The Allegheny Front’s Kara Holsopple spoke with Stine about some of the themes in Trashlands. A journalist and staff culture writer at Salon, Stine’s previous speculative fiction book, Road Out of Winter won the 2021 Philip K.

Coral doesn’t remember a time when there were four seasons, while she and scrapes together meals from flour made of crickets.Īuthor Alison Stine created this world. The central character, Coral, named for the coralroot orchid, which has gone extinct, struggles to keep her family together and make sense out of this dystopian reality. Group of people try to squeeze an existence out of the scraps that remain from our modern way of life. This year’s Trashlands takes place in an eponymous junkyard where decades into the future a This thought-provoking apocalypse noir fires on all cylinders.This interview was originally published on December 20, 2021.Īs Shell builds its petrochemical facility to make the building blocks of plastic in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, and more ethane crackers are being considered for the region, a novel about plastic pollution in Appalachia seems well-timed. “A harrowing vision of the future, and at its center is the tug-of-war between what is right and what is necessary to survive. Told in shifting perspectives, Trashlands is a beautifully drawn and wildly imaginative tale of a parent’s journey, a story of community and humanity in a changed world. But is it possible to choose a future for herself?

When a reporter from a struggling city on the coast arrives in Trashlands, Coral is presented with an opportunity to change her life.

In her stolen free hours, she does something that seems impossible in this place: Coral makes art. She’s stuck in Trashlands, a dump named for the strip club at its edge, where the local women dance for an endless loop of strangers and the club’s violent owner rules as unofficial mayor.Īmid the polluted landscape, Coral works desperately to save up enough to rescue her child from the recycling factories, where he is forced to work. In the region-wide junkyard that Appalachia has become, Coral is a “plucker,” pulling plastic from the rivers and woods. Global powers have agreed to not produce any new plastics, and what is left has become valuable: garbage is currency. A resonant, visionary novel about the power of art and the sacrifices we are willing to make for the ones we loveĪ few generations from now, the coastlines of the continent have been redrawn by floods and tides.

Trashlands book