"Rogue Harvest combines cyberpunk, family drama, and ecological prophecy with a lot of action and adventure. The science is solid; the future richly depicted and nuanced. We're treated to an expansive vision of the world: its perils, its politics, even its music. I'm impressed with the depth and imagination of what Maslan has created."
"But what stands out most are the book's characters. The heroine, Jasmine, has a welcome complexity-a strong woman who makes things happen, but with her share of flaws and inner demons. Her partner, Mane, stands as a fitting counterbalance: an intriguing character in his own right, he provides a steadiness that complements Jasmine's mercurial personality."
"The secondary characters are just as well-realized. Instead of one-note villains, Maslan gives us real people with understandable (even sympathetic) motives for what they do. We see both sides of an ecological conundrum that resonates with the present day: how can we live in harmony with our environment, neither vandalizing it nor walling it off as too precious to touch? It's one of the most important questions in contemporary science fiction, and Maslan gets full marks for her thoughtful ruminations."
"In short, Rogue Harvest is an impressive debut, both as a work of fiction and as an examination of looming social problems. I look forward to Maslan's future career; she's definitely a writer to watch ...one of the first fresh voices of the twenty-first century."
-- James Alan Gardner, Hugo Award-nominated author of Radiant
This novel is an exploration of how humans fit into the natural world. Should we consider ourselves outsiders because we have the power to change the world? or are we meant to find our place in it--a place where we choose to do no harm.
It's a sad commentary on our world today that most near future SF not only assumes we will travel in space but that we will make our world almost uninhabitable with our unlimited "progress". I wanted to take that rather cliched extrapolation a step further and ask what happens after the collapse. How would we respond if we had a chance to rebuild what was lost?
The actual rainforest is as strange as any alien world an author could come up with. It's been fun to try to put the reader in a bizarre world that actually exists here on earth. Hopefully, the reader will think about what it means to lose entire ecosystems, how humans can come to terms with enjoying or using the natural world without doing harm.
I also wanted to create characters the reader will want to spend time with and will care about and "villains" who are trying to do the right thing.
Rogue Harvest is also about friendship. How we choose people to be our friends who can somehow do things we can't, who are like us because our values are the same but bring a balance to the relationship. Mane has a wonderful outlook on life and is fun to be around. He has excellent people skills and knows how to manipulate but lacks confidence and the drive to do anything worth while with his talents. Jasmine has drive and confidence but is self centered and humorless. These two people have a lot to learn from each other.
Music became a huge part of the novel, something that wasn't really intended. It just took hold and permeated the novel and did the same with my own life.
It was the cover of a 1984 Scientific American showing a man in climbing gear climbing into the upper reaches of a huge tropical tree that sparked the concept for Rogue Harvest. I read the article by Donald Perry and, because of my travels to tropical forests, understood immediately why the community of plants and animals living in the rainforest canopy was considered a new frontier. The upper canopies of these forests routinely grow 50 metres high and were entirely unexplored. It was truly a frontier for scientists--one that would take a lot of ingenuity to explore and understand. Since then, a lot of exploration has been done using the rope system described in that article and featured in Rogue Harvest. It's even become an eco-tourist opportunity as rope systems have been set up in several places now that tourists can use to do some rainforest climbing of their own.
Planning a novel of speculative fiction always starts with a lot of "what if" questions. What if people adapted the rope system and lived in the trees 10 stories above the ground? I just had to create the world in which this would happen. Easy peasy! I thought about it for several years while I finished another writing project.
For the story I came up with, the population in this future of our planet had to be reduced. After a bit of research, it wasn't a stretch to hypothesize that given a combination of current antibiotics becoming ineffective (because they are oversubscribed), the human immune system being compromised (because a lack of ozone in the atmosphere is letting in more UV radiation) and everyone being just a plane ride away from the spread of diseases like Ebola. It wasn't hard to come up with the concept of 50 years of plagues that kill off two thirds of the population. The research was very disturbing.
A trip to South America just as I finished the novel confirmed that I'd gotten most things about living in the rainforest right. Did you know that some jungles look like they've been planted by north American gardeners because the forest floor is full of plants that we would recognize as house plants?
Robert J. Sawyer, my editor, had a very early preview of the first chapters of Rogue Harvest during a writing workshop hosted by the Imaginative Fiction Writers Association here in Calgary where he was the workshop leader. I continued to work on the novel, finished it, then sent it to his publisher, Tor. They turned me down just as Rob was looking for novels to fill his line with Red Deer Press. I suppose he figured it wouldn't embarrass him too much to include it in his Science Fiction line.
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