The Lightest Object in the Universe - Kimi Eisele

I count dystopian or post-apocalyptic novels among my favorites, but having read quite a few of them over the years I’ve started to realize that finding something even a little different in the genre is not easy – not that I’m going to let that keep me from trying.  Kimi Eisele’s The Lightest Object in the Universe is one dystopian novel that does manage to stand out from the crowd a bit. And that’s both the good news and the bad news.

When the world economy finally crashes from all the abuses it’s suffered at the hands of incompetent and criminal manipulators over the decades, it drags governments and the whole power grid down with it.  The United States, it seems, is particularly hard hit by the implosion.  Suddenly, cell phones, personal computers, tablets, and smart watches are little more than plastic bricks of various sizes and shapes. Mass communication is a thing of the past.  Ready or not, everyone is on his own, and survival is something that will have to be worked at every day for the rest of your life.  And it won’t be easy. 

Carson and Beatrix are on opposite ends of the country when it happens. The pair met just days before the collapse, but both of them remember the sparks that flew during the little time they were able to share together before Beatrix had to return to the West Coast.  Now, Carson is determined somehow to make his way from one coast to the other – and he is prepared to walk all the way even without knowing whether or not Beatriz will be there when, or if, he finally gets there.

Author Kimi Eisele

What makes The Lightest Object in the Universe different from most novels of its type is its ever-present sense of optimism and goodwill, a feeling that the good people in the world so overwhelmingly outnumber the bad ones that things will work out in the end.  Everywhere our main characters turn they are met with people willing to share their expertise or whatever else they can spare. Oh, sure, there are some bad guys out there who will gladly kill and rape at the drop of a hat, but they never seem to get the upper hand for long.  But this brings us to the “good news-bad news” scenario I mentioned earlier.

I suppose that Kimi Eisele’s novel exposes me as being more a cynic than an optimist because I was never able to get completely comfortable with an apocalyptic world in which the crime rate is seemingly lower now than it was in the world that preceded it.  This is a world, in fact, in which most of the crime - and even that is mostly theft and relatively minor assault - is perpetrated by pre-teens and teens on bicycles. If already dangerous neighborhoods and large cities are violently tearing themselves apart, it is all happening behind the scenes. This allows the overall sense of optimism to be maintained, but it kept me wondering what was happening elsewhere, and how long it would be before those worlds would collide with this one.  That’s the bad news – at least for more cynical readers like me.

The good news is that this is an uplifting novel, one filled with hope and confidence in human nature, that I enjoyed reading despite my occasional twinges of doubt.  It is more a story about the creation of a new world than it is one about the destruction of an old world.

And that just may be exactly what you need right now, so take a look.

(Book Number 3,413)