The Dying Sun

Gary Blackwood, the prolific and popular author of fiction and nonfiction books and plays for young adults, published his dystopian speculative fiction The Dying Sun in 1989. Set in the middle of a new ice age during the twenty-first century, the novel explores a possible future where most of the U.S. and Canada is no longer habitable. By tracing the adventures of a teenager trying to traverse the dangerous landscape between Mexico and Missouri, Blackwood examines the geopolitical transformations and conflicts that an environmental disaster like this one could bring about.

The novel is narrated by sixteen-year-old James Simpson as he looks back over the last year of his life and considers what has happened to him during that time.

In the middle of the twenty-first century, the sun’s light and its effects on the Earth are slowly diminishing. This has caused the Earth to cool significantly, creating a climate change effect that is the opposite of global warming, but no less devastating. There has been mass migration, as residents of the U.S., especially those in northern states, have moved south towards Mexico. The U.S. has moved its capital from Washington, DC to Houston, which is no longer a simple city, but instead, is a huge and run down megalopolis stretching along the Mexican border.



In a twist that reads as irony in today’s politically anti-immigrant climate, the fact that many U.S. citizens are trying both legally and illegally to cross into Mexico inflames that country’s patriotism towards hostility. Some Mexicans have banded together into border patrol militias, calling themselves the Mexican Liberation Army and using terrorism to conduct guerrilla warfare against anyone they find from the U.S.

James’s family has been doing their best in the Houston megalopolis, but as the novel opens, the rampant crime, terrible living conditions, and general sense of displacement that they’ve been experiencing as refugees have overwhelmed them. The Simpsons decide to go against the grain and travel north to their abandoned farm in the middle of Missouri to try to make a life there.

Unwilling to give up everything he knows and scared to abandon the comforts of modern life for a necessarily harsh backwoods existence, James stays behind in Mexico. He moves into the house of his recently orphaned best friend, Robert, and Robert’s grandmother. Soon after, Robert loses a leg in a terrorist attack, and the government of Mexico institutes a universal military draft that would include all immigrants regardless of their physical condition. Worried, James and Robert set out towards the north, hoping that the dangers of the journey will prove easier to overcome than the dangers of staying.



The road is long and perilous; they make their way along roads that are falling apart and through the devastated countryside. Along the way, they meet Sunny Shanahan, a thrill-seeking, funny, but also unpredictably unstable drifter. Often Sunny’s devil-may-care attitude puts the boys in harm’s way – sometimes so much so that they almost end up killed.

At long last, James and Robert make it all the way to Missouri, only to be deeply disappointed by what they find there. The weather is unremittingly cold, there are no amenities to make life at all comfortable, and all there is all day every day is the backbreaking work of making a farm go. Robert is incapable of adapting to this new way of life and, eventually, makes the decision to go back south to his grandmother. However, after James lives through an almost unbearable winter, and copes with witnessing Sunny savaged by wild dogs, he finds himself maturing and more capable of bearing the load. The novel ends as James starts to get closer to his at first seemingly unfriendly cousin, Judith, facing an uncertain future with stoicism.

Reviewers praise the novel’s interesting take on a possible dystopian future but worry that its prose works against it. As Jack Forman from the Mesa College Library in San Diego puts it, “the considerable plot action is slowed down by the boy's colorless and reflective tone. Despite the important political, social, and personal issues raised, the story lacks the fire that would melt the ice in James' narration.”