Emergence, by David R. Palmer
This is an 80s sf novel about a super-intelligent girl who is the lone (or so it seems) survivor of an apocalypse. I read it when I was twelve or so, really enjoyed it for the female protagonist having post-apocalyptic adventures, and also registered that some parts seemed really skeevy. When I was twelve, I did not have a finely-honed skeeve-meter and a lot of stuff went over my head. Like, I did not really register the skeeviness of Piers Anthony until something like 30 books in. However, the skeevy parts of Emergence were relatively small parts of the whole, and there were not a lot of post-apocalyptic books with girl heroines at that time, so I remembered it with mild fondness.
As you can see, it has a very nice cover and I wish the whole book was like that: a young girl sets off into a depopulated world.
I recently found a copy, re-read it, and was fairly boggled by it. I then tried to describe the plot to Sholio, at which point I realized how much more bizarre it was than I’d even registered while reading. I think it was when I was saying, "And then her pet parrot bites the evil gynecologist - did I mention that she's telepathic with her pet parrot? - yeah, she's telepathic with her pet parrot, no, that's never really explained..."
It’s presented as the diary of Candidia “Candy” Smith. Pro tip: if the first two human beings your heroine meets after the seemingly total depopulation of the world result in lovingly described encounters with, respectively, a Foley catheter and a speculum, her full name should not be quite so close to the organism which causes yeast infections.
Candy, age eleven, is a supergenius, a sixth-degree black belt capable of shattering bricks with her bare hands and subduing all bad guys, and writes in Pittman shorthand:
English 60 percent flab, null syllables, waste. Suspect massive inefficiency stems from subconsciously recognized need to stall, give inferior intellects chance to collect thoughts into semblance of coherance (usually without success) and to show off (my twelve dollar word can lick your ten dollar word).
The entire book is written like that.
Her father luckily has the world’s greatest bomb shelter equipped with six months’ worth of food and water, plus a ginormous library. Candy is down there reading in the company of Terry, her pet macaw, whom she refers to as “my retarded baby brother.” Terminology aside, this is actually a very sweet relationship. (They do not at this point know that they’re telepathic.) The world blows up in a combination of nuclear strikes followed by plague. Candy listens in via radio to the world falling apart, knows to stay in for three months to avoid the plague, and emerges as the sole survivor (or so she thinks) of the entire world. Unsurprisingly, she freaks out.
But all is not lost! She goes to the home of her sensei to grieve, and finds a letter from him informing her that he moved to her town because he was involved in a secret study of homo post-hominem, the new step in human evolution, a supergenius and immune to all illnesses including the plague, and she was a rare example of one the study missed and so was raised differently and is also a lot younger than the study post-hominems. So all other post-hominems will still be alive. He helpfully gives her the address of one who’s closest to her age (21 - only ten years older) and “a direct, almost line-bred descendant of Alexander Graham Bell” and proceeds to yenta them.
Then, after explaining to her that she’s not human, she will form a new society with other nonhumans, and everyone important in her life was secretly manipulating her all along, he concludes, By the authority vested in me as the sebior surviving official of the United States Karate Association, I herewith promote you to Sixth Degree.
Cut for length and also super skeevy stuff about an eleven-year-old.
She then sets out in search of the other post-hominems. A long stretch of fun survival type stuff ensues. She is shocked to come across a teenage boy drag-racing; he is equally shocked, so much so that he crashes his car, which bursts into flames. She is forced to use her super martial arts “hysterical strength” to rip apart the car with her bare hands to rescue him. This exhausts her so much that she collapses in the flames!
But she awakens comfortable, tended, and in bed, and finds the boy, who proceeds to monologue at her for pages about how he rescued her. As he’s a self-taught EMT in addition to being a Mozart-level musician (he is playing exquisite music while he monologues) and world-class chef and supergenius at age 13, he was able to treat her injuries.
All well and good and sweet. Until he proceeds to spend THREE LONG PARAGRAPHS explaining how he catheterized her. You confirmed my suspicions by filling the first container in a single nonstop gush. And then, after saying, You probably don’t want to know the details of how I coped with your bowels, he proceeds to give her all the details. All this while playing nonstop exquisite music on the piano.
Followed by two long paragraphs about how he definitely absolutely no way molested her while she was comatose. Nosirreee Bob! This comes across as about one million times creepier than if he hadn’t mentioned the possibility at all.
I have to mention here that as I read and write romance, hurt-comfort, and hurt-comfort romance, the situation of “future love interest needs to undress hero/heroine to tend to their injuries/hypothermia/etc” is pretty common, and there are a million ways to handle it so it doesn’t come across as creepy. One is to not mention the sexual potential at all. Another is to have them feel a little awkward and then just get past it. Or they can joke about it. Or they can internally think that under other circumstances it would be great to be cuddling/getting naked/seeing the other naked, but not like this. Etc. “Let me explain exactly how and why I didn’t molest you while you were in a coma” is not one of them.
Candy and “Adam” (clearly not his real name) then have some fun adventures before meeting a third survivor, Rollo the forty-something gynecologist and sexual counselor. Within literally minutes of meeting them, he’s informing them that he won’t join up with them unless he gets sexual access to Candy (age ELEVEN) and wouldn’t it be a shame if one of them died because they didn’t have a doctor with them.
He justifies this for FIVE PAGES, explaining how he’s had sex with twelve-year-olds before and they were grateful EW EW EW and then graciously says that if Candy is physically too small to accommodate him, he’ll travel with them anyway and wait till she’s older because he’d hate to hurt her. But “I cannot and will not endure your company on a celibate basis if, after speculum examination, it is my professional opinion that you are physically capable of accepting me as a lover.”
On the one hand, this is presented as not okay. On the other hand, when you are getting into the level of detail of “I will give you a speculum exam to see if I can rape you,” the author has clearly thought about this waaaaay too much.
Candy is guilt-tripped into being about to agree. But luckily, before anything can happen, Terry the macaw bites him. Rollo tries to murder him with a frying pan, and Candy goes berserk and beats him to death with her bare hands. As one does. They take Rollo’s cat, who deserved a better owner, and leave.
Candy and Adam then have more adventures, and finally meet up with a group of nice homo post hominems. To her delight, her sensei is there, alive and well! Despite running the post-hominem study, it never occurred to him to test himself. He’s a post-hominem too!
All is well… until it turns out that evil Russian homo sapiens, who survived in an underground lab, have launched nukes to destroy the world and kill all the post-hominems so when they emerge generations later to a no-longer-totally-radioactive world, their species will reign supreme!
They found this out from a turncoat post-hominem Russian, who volunteered to go up in a space shuttle and deactivate the space nukes in a suicide mission. But the mission requires three people. They have an American astronaut. But oh no, they also need someone tiny enough to squeeze through a hole but strong enough to move a very stiff lever. Guess it has to be eleven-year-old Candy and her hysterical strength!
While in outer space, Candy muses how sad it is for the other astronauts and how if she was only a little older, she’d comfort them with sex so they could die happy.
Then the Russian turns out to be an evil Russian! He murders the American astronaut so the nuke plan can continue! But Candy breaks his neck and disables the space nukes! But how can she get back to Earth to warn the post-hominems to never trust a Russian?
At this point, we all discover that Terry the macaw can telepathically repeat everything Candy is thinking, and gives Adam a radio commentary of her thoughts and her plan to splash down in a space capsule, so they are able to rescue her.
The only reason Terry is telepathic, by the way, is because otherwise no one would know where Candy's capsule would splash down to rescue her.
The end!
Palmer did a sequel to this, “Tracking,” which appeared in Analog, which I never read. His bio says he’s a shorthand court reporter, which explains the shorthand but not much else.
He also wrote a book called Threshold, and then vanished from the face of the Earth. I guess his work here was done. I read it but all I remember was apostrophes; Amazon informs me that the aliens are called voor'flon. In case you're curious about Threshold, here's the first two Goodreads reviews:
One star: I just don't get this book. Is it serious? Is it a parody?
I toughed it out to page 31, wherein it's explained that the naked fairy might have the body of a twelve-year-old, but she's really fifty-two. So it's totally okay to stare at her breasts (that last part was implied).
The narrator is an insufferable Mary Sue (he's rich! he has perfect pitch!), the writing is purple, and the only good part is the talking cat.
Four stars: Man, I loved this book. It was cheesy as hell when I picked it up (in Norwich, mostly for the man riding a pterodactyl) and reading the first few pages -- naked girl and her cat proclaims to be space aliens to the multi-millionaire protagonist (who they reveal is precisely the ridiculously perfect human being he is because he's the end result of a thousand year long eugenics program, so that's alright then) and then fly the alien's planet where they get shot down and he's stranded naked at the wrong end of the planet surrounded by a huge variety of things that want to eat him.
Crossposted to https://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/2195912.html. Comment here or there.
As you can see, it has a very nice cover and I wish the whole book was like that: a young girl sets off into a depopulated world.
I recently found a copy, re-read it, and was fairly boggled by it. I then tried to describe the plot to Sholio, at which point I realized how much more bizarre it was than I’d even registered while reading. I think it was when I was saying, "And then her pet parrot bites the evil gynecologist - did I mention that she's telepathic with her pet parrot? - yeah, she's telepathic with her pet parrot, no, that's never really explained..."
It’s presented as the diary of Candidia “Candy” Smith. Pro tip: if the first two human beings your heroine meets after the seemingly total depopulation of the world result in lovingly described encounters with, respectively, a Foley catheter and a speculum, her full name should not be quite so close to the organism which causes yeast infections.
Candy, age eleven, is a supergenius, a sixth-degree black belt capable of shattering bricks with her bare hands and subduing all bad guys, and writes in Pittman shorthand:
English 60 percent flab, null syllables, waste. Suspect massive inefficiency stems from subconsciously recognized need to stall, give inferior intellects chance to collect thoughts into semblance of coherance (usually without success) and to show off (my twelve dollar word can lick your ten dollar word).
The entire book is written like that.
Her father luckily has the world’s greatest bomb shelter equipped with six months’ worth of food and water, plus a ginormous library. Candy is down there reading in the company of Terry, her pet macaw, whom she refers to as “my retarded baby brother.” Terminology aside, this is actually a very sweet relationship. (They do not at this point know that they’re telepathic.) The world blows up in a combination of nuclear strikes followed by plague. Candy listens in via radio to the world falling apart, knows to stay in for three months to avoid the plague, and emerges as the sole survivor (or so she thinks) of the entire world. Unsurprisingly, she freaks out.
But all is not lost! She goes to the home of her sensei to grieve, and finds a letter from him informing her that he moved to her town because he was involved in a secret study of homo post-hominem, the new step in human evolution, a supergenius and immune to all illnesses including the plague, and she was a rare example of one the study missed and so was raised differently and is also a lot younger than the study post-hominems. So all other post-hominems will still be alive. He helpfully gives her the address of one who’s closest to her age (21 - only ten years older) and “a direct, almost line-bred descendant of Alexander Graham Bell” and proceeds to yenta them.
Then, after explaining to her that she’s not human, she will form a new society with other nonhumans, and everyone important in her life was secretly manipulating her all along, he concludes, By the authority vested in me as the sebior surviving official of the United States Karate Association, I herewith promote you to Sixth Degree.
Cut for length and also super skeevy stuff about an eleven-year-old.
She then sets out in search of the other post-hominems. A long stretch of fun survival type stuff ensues. She is shocked to come across a teenage boy drag-racing; he is equally shocked, so much so that he crashes his car, which bursts into flames. She is forced to use her super martial arts “hysterical strength” to rip apart the car with her bare hands to rescue him. This exhausts her so much that she collapses in the flames!
But she awakens comfortable, tended, and in bed, and finds the boy, who proceeds to monologue at her for pages about how he rescued her. As he’s a self-taught EMT in addition to being a Mozart-level musician (he is playing exquisite music while he monologues) and world-class chef and supergenius at age 13, he was able to treat her injuries.
All well and good and sweet. Until he proceeds to spend THREE LONG PARAGRAPHS explaining how he catheterized her. You confirmed my suspicions by filling the first container in a single nonstop gush. And then, after saying, You probably don’t want to know the details of how I coped with your bowels, he proceeds to give her all the details. All this while playing nonstop exquisite music on the piano.
Followed by two long paragraphs about how he definitely absolutely no way molested her while she was comatose. Nosirreee Bob! This comes across as about one million times creepier than if he hadn’t mentioned the possibility at all.
I have to mention here that as I read and write romance, hurt-comfort, and hurt-comfort romance, the situation of “future love interest needs to undress hero/heroine to tend to their injuries/hypothermia/etc” is pretty common, and there are a million ways to handle it so it doesn’t come across as creepy. One is to not mention the sexual potential at all. Another is to have them feel a little awkward and then just get past it. Or they can joke about it. Or they can internally think that under other circumstances it would be great to be cuddling/getting naked/seeing the other naked, but not like this. Etc. “Let me explain exactly how and why I didn’t molest you while you were in a coma” is not one of them.
Candy and “Adam” (clearly not his real name) then have some fun adventures before meeting a third survivor, Rollo the forty-something gynecologist and sexual counselor. Within literally minutes of meeting them, he’s informing them that he won’t join up with them unless he gets sexual access to Candy (age ELEVEN) and wouldn’t it be a shame if one of them died because they didn’t have a doctor with them.
He justifies this for FIVE PAGES, explaining how he’s had sex with twelve-year-olds before and they were grateful EW EW EW and then graciously says that if Candy is physically too small to accommodate him, he’ll travel with them anyway and wait till she’s older because he’d hate to hurt her. But “I cannot and will not endure your company on a celibate basis if, after speculum examination, it is my professional opinion that you are physically capable of accepting me as a lover.”
On the one hand, this is presented as not okay. On the other hand, when you are getting into the level of detail of “I will give you a speculum exam to see if I can rape you,” the author has clearly thought about this waaaaay too much.
Candy is guilt-tripped into being about to agree. But luckily, before anything can happen, Terry the macaw bites him. Rollo tries to murder him with a frying pan, and Candy goes berserk and beats him to death with her bare hands. As one does. They take Rollo’s cat, who deserved a better owner, and leave.
Candy and Adam then have more adventures, and finally meet up with a group of nice homo post hominems. To her delight, her sensei is there, alive and well! Despite running the post-hominem study, it never occurred to him to test himself. He’s a post-hominem too!
All is well… until it turns out that evil Russian homo sapiens, who survived in an underground lab, have launched nukes to destroy the world and kill all the post-hominems so when they emerge generations later to a no-longer-totally-radioactive world, their species will reign supreme!
They found this out from a turncoat post-hominem Russian, who volunteered to go up in a space shuttle and deactivate the space nukes in a suicide mission. But the mission requires three people. They have an American astronaut. But oh no, they also need someone tiny enough to squeeze through a hole but strong enough to move a very stiff lever. Guess it has to be eleven-year-old Candy and her hysterical strength!
While in outer space, Candy muses how sad it is for the other astronauts and how if she was only a little older, she’d comfort them with sex so they could die happy.
Then the Russian turns out to be an evil Russian! He murders the American astronaut so the nuke plan can continue! But Candy breaks his neck and disables the space nukes! But how can she get back to Earth to warn the post-hominems to never trust a Russian?
At this point, we all discover that Terry the macaw can telepathically repeat everything Candy is thinking, and gives Adam a radio commentary of her thoughts and her plan to splash down in a space capsule, so they are able to rescue her.
The only reason Terry is telepathic, by the way, is because otherwise no one would know where Candy's capsule would splash down to rescue her.
The end!
Palmer did a sequel to this, “Tracking,” which appeared in Analog, which I never read. His bio says he’s a shorthand court reporter, which explains the shorthand but not much else.
He also wrote a book called Threshold, and then vanished from the face of the Earth. I guess his work here was done. I read it but all I remember was apostrophes; Amazon informs me that the aliens are called voor'flon. In case you're curious about Threshold, here's the first two Goodreads reviews:
One star: I just don't get this book. Is it serious? Is it a parody?
I toughed it out to page 31, wherein it's explained that the naked fairy might have the body of a twelve-year-old, but she's really fifty-two. So it's totally okay to stare at her breasts (that last part was implied).
The narrator is an insufferable Mary Sue (he's rich! he has perfect pitch!), the writing is purple, and the only good part is the talking cat.
Four stars: Man, I loved this book. It was cheesy as hell when I picked it up (in Norwich, mostly for the man riding a pterodactyl) and reading the first few pages -- naked girl and her cat proclaims to be space aliens to the multi-millionaire protagonist (who they reveal is precisely the ridiculously perfect human being he is because he's the end result of a thousand year long eugenics program, so that's alright then) and then fly the alien's planet where they get shot down and he's stranded naked at the wrong end of the planet surrounded by a huge variety of things that want to eat him.
Crossposted to https://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/2195912.html. Comment here or there.