Crack open C Pam Zhang’s new novel, “Land of Milk and Honey,” and marvel over how she builds an entire dystopian world within a few short pages.

After a mysterious smog wreaks havoc on Earth, there are “no more lemon trees fragrant on the slopes of Greece, no more sugarcane striping Vietnam, no more small, sweet Indian mangoes.” Gone, too, is much of the animal life that has fed humanity for generations.

Hunger drives the people of this dismal world, especially Zhang’s protagonist, a nameless, adrift, 29-year-old Asian American chef. She hasn’t seen her home state of California for 10 years — and hasn’t tasted fresh produce in three. After the climate apocalypse, she, like most of the world’s people, relies on a grim “mung-protein-soy-algal flour” as a staple food.

But lest the reader find this world too bleak, a scintillating alternative beckons right from the outset of the novel. A controversial “elite research community” on a mountain in Italy seeks a private chef — and their land is one of the few places on Earth the sun still reaches. When the billionaire boss sends our chef-protagonist a job offer, she sets off for a destination referred to as “the land of milk and honey,” fueled by the dream of biting into leafy lettuce once more.

What follows is page after page of decadent, sensual writing, making “Land of Milk and Honey” one of the most pleasurable, inventive reads of the year. After years of mere subsistence, the chef experiences a carnal sort of ecstasy as she takes in the bounty of this colony for the first time: “Strawberries and spring, strawberries and musk, strawberries and sex flooded back as I crushed my tongue to sugar,” she narrates.

由财富的巨富,这片土地of milk and honey operates as a hedonistic time warp into the plentiful past. Cutting-edge, if tenuous, science has preserved and revived a cornucopia’s worth of edible plant and animal species, even resurrecting varieties currently extinct in the real-world present.

The chef finds herself seduced by this world and its people on multiple levels, and the immersive quality of Zhang’s luscious writing means the reader gets sucked in alongside her. It’s clear that something isn’t right in this manufactured Eden, but it becomes frighteningly easy for the chef to become wrapped up in its indulgences and deceptions.

In this novel, as well as her extraordinary debut, 2020’s “How Much of These Hills Is Gold,” Zhang’s formidable talents in world-building sparkle. It’s clear the author, who used to live in the Bay Area, is a sharp observer of the forces at play in our present — capitalism, an inhuman brand of innovation, increasingly fragile ecosystems, the way society saddles Asian women with the twinned burdens of sexualization and idealized subservience.

But it’s clear that Zhang beholds the world through a lens that’s far from despairing. By sprinkling her fiction with smart, speculative touches, she reveals that we as humans can still imagine better, more brilliant outcomes when looking toward the past, present and future. And for Zhang and her readers, taking this route can be fiendishly, deliciously fun.

Hannah Bae is a freelance writer.