Andrés Vaccari

A SONG FOR SUMERICA
This was originally titled PREY, but the title was changed after Michael Crichton published a novel by the same name. It was shortlisted for the 1999 George Turner Award (among the ten best). I’ve shelved it after I got accepted into a PhD program at Macquarie University.

The novel is a sci-fi fantasy epic set in a post-apocalyptic future society set in South America. Having survived a long-forgotten apocalypse, they believed themselves to be the last civilization on Earth. They have begin their society from zero, based on communist-anarchist principles. They are enlightened, but worship mechanical gods, relics from a past high-tech era.

The plot centers on Liliana, a woman who has found out she is pregnant and has been singled out by the Bird God to sacrifice her newborn. The narrative follows her nine months of gestation, and her changing feelings towards her unborn child and the prospect of its death. But there are darker forces at work, for many believe her child is the one spoken in a prophecy. Liliana´s journey will take her through the various hidden aspects of Sumerican society: the pale Officers who control the underground bureaucracy, the Seers who promulgate an alternative cult to the state religion and reign of the Gods, the forbidden zones where the lasting effects of the War of the Ancients can still be felt. And the society of the Wounded, those the Bird God has disfigured with the Mark for thei crimes against the common good. Through her journey, Liliana will learn that she is not what she has always believed she was.