The Fire Sermon

Apocalyptic dystopian fiction has long been a favourite of mine, and The Fire Sermon fits very much into that mold with some interesting and unique twists. The main conceit of the novel is that after some incident in the past (The Before, in the books parlance) everyone is born with a twin. One of the twins is born perfect, the other with some form of deformity (the alpha and the omega). The perfect Alpha's use this to suppress the Omega's, but due to some feature of the twinning process each of the twins is linked such that if one dies the other dies as well. It is an interesting concept, the idea of an oppression, but one where genocide is not an option.

This oppression based on differences has strong echoes of todays protests about racial inequality and a system fixed against someone lending the books some extra power. The methods the Alpha's have built into controlling their siblings are dark and impressive. The systematic oppression and stacking of the systems against the Omegas gradually take a darker and darker dimension as the novel unfolds.

This was a bleak story, but the messages are powerful, and the parallels to the real world are all to easy to draw. I look forward to seeing where this tale goes...