Rogue Harvest

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

Danita Maslan’s first novel, Rogue Harvest, presents a world almost
lost to ecological destruction and plague, which, 100 years later, has
slowly recovered under the draconian rule of the Emerald Coalition. That
political party hired EcoTech to replenish all the ruined areas of the
world, replacing their original habitats, and used its Green Splinter
warriors to first back up the early removal of people from all the
preserves to cities and then prevent anyone from returning.

When her adoptive father is murdered for publicly arguing that the
preserves should be opened, if only slightly, to scientists and others,
Jasmine Rochelle hires a smart mercenary from the Core to help her track
down the killer. Before long, they have discovered that the murder and
its cover-up are actually covering up something much larger. Jasmine
wants to help her medical researcher adoptive brother find a cure for a
terrible new disease, using the VJX mould from the South American
preserve. Before long she and her partner, Mane, are seeking a way to
enter the preserve without damaging it the way other smugglers do—all
of which sets up a taut thriller, in which there are few obvious good or
bad guys. The leaders of Emerald Coalition truly believe that the
preserves must be kept absolutely empty of any human interaction,
especially as EcoTech keeps telling them that. But, as Jasmine and her
little corps of scientists are discovering, the new forest is not as
absolutely pure as it is said to be; somehow or other, a few previously
unknown species have grown there.

In fact, it is this secret that EcoTech is determined to keep, even if
it has to sanction murder and beatings and other forms of political
violence. Jasmine and her crew, and her friends in the music business,
might upset this and so must be stopped.

Maslan has put together a finely tuned future political thriller in
Rogue Harvest. It’s good solid entertainment with an ecological
warning we should all perhaps take seriously.