Fight for life

A resourceful young woman flees a dying American colony only to battle for survival in a terrifying wilderness.

- CHERYL PEARL SUCHER

As climate change wreaks havoc on our precious Earth, many writers have chosen to contemplate the end of days by imagining dystopian universes inhabited by sole survivors of the planet's destruction. These futuristic quests are survivalist in nature, their heroes no longer battling for domination over nature but for humanity's existence.

Lauren Groff's The Vaster Wilds imagines a survivalism of the past. Set in 1609 in Jamestown, one of the first British settlements in North America, during the Starving Time when "food shortages, fractured leadership and a siege by Powhatan Indian warriors killed two of every three colonists at James Fort", it envisions the escape of a young servant girl who has fled indescribable horrors of the dying colony. In the words of one of the few surviving colonists, George Percy, "[N]othing was spared to mainteyne Lyfe and to doe those things w[hi]ch seame incredible..." She navigates the vast wilderness with only the tools she has stolen from her domicile and her sheer ingenuity.