The Swimmers

By Marian Womack

2021

First Published

2.87

Average Rating

288

Number of Pages

8H47M

Audio Length

A claustrophobic, literary dystopia set in the hot, luscious landscape of Andalusia from the author of The Golden Key. After the ravages of global warming, this is place of deep jungles, strange animals, and new taxonomies. Social inequality has ravaged society, now divided into surface dwellers and people who live in the Upper Settlement, a ring perched at the edge of the planet's atmosphere. Within the surface dwellers, further divisions occur: the techies are old families, connected to the engineer tradition, builders of the Barrier, a huge wall that keeps the plastic-polluted Ocean away. They possess a much higher status than the beanies, their servants. The novel opens after the Delivery Act has decreed all surface humans are 'equal'. Narrated by Pearl, a young techie with a thread of shuvani blood, she navigates the complex social hierarchies and monstrous, ever-changing landscape. But a radical attack close to home forces her to question what she knew about herself and the world around her.

Avg Rating

2.87

Number of Ratings

331

5 STARS

4 STARS

17%

3 STARS

42%

2 STARS

23%

1 STARS

11%

goodreads

Author

Marian Womack

Author · 6 books

Marian Womack is a bilingual writer born in Andalusia and educated at the universities of Glasgow and Oxford. She is currently completing a part-time Masters Degree in Creative Writing at Cambridge University, and recently graduated from the Clarion Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writer’s Workshop at USCD. She is co-editor of the academic book Beyond the Back Room: New Perspectives on Carmen Martín Gaite (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), and of The Best of Spanish Steampunk (forthcoming, 2015). In Spanish she has published the cycle of intertwined tales Memoria de la Nieve (Zaragoza: Tropo, 2011), has co-authored the YA novel Calle Andersen (Barcelona: La Galera, 2014), and has contributed to more than fifteen anthologies of short fiction, the most recent Alucinadas (Gijón: Palabaristas, 2014), the first Spanish language all-female SF anthology. Her journalism and critical writing on Spanish literature, culture and society have appeared on a variety of English speaking academic journals, as well as the Times Literary Supplement, the New Internationalist, and the digital version of El País. She has fiction forthcoming in English in Weird Fiction Review. Chosen by literary magazine Leer in its 30th anniversary as one of the thirty most influential people in their thirties in Spain’s literary scene, she is also a prolific translator, and runs a small press in Madrid, Ediciones Nevsky.