earth wanderers; it was that there were so damn many of them and more came from the south every day.

FromCorvusby Harold Johnson 2015. Published by Thistledown Press.

Corvus

Harold R. Johnson

From the book

Other books by Harold R. Johnson