Then one day the City starts to swell, new neighborhoods and districts rising overnight to accommodate the sudden arrival of billions. The newcomers all report the breakout of a horrific new Plague, which is wiping out the entire population of the living world. Before long it becomes clear that humanity will not be walking away from this one, and the City begins to depopulate as well, as its citizens are abandoned by the mortal memory that sustains them.

For a while, the City seems about to empty entirely. But then the disappearances stop. The last citizens perform an informal census and discover that they still number many thousands. What's more, a disproportionate number of them seem to be the family and acquaintances of a single woman, one Laura Byrd, who has yet to show up on the City's teeming streets.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, Laura Byrd sits alone in a research station in Antarctica. The relief expedition is overdue. The radio has broken down. Her fellow expedition members, who left to seek help from another distant outpost, have not returned or sent help. The food is running out. She is lonely and afraid and certain that something horrible has happened. In this, she's correct. But the news is worse that she can know. Because she's probably the last human left alive on Earth, and the City will remain standing for only as long as she can. ...

Applauding the persistence of memory

If "The Brief History of the Dead" sounds familiar, that's because (a version of) its first chapter appeared in The New Yorker as a stand-alone short story that was later nominated for the Nebula Award. The story was sad, haunting, beautiful and, at times, perversely funny. The novel, which introduces us to Laura Byrd and follows the daily "lives" of those who live on in her memory, is even better: a little long-winded at times, in that some of its descriptions go on well past the moment when impatient readers can be expected to say, "OK, I get the point," but also constantly surprising, in a manner that defies a plot that can only reach one sad conclusion.

SPOILER WARNING!

We know Laura Byrd is doomed. She's stuck in an incredibly hostile environment and would be many miles away from help even if help were available for her to find. The best possible outcome for her, even if she makes it back to civilization, is a long, lonely wait for death as the last survivor of a ruined world. She might not even have that, as the Plague is airborne and there's no reason to believe she's immune. Knowing what we know, there's really no reason for her to do anything but lie down and die. But her arduous journey across the ice, in pursuit of the co-workers who have not returned for her, workers who we know must be as dead as the rest of humanity, is a compelling, vivid account of survival and endurance. It's also a sad portrait of a woman falling apart under the weight of her own despair and loneliness—a woman who, we come to understand, never quite knew what her life was for, even before she found herself in imminent danger of losing it. Her flashbacks to random, intangible moments from her past are (we understand) manifestations of the very same phenomenon that keeps the City standing. The miracle is that she keeps going, even after she knows that there's probably no point. It's the way she's built.

The Brief History of the Dead derives some of its impact from ecological concerns. The Plague takes place several decades in our future and reflects the further degradation of our environment; there have been mass extinctions, devastating wars and a degree of additional global warming that only intensifies the risks of Laura's journey across the ice. And there's satire, too: In this future world, Antarctica is owned by a consortium that includes her employers, the Coca-Cola Corporation. (Coca-Cola comes in for serious abuse here.)

But that's just the speculative background. The novel's true focus, which it returns to again and again, is memory: the way our lives resonate in the lives of other people, even those we've only touched in passing. This rings just as true with the people of the City as it does for poor, suffering Laura. They achieve compelling weight, even when they appear for only as long as a sentence. The ones we get to know are rich, and alive, and still capable of surprising us, as much with the life they live now as with the memories they bring with them from the life they lived before. We're still learning new things about them (most heartbreakingly, a blind man Laura used to see on her way to work), even as, on the world they left behind, Antarctica does what Antarctica must.