Homeward Bound

Well into Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Turning Leaves, one character remarks to another, “That’s the thing about stories about the end of the world, I guess. . . .You just got to worry about yourself. At first, anyway. But then, if you wanna see the future, if you wanna survive, you gotta find others. If you think you care about the future and your life ends alone, what was it worth?”

This sentiment neatly encapsulates the project Rice has undertaken with his pair of speculative novels focused on a small Anishinaabe community in Northern Ontario. In the first, Moon of the Crusted Snow, from 2018, the power grid suddenly fails without explanation. The residents, living at the end of a 300-kilometre service road, gradually learn that the outage has sparked widespread chaos and societal collapse. Entirely cut off from the wider world, they struggle to survive through the winter as fuel and food supplies dwindle. Although Moon of the Crusted...