“A post-apocalyptic road novel with the gnomic quality of a parable, Strange Labour shimmers with a meaning just beyond reach.”

Sofia Samatar

Author of A Stranger in Olondria (winner of the William L. Crawford Award, British Fantasy Award and World Fantasy Award), The Winged Histories, Tender (a short story collection) and Monster Portraits (a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar).

“What a vision this novel has. It is at once startling, smart, dark, and full of ache and humour. An amazingly spot-on evocation of our times. I cannot help but use the novel’s last line to say that it made me ‘inexpressibly, unaccountably happy.’ Brilliant.“

David Bergen

David Bergen is the award-winning author of eight previous novels and a collection of short stories. A Year of Lesser was a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award, and The Case of Lena S. was a finalist for the Governor General's Award for Fiction. In 2005, Bergen won the Giller Prize for The Time in Between.

“Robert Penner’s Strange Labour is a road novel of crystalline exuberance — populated by mindless diggers, resourceful scrabblers, evil drifters, and the heroic Miranda. In the majority are the diggers, eternally bulldozing vast earth-works: cryptic nests of grooves that fill valleys with fluid patterns. Might the diggers be an objective correlative for today’s info-tech workers? Individualists tend small farms or scavenge the deserted towns. Mad-Max-style bikers roam the  the landscape with dog-skulls on their handlebars. Resourceful Miranda has our sympathy throughout. Penner adorns his narrative with poetic evocations of this fallen world. A sample: “The sun did not so much rise above the scene, over the dark serration of the treetops, as it formed there, a growing intricacy of light, a concentration of heat and energy drawn up from the world around it, a vortex.” Strange Labour is a book to savor and to love.”

Rudy Rucker

Author of The Ware Tetralogy,  the first two of which, Software and Wetware, both won Philip K. Dick Awards.

“Strange Labor is a beautifully written and intensely smart journey through an abandoned America peopled with fascinating characters who conjure the folklore of the future in the flickering light of frontage road campfires. It captivates you with the charismatic melancholy of its penetrating voice, and takes you right to the edge of the revelatory, in a story that combines gritty realism with the long echoes of deep history and the alienated apocalypse of the right now.”

Christopher Brown

Campbell and World Fantasy Award-nominated author of Tropic of Kansas and Failed State

“Penner proposes an original, quiet apocalypse of labor that resists comprehension; a great metaphor for our socioeconomic predicament. But also much more than that: a bleak, beautiful, even — why not? — inspiring vision of humanity's future. In what feels like an echo of our post-post-world, human industry — and the mythology around it — is driven to absurdity. This is the evolution of humans into creatures defined by their labor: a new evolutionary directive, a novel organization of the human psyche. The origin story of a new species told from the perspective of those bound for extinction. 

Brilliantly, it's the diggers, the non-violent turned, the meek plagued who are organized and efficient. At least they're building something new. The rest, the survivors, are decaying, self-destructing, clinging uselessly to their ghosts. The novel bears quiet witness to the extinction of the bourgeoisie and the strange labor of an apocalyptic proletariat.”

Natalia Theodoridou

Winner of the 2018 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. 2018 Nebula Award Finalist (Game Writing). Fiction editor at sub-Q interactive fiction magazine.

“What do you do when it's after the end of the world? What does it mean to survive the annihilation of everything you formerly took for granted? Strange Labour offers us a beautiful, wavering meditation on these questions. The novel moves through all the usual post-apocalyptic fantasies — a romantic road trip among the ruins, a desperate clinging to vestiges of the past, new forms of community — but it finds all of them wanting. It's a book whose tone continually changes: lucid and observant at some moments, harshly pragmatic at others, and dreamy and dissociated at still others. We are left at the end neither with hope nor despair, but perhaps with a vague sense of making do that is more valuable than either.”

Steven Shaviro

Steven Shaviro is an American academic, philosopher and cultural critic. His books include The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism and Discognition.

“What strange labour are care work and companionship, folklore-ing and child-rearing. How obliquely they appear in whatever it is we sometimes call SF. What is it that stops anyone from doing only this social work, only what needs to be done? Robert Penner’s wonderful novel brings this work front and centre. A woman wanders the desolate US, stays at a care home, meets a man and travels with him, they briefly stay at a commune of liberal aesthetes, then make their way to a camp named Big Echo. Miranda and Dave, Dave and Miranda, Dave delivering improvisational yarns, Miranda accruing eerie topographic patternings, Dave telling stories, Miranda telling stories. Digging, getting down, they try to avoid the overtly and not so overtly fascistic remnants of what was. Where does that get them? Miranda says to Dave, at one point, that there is nothing post-apocalyptic about violent men getting what they want.  The problems, they are the same. There is nothing post-apocalyptic about this novel. And yet it devastates me”

Robert Kiely

His critical work has been published in Irish University Review, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, The Parish Review, and Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui. His chapbooks include simmering of a declarative void (2020), Incomparable Poetry: An Essay on the Financial Crisis of 2002–2008 and Irish Literature (2020), How to Read (Crater, 2017) and Killing the Cop in Your Head (Sad, 2017).

“With crystal clear prose and exquisite restraint, Strange Labour conjures an apocalypse and an aftermath, the meanings of which are always just beyond reach. As Miranda roadtrips across the US, she meets multiple survivors, all desperate to retain purpose in a world which is no longer and can never again be the same. Can they escape the spectral structures of the past? Do their actions matter? Do ours?”

Mark Bould

Mark Bould teaches film and literature at the University of the West of England. He co-edits the books series Studies in Global SF, and his books include Africa SF (2013), SF Now (2014), M. John Harrison: Critical Essays (2019) and The Anthropocene Unconscious (2021).

“Though Westerners often flock to post-apocalyptic tales for escapist entertainment, this novel takes us where the best literature always does: into the heart of our own darkness. Strange Labour is a story about stories — what we tell ourselves, what we tell others, and what kind of endings humans are willing to endure. Robert Penner has crafted a compelling, disturbing vision, not only of a bleak American future stripped of any real sense of purpose, but of the questionable values and comforting lies defining the current cultural landscape.”

Chauna Craig

Author of The Widow’s Guide to Edible Mushrooms (winner of the Next Generation Indie Book Award for Short Fiction)