Dossier: “The Future of Threat is Forever”: Canadian Apocalyptic Fiction
This article analyzes Thomas King’s The Back of Turtle. See this issue’s introduction for full context regarding the study of King’s novel.
Scrap Economics in The Tiger Flu and The Back of the Turtle1See this issue’s introduction for full context regarding the study of King’s novel.
In Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu and Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle, various characters display behavior similar to that of scavenger species in our ecosystem: scrounging for scraps and digging through carrion to harvest resources. In Lai’s novel, two parallel communities survive by foraging supplies from their environment. One community forages from nature, and the other forages from abandoned settlements filled with corpses, yet the language is the same in both cases. There is no distinction between “natural” foraging and “urban” foraging. In King’s novel, a young man salvages supplies from his environment to create a beacon to guide lost sea turtles home. Another character recounts tales of tourists salvaging supplies from an abandoned indigenous settlement, extracting curio and reselling them online for cash. While, ecologically speaking, “scavenger” is a term reserved for species that scavenge nutritional resources from decaying bodies, it can be useful to apply a similar notion to human individuals who scavenge economic resources from a decaying economic environment, as is the case in the fictional settlement of Samaritan Bay in The Back of the Turtle. This essay will examine scavenger figures in apocalyptic fiction from a socio-ecological perspective, and will argue that these figures, whether human or non-human, play a crucial role in our society-as-ecosystem.
Human society, as it currently stands, is an incredibly wasteful affair. According to a report by the WWF titled Driven to Waste: Global Food Loss on Farms, “an estimated 2.5 billion tonnes of food goes uneaten around the world each year. […] These new estimates indicate that of all the food grown, approximately 40 per cent goes uneaten.” (n.p.). In a research paper titled “Scavenging in the Anthropocene: Human impact drives vertebrate scavenger species richness at a global scale,” researchers highlight that scavenger species thrive in proximity to human societies due to the sheer amount of waste we produce. In their analysis of scavenger species, “[human footprint] was the main factor influencing scavenger richness in an assemblage, showing a quadratic relationship” (Sebastián‐González et al. 3011). Civilization providing such a rich source of sustenance for scavenger species is certainly good for our ecosystems, as “Scavengers play pivotal roles in ecosystems by stabilizing food webs (Moleón et al., 2014; Wilson & Wolkovich, 2011), providing regulating services for organic food waste (O’Bryan et al., 2018), accelerating nutrient recycling (Wilson & Read, 2003) and removing potential sources of infectious disease transmission” (Sebastián‐González et al. 3007). However, this very abundance should call into question how and why we produce such towering amounts of waste. After all, while edible waste can be taken care of by scavenger species, any waste that cannot be digested must be processed some other way, usually by human involvement.
Artistic Scavenging in Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle
In Thomas King’s novel The Back of the Turtle, there are two prominent figures who salvage supplies from their environment. The first group is not directly involved in the events of the book, but is described by Mara as thieves, “looting the community centre” (280). These tourists enter indigenous reserves they believe to be abandoned, taking advantage of “laws that covered abandoned buildings and goods, [claiming] that [they] had as much right to what was here as the next man.” (280). These tourists are part of a much larger industry of souvenir-selling online vendors, a practice that fills Mara with anger:
Mara could feel the anger creep in at the corners. “Genuine Aboriginal ghost-town souvenirs. Own a piece of creepy misfortune. Hear the cries of the dying in every teacup. Feel the cold hand of death on every place setting. […] An eBay special. Bid early, bid often, Use the security of PayPal.” (280)
Upon hearing this story, “Gabriel trie[s] to imagine the kind of person who would steal from the dead. Ordinary. They were probably perfectly ordinary” (281), highlighting that this practice of extracting value from abandoned areas is not a particularly outrageous practice, and is relatively commonplace. Value is extracted from indigenous land if there are no individuals living on it, being seen as fair for the taking. If people are living on land housing valuable resources, excuses are made to move them in order to access these resources. Contrasting with this extractive mentality is Sonny, a young man who spends his time beachcombing in search of treasure. He does not necessarily search for objects of value but is led by his own curiosity and personal interest in whatever materials he can find. In the latter half of the novel, he finds a roll of copper wire on the beach. He strips it of insulation, resulting in a heavy glimmering roll of pure copper wire. Copper theft is an incredibly frequent and lucrative crime, and instances of this crime have grown “by about 200 per cent annually from 2021 to 2023” (Duhatschek), yet Sonny does not show an interest in this material for its financial value; he likes it purely for its artistic value: “Now that he has the wire, he’ll be able to build the tower quickly, and with the wire, the tower will be strong and beautiful. Sonny even likes the colour. In the sunlight, the shells and wire will shine and glow like alabaster and gold” (352). Unlike the tourists, he also shows respect toward those he calls the “ghost Indians” (352), sharing his food with them and showing an interest in forming a friendship with them (230). When he finds a piece of salvage he believes belongs to another individual, he does not take it for himself; he attempts to return it to its rightful owner (101). Sonny’s scavenging is respectful of those who share the land with him as well as transformative, creating value through artistic labor, while the tourists do not transform the materials they scavenge. Sonny’s artistic scavenging of materials is an efficient way to repurpose many discarded materials and extract some value out of them, comparable to many different sustainable efforts outside of the novel. Many textile artists center their artistic practices around second-hand materials, whether by budget limitations or as a conscious artistic decision, while many researchers dedicate their efforts to exploring the potential value of bioplastics created from food waste (Baum). This type of scavenging is not a direct analogy to scavengers in our ecosystems but fulfills the important role of transforming and salvaging value from materials that could not be salvaged by animals or by any digestive process.
Urban Foraging in Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu
In Lai’s novel, scavenging is given an ambiguously non-human face, blurring the lines between human scavenging and the species in our ecosystem that take care of the decomposing process of nature. In The Tiger Flu, the Grist sisters are a group of clones who live off the land, reproducing themselves asexually through a mutational duplication process called “doubling.” While the Grist sisters are not explicitly characterized as Asian women, aspects of their identity do hint towards some of these social dynamics that surround them. Lai states in her essay “Familiarizing Grist Village” that her choice to depict the Grist commune as a community of clones “stems from this […] working through of the racist notion that all Asians look alike.” (Lai 27), as well as a long-standing history of cyberpunk fiction depicting “Asians […] as machines, insects, robots, cyborgs—differently depending on nationality, but nonetheless generally nonhuman” (Lai 23). The Grist women are not exactly human, multiplying like amoebas, birthing litters of “puppies” (93) and healing injuries or amputated body parts like a starfish would. This places these women in an uncanny valley, where their non-human status and their exclusion from society frame them into a social class lower than the rest of society. The Grist women nourish themselves by foraging from their natural environment, as well as growing crops from seeds provided by the New Origins Archive. (Lai 88) The Cordova girls also forage from their environment, breaking into abandoned supermarkets to find canned foods.
While the Cordova School for Dancing Girls and the Grist commune differ greatly in their foraging techniques, both originate from the same survival philosophies. While the Grist sisters primarily forage plants and resources from the natural environment, much of their equipment is also foraged from urban sources. Their whetstones, used to sharpen their precious surgical knives, are made from crushed engagement rings (Lai 19), while their Bunsen burners and other surgical equipment are scavenged from the very laboratories that created their ancestor, Grandma Chan Ling. This grandmother is also the very same individual that links these two communities together. In her time,
The Cordova school was the Grist commune. It’s where Grandma Win Ling came after the purge, and after her sister, Chan Ling, fled with many others to the quarantine rings. The school was a cover for it, so we could hide and survive. As our numbers dwindled, we brought in orphans so we could pass our history and survival techniques on to them. (172)
This information contextualizes the Cordova girls’ urban foraging as an extension of the Grist women’s foraging practices, simply applied to a different environment. Madame Dearborn, their headmistress, believes that her girls are only foraging in old, abandoned supermarkets, though the Cordova girls are more realistic about the state of affairs. There are no supermarkets left for them to forage, which leaves them no choice but to resort to raiding plague houses (136). The girls lie to their headmistress about the origin of their spoils because they are acutely aware of the complexity of their situation, and collectively agree that this small crime is necessary for their survival:
There are no supermarkets left in the first ring. Madame wants to believe there are, and it’s our duty to uphold that belief. We used to cross into the other quarantine rings, but Cosmopolitan Earth has just closed the One-Two border, even to us. The city needs more cans, and it’s our job to get them. So. In you go. (137)
This lie results in some incredibly fruitful hauls, as these plague houses are filled with “cans, bottles, and jars of everything Cordova girls dream of. Peanut butter, tuna, tomatoes, soup, juice, beer” (140). Many of these urban foraging practices align themselves with Freegan principles. According to the website freegan.info, a freegan is one who “employ[s] alternative strategies for living that are based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources” (n.p.). Freegans employ a variety of methods to minimize their engagement with the economy they view as incredibly wasteful, but:
the most publicized Freegan waste-reduction strategy, commonly called dumpster diving or urban foraging, involves foraging through the waste of retailers, residences, offices, and other facilities for useful goods. These goods are safe, usable, clean, and often in perfect or near-perfect condition, a symptom of a throwaway culture that encourages disposability. (n.p.)
According to a study by Benedikt Jahnke and Ulf Liebe titled “Explaining Unconventional Protest and Public Support for Actions against Food Waste”:
for many […] activists, dumpster diving provides an opportunity to express their criticism of consumerism. By not buying food, which would create a new demand for products, they live on the “leftovers” of society. (Jahnke and Liebe 60)
While urban foraging is by and large a victimless crime, it is still frequently legally prosecuted in many countries. In Canada, dumpster diving is legal; yet, since the dumpsters are often located on private property, it is often prosecuted under the offence of trespassing. Culturally, there is generally a slight aversion to food that has been in a dumpster, but non-participating members of society generally demonstrate approval of these kinds of waste-reduction methods (Jahnke and Liebe 69). There is a common misconception that these activists participate in urban foraging out of a lack of funds, though, according to a survey in Jahnke and Liebe’s study,
saving money was selected mostly as the third most important motive, [preceded by rescuing food and preserving resources,] which is in line with the qualitative finding that dumpster diving is not primarily carried out to save money but that this financial aspect is a positive side effect of the activity. (63)
This difference marks a clear difference between freegans in our world and the scavenger figures in Lai’s novel. In reality, it is not necessary to be struggling financially to partake in these activities, and many freegans highlight that the money they save by participating in urban foraging allows them to spend their money on more ethical options, such as organic or local farm foods: “One female respondent (30 years old) said: “Because I get my fruits and vegetables only by dumpster diving, the remaining food I buy is organic and I can afford to do this because of dumpster diving” (Jahnke and Liebe 61).
A similar scavenging phenomenon also takes place with knowledge as a resource. While the Cordova girls primarily scavenge for food, they also employ a similar philosophy with knowledge. In Saltwater City, knowledge is difficult to access without financial means, yet the value of knowledge is recognized as an important tool for survival. As Myra states when addressing her sisters: “in order to survive in the world that is coming, we need to know our history. […] Knowledge, my sisters, is the most important tool we have” (86). However, access to this information is, unfortunately, incredibly dependent on one’s socioeconomic status. In Lai’s Saltwater City, information is stored on scales, tiny hair-like filaments of technology that are lodged directly into people’s brains. Connecting these scales without proper sanitization exposes its users to a risk of infection, one that those in lower classes are much more exposed to, like Kora, who has “no renminbi [(currency)] for the alcohol solution you’re to rub on [scales before inserting them]” (75). Those with an abundance of knowledge have a visible halo of scales around their head, serving as a visual status symbol for those around them. In the very first chapter of the novel, Kora dreams of “add[ing] rings to her halo, or even a full helmet, so she can get wiser quicker.” (Lai 12) While large halos are a status symbol, Kora also has deep-rooted shame about the state of her infected scales, as they are a physical representation of her poverty. When attempting to cross the border, her infection is used to demonstrate that she is not a threat and should not be taken seriously. While the soldiers see the two Grist women as “young, dirty, scrawny girls of no account” (Lai 263), one soldier is suspicious of Kora due to her abundance of scales. To brush of the suspicion, Tania lifts Kora’s bangs to expose her infected scales:
“They’re all infected. Look,” Tania says. She lifts Kora’s hair, and they can all see the insects crawling on her scalp and red, angry flesh following the path of her halo. Kora feels ashamed. (263)
Similar to Lai’s novel, it is becoming increasingly difficult to access information without the financial resources to pay for a subscription. Services like Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine are under attack by major publishers, who are cutting its access to their websites under the excuse of AI scraping. Resources like these not only allow individuals without the means to pay for a subscription to access their content but also keep news companies accountable by tracking any changes made to their articles and archiving copies of each version on their servers. Its database has been used in a myriad of legal cases, has allowed citizens to criticize silent edits of news articles on political figures in electoral periods, and has even allowed journalists to keep tabs on US governmental entities like ICE. (Knibbs) Much like Lai’s novel, it is “only the citizens of the glass towers” (12) who can stay educated and inform themselves on the state of the world. As Cormier highlights in his paper titled “Emergent Critical Strategies against the Nation-Trap: The Digitization of Literary Apocalyptic Affects and Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu,” it’s important to consider how technology emphasizes these class divides by building upon our preexisting inequalities rather than being consciously built to subvert them:
One of the key problems, here, is that the race for the dominance over technology, of transhumanism or the cybernetic-transcendence of the human—the body, in particular—is merely a continuation of the current pursuit, one that also breeds social hierarchies based on exploitation and accessibility (Cormier 180)
There are certainly means to access information without paying for it, such as piracy, but these methods expose its users to a variety of risks and viruses, much like Lai’s scales. This physical danger and infection described in Lai’s book are simply a natural result of the expansion of technology into the biological.
Our society and, consequently, the scale on which our industries must operate are expanding at breakneck speeds, and the amount of waste we produce is growing alongside it. Much like the freegans or the Cordova girls, it would be beneficial for us to question the ways in which we allocate our financial resources, and how we can use them differently in order to minimize our contributions to this unsustainable growth. While not everyone can dedicate time or physical ability to participate in urban foraging, we can look at Sonny’s artistic repurposing of materials and apply these practices in our own lives. We can do this on our own, or join repair café initiatives. We can learn to protect ourselves when accessing information at a discount and teach others to do the same. But most importantly, it’s important to keep an open mind when observing the methods that others use to subvert the wasteful practices of our society, and to avoid equating legality with morality. Just because something is legal, like in the case of the tourists in King’s novel, does not mean that an action is moral. And, in the case of many freegans worldwide, just because dumpster diving is illegal does not make it an immoral action. Keeping a clear distinction between these two concepts expands our toolkit of revolutionary action, helping us shape a world where we hopefully create less waste than we do now.
Works Cited
- Baum, Stephanie. “Researchers Turn Food Waste into Biodegradable Plastic.” Phys.org, 15 July 2025, phys.org/news/2025-07-food-biodegradable-plastic.html. Accessed 20 Apr. 2026.
- Cormier, Matthew. “Emergent Critical Strategies against the Nation- Trap: The Digitization of Literary Apocalyptic Affects and Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu.” Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 11, 21 Oct. 2022, pp. 167–182, https://doi.org/10.14201/candb.v11i167-182. Accessed 19 Apr. 2026.
- Duhatschek, Paula. “Copper Theft Has Been Growing. The Telecom Industry Wants Tougher Penalties.” CBC, 5 July 2024, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/copper-wire-theft-telecom-penalties-1.7253719. Accessed 20 Apr. 2026.
- “Freegan.info – Strategies for Sustainable Living beyond Capitalism.” Freegan.info, freegan.info/.
- Jahnke, Benedikt, and Ulf Liebe. “Explaining Unconventional Protest and Public Support for Actions against Food Waste.” Nature and Culture, vol. 16, no. 3, 2021, pp. 49–82. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27203851, https://doi.org/10.2307/27203851.
- King, Thomas. The Back of the Turtle. Toronto, Harper Perennial, 2014.
- Knibbs, Kate. “The Internet’s Most Powerful Archiving Tool Is in Peril.” WIRED, 13 Apr. 2026, http://www.wired.com/story/the-internets-most-powerful-archiving-tool-is-in-mortal-peril/.
- Lai, Larissa. “Familiarizing Grist Village.” Canadian Literature, no. 240, 9 July 2020, https://doi.org/10.14288/cl.vi240.192487.
- Lai, Larissa. The Tiger Flu. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018.
- Sebastián‐González, Esther, et al. “Scavenging in the Anthropocene: Human Impact Drives Vertebrate Scavenger Species Richness at a Global Scale.” Global Change Biology, vol. 25, no. 9, 24 June 2019, pp. 3005–3017, https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.14708. Accessed 19 Apr. 2026.
- World Wildlife Fund. Driven to Waste: Global Food Loss on Farms. 2021.
Notes
- 1See this issue’s introduction for full context regarding the study of King’s novel. ↩︎
About the Contributor
Mari-Alex Rioux
Mari-Alex Rioux is a multidisciplinary artist from Cocagne, NB. It describes themselves as a musical archeologist, a wannabe luddite with a passion for technology, or as a bookworm, "but in a very literal sense, like an an actual worm". Its musical explorations are shared on their radio show Le...
Mari-Alex Rioux is a multidisciplinary artist from Cocagne, NB.
It describes themselves as a musical archeologist, a wannabe luddite with a passion for technology, or as a bookworm, "but in a very literal sense, like an an actual worm".
Its musical explorations are shared on their radio show Le Concept, which airs on CKUM's (Codiac FM) airwaves.
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