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Followed by “N-lite,” “forget-me-do,” “doublers,” “batterkites,” “zeptocameras,” “deep downloads,” “LïFT,” “catcoats,” “plague houses,” and “womb bombs” (to mention a few) as well as dialogue between characters named Bombyx Mori, Peristrophe Halliana, Corydalis Ambigua, and Plumula Nelumbinis, the sheer invention of Tiger Flu rewards a patient reader with an engrossing (if at times confounding) vision of the marvellous (yet disastrous) century following Peak Oil.

With its telltale Woodward’s W, Lai’s otherworldly Vancouver (a.k.a. Saltwater City, first mapped in her previous novel, Salt Fish Girl, well over a decade ago) is viewed beginning in 127 TAO (Time After Oil), which is also Year 42 (Wood Snake Year) and a few decades from now, in 2145. The assorted calendars in use are indicative of the era: society is tribal and fractured and well past any two-tier system. Ancient ways vie with new outlooks, traditions mutate, worldviews compete; high above, space stations and satellites in decaying orbits are regarded as deities or relics or portents.

In alternating chapters, Kora Ko and Kirilow Groundsel, two young women on enemy territory-crossing quests, allow Lai to survey the wonders and ruins while relaying the region’s (and globe’s) past, present, and future. Though at moments plot and, especially, character development take on a distinctly YA fiction flavour, the pit stops Lai conjures — including a school for girl criminals, a parking garage rave, and a conservancy for seeds, spores and cells run by a creepy sisterhood — are captivatingly cinematic.

In reviewing Claire Vaye Watkins 2015 book Gold Citrus Fame (a dystopia of mass desertification), Emily St. John Mandel wrote, “it’s relatively easy to end the world in fiction, to shock and awe with the final disaster and establish the rules and parameters of the radically altered post-apocalypse, but well, then what?” Lai answers that question in ways that are strange and enchanting.

Brett Josef Grubisic’s latest novel, Oldness, is set around 2027. Things then aren’t all that different.