Post-apocalypse, and the survivors are reduced to treadle-powered computers, and trying to glean useful intelligence from the huge data archives available to them. Sadly this includes data-mining amongst blog archives, giving the survivors the opportunity to reflect on the blinkered, anal and self-obsessed ancestors who got them into this mess.
One woman recently-deceased father hovers over the story, as his daughter comes to terms with his death, and has to decide whether it is worth the effort to fully recover what he may have left behind, or whether to leave the past as a foreign country and to look forward.
The story didn’t really grab me, and I did have some reservations about a man writing a story in which the characters, all female, are using treadle-powered computers to do family history research, and are mostly quite happy to pass the time in idle conversation, with the male character, even in death, having the females in orbit around him.
