E.G. Condé

The Future is Taíno

In the aftermath of a category 6 hurricane in Puerto Rico, aspiring journalist Vero Diaz leads an effort to rebuild his community, reviving ancient Taíno traditions to survive the storm’s aftermath and their island’s new colonizers. Still gripped by tradition, many do not accept Vero, a trans man, as their leader, driving him to start a new life as a reporter abroad. In the Yucatán, Vero finds a landscape ravaged by an ecological disaster of humanity’s own making—the Hydrophage, a climate technology warped into a weapon of war by the ruthless dictator, Caudillo. In the ruin that war carved, Vero documents the lives of the survivors, finding stories of resilience, hope, and relentless determination; a gardener who sows seeds in rubble; an amnesiac searching for purpose in the twilight of his life; and a Maya revolutionary called the Loba Roja, whose daring vision for the future both inspires and frightens him…

“Condé’s brutal, mystical, and deeply felt speculative debut lifts up a vision of Indigenous resistance and renewal in the face of climate change and colonizers…The author’s depiction of Taíno culture is profound, his evocative images of a land in ruin are visceral, and the grief and sheer determination expressed through his characters is often so vivid as to be overwhelming.”

— Publishers Weekly Starred Review

“Told through intersecting character POVs, and set across a few island and Indigenous communities currently afflicted by other cultures’ climate change transgressions, Sordidez inverts the very concept in its title—a state of ruin, and of a ruined and abandoned people—to imagine sórdidos (those cast into the worst eco-social traumas and displacements) as precisely the changemakers who will be able to imagine other ways to rebuild the world.”

— M L Clark, Author review in Strange Horizons