Tricia Sullivan’s Lightborn initially appears to be a new twist on the zombie novel: in a near-future society, technology has been developed which allows neural stimulation and recreation via patterns of lights watched by the user. These Lightborns, colloquially known as Shine, are an accepted part of society, being used for pleasure, for learning new skills and so on. When everything goes to hell in the fictional American city of Los Sombres (somewhere in the desert West), it’s Shine that’s to blame, and only Roksana, a teenage girl who is unaffected by Shine, and the younger children who are not yet susceptible to it, escape the effects.

We then meet up with Xavier, a teenage boy living outside Los Sombres in the aftermath of the disaster, a refugee from the city who lost his father and whose mother has been driven mad by the Shine. Los Sombres is under quarantine by the army, with hi-tech robots prowling the landscape where adults fear to tread; meanwhile, Xavier and others his age take drugs to retard their physical development and delay the moment when they become at risk from the Shine. Into the refugee community, which is organised by the local Native American tribe, comes a stranger from Los Sombres, and following his arrival everything starts to change. The theft of his special drugs drives Xavier to take the drastic step of lighting out for Los Sombres in search of more – and what he finds there is not what he had been led to expect.

Instead of a barren urban landscape populated by Shiney zombies, Xavier finds a society of sorts, with vestiges of organisation among the Shine-addled adults and small bands of children existing amongst them – the government picture of Los Sombres was clearly propaganda. He also finds Roksana – and their partnership, along with the work of her father, Amir, holds the key to fixing Los Sombres and ending the quarantine.

Lightborn is a clever premise – after the initial setup, and being exposed to the implicit assumption that all order in Los Sombres has gone, that the Shiney people are zombies, the reality comes as a surprise, and it’s something of a relief that this isn’t just a new variation on the zombie theme. The Shineys may not be zombies, but they are addicts, in thrall to their fix of Shine, and Sullivan’s portrayal of a society lurching along under those conditions is plausible and clever, and in its way a little bit post-apocalyptic. The adventures of Xavier  and Roksana are engrossing and surprising in equal measure, and the end result is a well-paced and engaging slice of science fiction.

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