When You Had Power

Nothing Is Promised, Book 1

By: Susan Kaye Quinn

Narrated by: Maria Victoria Martinez

For better, for worse. In sickness and in health.

It’s a legal vow of care for families in 2050, a world beset by waves of climate-driven plagues.

Power engineer Lucía Ramirez long ago lost her family to one - she’d give anything to take that vow. The Power Islands give humanity a fighting chance, but tending kelp farms and solar lilies is a lonely job. The housing AI found her a family match, saying she should fit right in with the Senegalese retraining expert who’s a force of nature, the ex-Pandemic Corps cook with his own cozy channel, and even the writer who insists everything is stories, all the way down. This family of literal and metaphorical refugees could be the shelter she’s seeking from her own personal storm.

She needs this one to work.

Then an unscheduled power outage and a missing turtle-bot crack open a mystery. Something isn’t right on Power Island One, but every step she takes to solve it, someone else gets there first - and they’re determined to make her un-see what she’s seen. Lucía is an engineer, not a detective, but fixing this problem might cost her the one thing she truly needs: a home.

When You Had Power is the first of four tightly connected novels in a new hopepunk series. It’s about our future, how society will shift and flex like a solar lily in the storms of our own making, and how breaks in the social fabric have to be expected, tended to, and healed. Because we’re in this together, now more than ever before.

©2022 Susan Kaye Quinn (P)2022 Spotify Audiobooks

One of the most Solarpunk books out there

This book checked a lot of boxes for what in my opinion makes a canonical or ideal solarpunk story. On top of that it was quite pleasant to listen to!

The narrator did a great job, and the book was well written with realistic characters and interactions. Definitely going to get the sequel(s)! Though I will be buying those on Libro.fm instead of this broligarchic app, which is increasingly beginning to annoy me with bugs and unwanted features

Sweet story, good sci-fi premise, but incomplete

The author paints an interesting picture of how power generation and distribution might work in the future, but ultimately this is just the opening of a longer work, with no resolution of the larger mystery. Also, it was so short that I have no in-character understanding of how the family resolution occurred—as the main character even remarks herself.

What exactly was this strange book?

Guessing I fell into some weird subgenre that includes "cozy time" before dinner. Started off ok but just got dumber and dumber.