Jeffrey Rotter

In a post-apocalyptic future, Rowan Van Zandt and his criminalistic family are conscripted to travel into space. On a "cape of land called Cannibal" in "Floriday"a rocket is found buried underground and in this they will depart. But things don't work out as planned, which isn't unusual for the Van Zants, who are apparently descended from "musical cowboys with drug problems."

Most history in the story seems verbal, and is consequently misheard, misunderstood, and misspelled. The fate of Manatees, for instance: "The original Floridayans killed them for sport, with motorboats… (meer)

The Only Words that are Worth Remembering takes place in the future ruins of the US, where astronomy, including the heliocentric theory, has been forgotten. After Rowan Van Zandt and his twin brother hijack a tour bus, the two face a sentence of hard labor alongside their father in Cuba, now a penal colony. Faced with losing her entire family, Rowan’s mother agrees to a crazy proposition; a space shuttle has been excavated in the ruins of Cape Canaveral, and the Van Zandt family, in exchange for their freedom, must agree to test it.

The novel is told by a future Rowan to his daughter, Sylvia;later parts of the story alternate between astronaut training and Rowan’s eventual escape across the Americas. Most of these “road trip” portions consist of brief vignettes of his stops across the continents, and consequently not much detail is revealed regarding these settings and characters. Astronomy continues to be a major theme throughout, with Rowan drawn to various dismantled observatories.

The biggest weakness of the story is the world-building; it’s difficult to get a real sense of this world and how it came to be. People are loyal to a few major corporations here rather than countries, an numerous references are made to the former “Gunts” and corruptions of current place names. However, it’s never made clear exactly who qualified as a “Gunt,” or how far in the future this is.

The level of technology seems weirdly inconsistent as well; jet airplanes are still common, but basic astronomy is forgotten or suppressed. It’s also highly unlikely that an abandoned shuttle could still be expected to work perfectly after years of neglect, no matter how well preserved. Space launches are extremely complicated, and there’s a huge suspension of disbelief needed to accept that a few random people could learn all the ins and outs via video recording.

The Only Words has some interesting ideas, but they need far more development that what Rotter gives here.

A review copy was provided through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.… (meer)