“Alejandro del Grande, the Macedonian, who I read about in the detention center library during study hours…

Alejandro ascended to the throne at just eleven years of age after the assassination of his father, Felipe. It was never clear who assassinated his father. But I knew…

..there was no question. He was not a boy. He was a King.“

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  AUG 8, 2011)

James Boice’s The Good and the Ghastly takes place 1500 years from now, after nuclear Armageddon has wiped out most of civilization. There are very few survivors in this blasted world where the oceans have risen high enough to flood much of the world’s low lying areas. Civilization has been rebuilt based on scanty and flagrantly wrong fragments of lore. Palin, for example, is the doyen of natural selection. All products are named by a status-linked phrase such as Visa Expensive Hotel. Visa is the generic term for government or other organizations or corporations.

There are two protagonists. The major actor is Junior Alvarez, a brutal “Irish” psychopath and paranoid with delusions of grandeur. He likens himself to Alexander the Great and Bob Dylan from warped “histories” that get little more than the names correct. As a teen-ager Junior beats another teen-ager so savagely in a mass gang fight that his opponent never recovers consciousness, forcing his loving mother to devote all of her time to his care. The mother, Josephina Hernandez, loving “Italian” mother, is the secondary protagonist. She becomes an avenging angel determined to wipe out the criminal monsters who have made her world a hell. Junior is her ultimate target, albeit incredibly difficult to tackle.

We are witness to the inner life of two driven characters, Junior and Josephina. They are skillfully rendered in poetic and compelling language, so beautiful that the reader is swept along in spite of the bestial and psychotic nature of the one and the awful pain of the other. Neither is quite sane. Both are purveyors of violence. Junior becomes a fugitive hero. Josephina passes unremarked except by the results of her executions.

The novel would have been stronger if Josephina were made more of an equal partner. As it is, she disappears for much of the time while Junior is a constant, always trying to present a benign face to the public while in fact being as violent and cruel a betrayer as to serve for the model of a nightmare. The novel achieves great heights in the poetic rendering of the inner lives of these two profoundly disturbed characters.

Why is it set in the far future; wouldn’t a setting in any major slum suffice? The answer to this question lies in how this novel casts a light on history itself and how it shows current society in the distorted mirror of satire. Post-apocalyptic fiction doesn’t need to posit new science, letting the author off the hook in that regard. The situation presents an opportunity to examine people under severe stress and with severed connections to anything pre-apocalypse. The disconnection from the historical past presents this author with much material for satire. We can smugly dismiss the historical errors by the characters in the story. As Santayana once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We know that the future civilization in this novel will surely repeat our errors from the past since their memory of the past is so clearly flawed. As the novel comes to its conclusion I was led to wonder if we remember our past any more accurately than Junior. Was, for example, Alexander a psychotic monster as Junior believes from his (mis)reading of history, a role model for Junior showing him the way to betray virtually all his friends and lovers? Do we really know much of anything beyone a couple of generations ago? Post-apocalyptic dystopian literature is such a lovely way to exercise pessimism!

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner (June 14, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	James Boice
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Jennifer Government by Max Barry The Unincorporated Man by Dani and Eytan Kollin

Bibliography:

• MVP (2007)
• NoVA (2008)
• The Good and the Ghastly (June 2011)

“In a little boy’s innocent voice, the machine delivers a death sentence: ‘The air in this hermetically sealed laboratory is evacuating. A faulty sensor has detected the unlikely presence of weaponized anthrax and initiated an automated safety protocol. It is a tragic accident. There will be one casualty. He will soon be followed by the rest of humanity.’ ”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (JUN 26, 2011)

Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson tells the apocalyptic story of a near future when one machine gains true intelligence and determines to honor life by wiping out human civilization. The machine intelligence takes over the robots that are central to civilization; the automatic cars, the robo-nannies and cleaning bots; all of them become the enemies of humanity. Most of the few people who survive are herded into concentration camps where some are surgically altered to become part machine. Needless to say the machine parts are all under control of the original rebellious machine. Robots start evolving, building new robots in response to human resistance.

The robots have greater intelligence, superior strength and speed than people. Humans have a killer instinct when it comes to survival, and a wild kind of creative imagination. Most of the surviving humans retreat from the machine-centered civilization that betrayed them, although one robotics worker creates an enclave of machines who fight on the side of humanity.

Many who are knowledgeable about machines and machine intelligence think it only a matter of time before there are machines that are intelligent. The test for intelligence is called the Turing Test after the brilliant English computer pioneer who said that a machine could be considered intelligent if it could pass for human in a blind conversation. The rebellious machine in this story clearly does pass the Turing test.

The theme of intelligent robots and intelligent machines has a long and distinguished history. H. G Wells had a robot-like machine in The War of the Worlds, published in 1898. Karel Capek coined the term robot in his play R.U.R. about rebellious robots. Isaac Asimov, a pioneer sci-fi writer, and a PhD scientist wrote convincingly about robots more than a half century ago. I, Robot is the classic in his series on the theme. He coined the “Laws of Robotics” that said in essence that robots would serve humans first, then their own interests, all under the prime directive not to harm a human. Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick was the basis for the movie Blade Runner.

The structure of the novel is a series of interlocking short narratives as recorded by the rebellious robots. Each narrative features heroes in humanity’s struggle to resist the robotic onslaught. Not all of the heroic characters are human, some are humanoid robots who have been awakened to sentience. The human heroes are varied, including soldiers, urban guerillas, a worker in a robotic factory in Japan, members of the Osage Nation, and a girl with machine eyes, among many others. All of these heroic characters are fiercely determined for humanity to survive, something that distinguishes them from the robotic enemy.

There are a lot of interesting questions raised here. Can machines someday become intelligent? If so, what form might that intelligence take and could that intelligence rebel against humanity? If there were to be a robotic rebellion is there any chance that humanity could survive? What about machine/human hybrids and chimeras? Could machines, even if intelligent, be creative, evolve, and have passion? There is compelling argument by Damasio and others that intelligence requires passion; that dispassionate intelligence is an oxymoron because there has to be a caring something that values one thing over another. The Nobel laureate, Gerard Edelman in Neural Darwinism expounded the view that machine intelligence can only derive from a machine evolving in interaction with its environment; a machine that can make mistakes and act to build a different machine in response.

Daniel Wilson holds a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon and is exceptionally well informed on the subject of robotics. Every aspect of robotics depicted here exists today or is under development. The philosophical questions are addressed, but not in any pedantic fashion that would take away from the rollicking good story, and Wilson proves himself to be one hell of a good storyteller. Robopocalypse moves along compellingly. The plot is clear and the action intense, well suited to the action movie of the same title Steven Spielberg is making based on the book.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 103 readers
PUBLISHER:	Doubleday (June 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Daniel H. Wilson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi Genesis by Bernard Beckett Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick And on DVD: Terminator: The Sarah Chronicles

Bibliography:

• Robopocalypse (June 2011)
• Amp (2013)

Humor:

• How To Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion (2005)
• Where’s My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived (2007)
• How To Build a Robot Army: Tips on Defending Planet Earth Against Aliens, Ninjas, and Zombies (2008)
• The Mad Scientist Hall of Fame: Muwahahaha! (2008)

Children’s:

• Bro-Jitsu: The Martial Art of Sibling Smackdown (2010)
• A Boy and His Bot (January 2011)

Movies from books:

• Robopocalypse (2013)

“They arrived at the bridge. He didn’t follow his own advice: there were things in the dark water,l ittle bloated islands that not even the seagulls dared touch. The wind had accumulated a small drift of them on the far bank, beached and slick where the rain beat down on them and cleaned the filth of the lake away.

When the Neva thawed in spring, there were always bodies washing under the Saint Petersburg bridges along the grey lumps of ice. But there was an effort to collect them, identify them, cut holes in the frozen ground and bury them.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  MAR 29, 2011)

Equations of Life by Simon Morden is a profoundly dystopian romp that takes place approximately twenty years in the future and it is great fun to read. Unlike much of contemporary science fiction, the science is pretty much correct as befits an author with a Ph.D. in planetary geophysics. It is the first in a trilogy, to be followed by Theories of Flight and Degrees of Freedom, all featuring Samuil Petrovitch, scientific genius, physical wreck, reluctant hero, and academic fraud.

Nuclear armageddon occurred twenty-some years ago. Japan sank beneath the ocean; much of the world has been ravaged. Greater London, the Metrozone, is impossibly crowded and horribly crammed with refugees. Hyde Park is a cesspool of diseased, dying and dead derelicts. There is barely room to breathe.

Petrovitch doesn’t want to be involved with anything beyond his work in physics. He is an academic fraud with no formal education. He stole from Russian criminals and is on the run from them. He most certainly does not want to attract attention.

A botched kidnapping of Sonja, a beautiful girl on the subway, triggers a spark of reluctant heroism. Petrovitch grabs Sonja and runs from the kidnappers. While fleeing the kidnappers his life is saved by Madeleine, a giantess of a nun with awesome fighting prowess. Sonja is the beautiful and much-loved daughter of London’s Japanese crime-lord, Oshicora. His passion is to create a virtual Japan, perfect to the last blade of grass, to replace what sunk beneath the ocean as part of the global disaster. Madeleine is described as ”…a nun, fully robed, white veil framing her broad, serious face. A silver crucifix dangled around her neck, and a rosary and a holster hung at her waist. She had the biggest automatic pistol Petrovitch had ever seen clasped in her righteous right hand.”

Petrovitch is a physical wreck. He is dying. His heart has failed and his pacemaker is failing. The Metrozone has been under attack by the New Machine Jihad. This has completely disrupted the Metrozone’s infrastructure. Hearts for transplantation, for example, have rotted since the refrigeration units are all stopped. Bad heart and all, Petrovitch is running around frantically, being shot, beaten and harassed on all sides as he tries to stop the Jihad and save Sonja from her kidnappers.

Between having his heart flat-line periodically and being chased by some of the nastier heavies in the city, he, along with his colleague, Pif, solve the grand unification problem that has eluded theoretical physicists since Einstein, who spent the last twenty years of his life on one futile attempt at a solution after another. We don’t find out much about this theoretical solution beyond the idea that it connects gravity with electromagnetism. We don’t even know if our hero will get a new heart before he dies for good. Madeleine is looking for a replacement heart for Petrovitch while Sonja is on guard in his hospital room, sword across her knees. The novel ends. We catch our breath.

This is a plot seemingly propelled by paranoia and amphetamines. Will artificial intelligence be Frankenstein the monster or will it be benign? Will Petrovitch and Pif’s grand unification theory really solve the fundamental questions of the universe? Will Petrovitch live? Will Petrovitch find true love with Madeleine, the nun? Will Sonja be a complication? Who is Petrovitch, anyway? Will his past catch up with him? I am really looking forward to the rest of the trilogy.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Orbit (March 29, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Simon Morden
EXTRAS:	Excerpt  The book covers for this series
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another dim view of the future:  The Passage by Just in Cronin

Bibliography:

• The Lost Art (2008)

Samuil Petrovitch series:

• Equations of Life (March 2011)
• Theories of Flight (April 2011)
• Degrees of Freedom (May 2011)

“Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping sates, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.”

Book Review:

Review by Vesna McMaster (JUN 20, 2010)

What is the Pulitzer Prize winning The Road by Cormac McCarthy really about? The plot is easily summarised as a man and his young boy moving south on foot through a post-apocalyptic North America towards southern shores, in hope of better chances of survival. The core reasons for the novel’s existence may be a little harder to grasp.

The scenery they move through is burned and dead – there is no alteration in the state of the entirely annihilated landscape, and nothing at all living apart from a scattering of humans – the solitary exception is one bark of a dog. Whatever the catastrophe was, it seems to have wiped out something like chlorophyll or plant life at some fundamental level. The sea is entirely barren when they reach it. There is no moss, no grass, the trees are all dead and continually falling over, and of course no crops grow. Without the base of the food chain to work on, there are no animals – hence the only living things remaining are the alpha predators that are humans, now also predominantly turned into cannibals. Scavenging sustains the two main protagonists but the obvious implication is that almost everything has already been scavenged, it is only a matter of time before all nourishment finally runs out. There is no indication whatsoever that there will be any change in circumstances.

Opinions that have been mooted (along with many others) as to the core thrust of the novel are:

• It is a story of the love between a father and his child
• A story of every parent’s worst nightmare, of not being able to live long enough to secure your child’s future
• A story of biblical redemption
• A warning to the present generation to cherish the luxuries we have

I have to confess, I do not see any redemption in this story. There is no hope anywhere, and though at the end the child is “saved” temporarily, the implication does not change for the “long-term goals,” as the child himself puts it. The father and the child certainly love each other, but what the nature of that love is might be slightly different to what one would expect. There are a few passages that point what this might be.  For example, when the child gets ill with a fever and the man is sure the child is about to die, he is frantic with the fear of isolation for both of them. He tries not to leave his son’s side so that he will not die alone, and repeats to himself the oath he made that if the child dies he will not let him “go alone”– in other words, the father will commit suicide. Interestingly, he terms this the “last day of the earth,”  not the last day of his own existence on earth. As everything else has been wiped out, his perishing would demark the end of the world.

At another point, they encounter a key moral dilemma. After a solitary traveller steals all their provisions, they track the thief down and the man makes the thief take off all his clothes at gunpoint, leaving him naked and stranded in the road, justifying it as being exactly what the thief had attempted to do to them: the biblical eye for an eye. The child weeps uncontrollably in pity for the stranded man and they eventually return the clothes, leaving them piled up on the road as there is no sign of the traveller. The father tries to explain to the son why he has acted so uncharitably, and that he too is afraid. He says:

“You’re not the one who has to worry about everything.
The boy said something but he couldn’t understand him. What? He said.
He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes, I am, he said. I am the one.”

Why is the boy the one that has to worry about everything? He relies on his father for food, shelter, ideas, directions: everything. The implication is twofold. The boy is the true repository of “the flame” of charity and compassion that they both think they are carrying. Also, the boy is well aware of the insubstantiality of the status quo – that of his father being present and guiding him through the desolate world. He watches his father for the worsening signs of sickness, and knows it is only a matter of time before the father is no more. Once that happens, the father will have no further worries. Both protagonists are often shown envying the dead. Death is by no means an ultimate state not to yearn for; it is the dying that is the problem.

And here I think we get to the very heart of what this book is about. It is a book about dying. What are the ethics of dying? I think the insistently dead grey scenery of the world and all the post-apocalyptic implications are mainly a metaphor for the situation of truly having nothing to live for. There really is no hope whatsoever, there is no redemption in this life. The biblical resonances so often noted are not aimed at an immediate, earthly application but the workings of the soul. The two characters both seem to be believers in some form of afterlife, but for different reasons. For the boy, the afterlife seems to have to exist logically as there is no before-life. He tallies the differences between the typically upbeat stories his father tells him about how life was before the catastrophe with the reality that he himself knows. If the stories are not “true” now they must have some truth somewhere, but he makes it plain that he has no point of reference for his sort of “happy” truth. But where does the boy’s “fire” come from? The answer to this, it is implied that the father thinks, can only be divine. Perhaps that is where the belief of the father comes from, not from the world past or present, but from the boy.

Why do the two of them stay alive? Certainly, for the man, his reason is the child. He labours entirely to save the child, and were the child to die, his link with life would be entirely severed. But what of the child? This is where the biblical tones come in. Christ-like the child is innocent but knows he has to take on the sins of the world and keep living for as long as is allotted. There is no love of life, no thought that life as it is has anything to offer but pain but that one must keep going because one is “carrying the flame.” Just to cement this, there is the background figure of the boy’s mother who has some long time ago committed suicide already – as the only sensible thing to do.

So there are the three options: get out of the running quick because it’s the sane thing to do (the mother), stay in as long as possible because you’re morally bound to (the child), or find yourself a reason, a person, to stay alive for (the father). Bind yourself to something like a raft otherwise the logic of the “secular” (a word McCarthy uses frequently in the most surprising applications) world will inevitably push you into the direction of self-destruction. All of a sudden, we find that the narrative is not in some horrifying future, but right here in our own godless world: these are already our choices.

This once again brings one full circle back to the implication that the dead scenery is indeed a world, but it is the world of the soul. Where has God gone, and where has creation and the gift of life gone? As per previous works by McCarthy, the punctuation in the book has been severely pruned, though relatively few critics bother to refer to the fact. The fragmentation of the sentences. The press-ganging of verbs made to work as adjectives or adverbs – the narrative is one painful trail of action after action. Most apostrophes have been slaughtered, there are no speech marks. The result is a flow of words that seeks to eliminate differentiation between personalities, scenery, time and space. The landscape and the travellers, the state of the world, are all blending into each other, like the corpses of the people who burned to death and were combined into the tarmac of the road as it melted.

The travellers are in constant fear of being “lost,” and indeed even when they know where they are it does not do them much good. What is the right thing to do when you are in the middle of a spiritual wasteland with not the faintest reason to continue to draw breath in this harsh world for one second longer? I believe that the implication here is: there is no sense, and there is no God and no creation apart from what dwells inside us, and that the capacity to care for another creature is the only thing that separates us – in this case, literally – from death. Placed back in the relentlessly materialist, capitalist, selfish scenery that is the reality of today’s world (perhaps more so in America than many other places), these are strong conclusions to arrive at. It is not so much a cautionary tale but a handbook on the choices of paths between the dead shores or the beach, the road and the woods.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2,853 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage Books; 1ST edition (March 28, 2007)
REVIEWER:	Vesna McMaster
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Cormac McCarthy Wikipedia page on Cormac McCarthy
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: No Country for Old Men Blood Meridian

Bibliography:

• The Orchard Keeper (1965)
• Outer Dark (1968)
• Child of God (1973)
• Suttree (1979)
• Blood Meridian (1985)
• No Country for Old Men (2005)
• The Road (2006)
• The Sunset Limited (2007)

Border Trilogy Novels:

• All the Pretty Horses (1992)
• The Crossing (1994)
• Cities of the Plain (1998)
• The Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, the Crossing, Cities of the Plain

Movies from Books:

• All the Pretty Horses (2000)
• No Country for Old Men (2008)
• The Road (2010)

“The Army needed between ten and twenty death-row inmates to serve in the third-stage trials of an experimental drug therapy, codenamed Project Noah.   In exchange for their consent, these men would have their sentences commuted to life without parole.  It would be Wolgast’s job to obtain the signatures of these men, nothing more.  Everything had been legally vetted, but because the project was a matter of national security, all of these men would be declared legally dead.  Thereafter, they would spend the rest of their lives in the care of the federal penal system, a white-collar prison camp, under assumed identities.  The men would be chosen based upon a number of factors, but all would be men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five with no living first-degree relatives.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (JUN 7, 2010)

In this staggering book of speculative fiction, Cronin has proven that he can transcend genre and, with his power of language, create a distant world that feels close and credible. This is not your typical zombie or vampire novel; it isn’t cheesy or reductive. It shares some characteristics with its progenitor, The Stand, and fans of King’s work will be arguably riveted by this (more updated) novel. But there are as many differences as there are similarities, and Cronin’s ambitions are ultimately more complex and expansive. Cronin covers a longer period of time and delves more densely and philosophically into the dark and grey areas of the human psyche. Also, his poetic and luminous language and metaphysical subtext eclipses, in my opinion, King’s earlier work.

The story is teased out gradually, moving back and forth from places as far and deep as a Bolivian jungle, to the deserts and mountains of the west and southwest, to the concrete jungle of Houston, Texas, and many stops throughout. The disparate narrative threads converge to a point after the first 250 pages, and then we are thrust into a new world order at a place called The Colony. Some readers feel that this middle section is rather slow, but it is actually where Cronin shines. He introduces new characters that are likely to stay the course of the trilogy, and he is more meditative and succulent in his prose. The final 250 pages illuminate ambiguities that may still be humming and create a climax that heads toward a continuation.

There is a lot more than good and evil at play here, although the moral heft is evident, as human forces must combat malevolent viral creatures. But the incipience, growth, and psychology of these viral entities is not so simple. The relationship between the survivors and the creatures is more like a Venn diagram than a dualistic paradigm. Moreover, the human condition is explored in different states of wakefulness and sleep, in a myriad of conscious states, and connects all beings, whether viral or human. It also raises the question of, “who are the monsters?”

Divided into eleven sections, (with numerous chapters), the novel covers approximately one hundred years, starting circa 2014. However, there are three time periods that are pertinent to the story, two that are covered in detail. Each new section is headed by a short verse of Shakespeare from a play or sonnet, or else a poem by Shelley or other poet that has a poignant significance to the narrative. For instance, this verse by Henry Vaughan, from “The World:”

I saw eternity the other night
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm as it was bright,
And round beneath it time in hours, days, years,
Driven by the spheres,
Like a vast shadow moved in which the world
And all her train were hurled.

Cronin’s sense of place; of time; of timelessness; and his magnificent explorations of memories; of memories folded and unfolded and twisted in time; and of the self and the Shadow self, are examples of his bridges from genre to literature. He balances intellectual and action narrative with enough gusto to keep all audiences satisfied. The plot and story have a solid pace, although he takes his time to develop his characters and illuminate the back-stories. Additionally, as in his superb novel, The Summer Guest, Cronin’s prose glitters with moving beauty. “…while you sank into the dreamy softness of your seat and sipped ginger ale from a can and watched the world float in magical silence past your window, the tallest buildings of the city in the crisp autumn light and then the backs of the houses with laundry flapping and a crossing with gates where a boy was waving from his bicycle, and then the woods and fields and a single cow eating grass.”

There are, occasionally, some minor snags in the construction. A few devices are employed at intervals, and there are times when a character is improbably saved from the clutches of disaster. Yet, the author does it with panache, in dramatic scenes portrayed with a soulful and melancholy elegance. He avoids melodrama. He gets inside the head of his characters, and they are made of flesh and bone, not straw. It is also satisfying to see that this is a very diverse cast of multi-ethnicities. The landscape of people is naturally rendered, not making a statement but rather reflecting a realistic ethnic pool of combinations.

The Passage is the first of an ambitious trilogy. The journeys on foot or by hoof, by machine or by dream, are full of serrated adventure. And it immerses you in all strains of love–sibling, maternal, paternal, friendship, romantic, and a crushing one of cross-purposes. And it has stars, the moon, bones, and blades, guns and garrisons, trees and cliffs. And did I say stars? A-

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2,381 readers
PUBLISHER:	Ballantine Books (June 8, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Justin Cronin
EXTRAS:	Excerpt and Web Site
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Post-Apocalyptic: Our American King by David Lozell Martin The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Bibliography:

• Mary and O’Neil (2002)
• The Summer Guest (2005)

• The Passage (2010)
• The Twelve (2012)
• City of Mirrors (2014)

“What does the gentleman think I will do with his extra baht?’ she asks. “Buy a pretty piece of jewelry? Take myself to dinner? I am property, yes? I am Raleigh’s.” She tosses the money at his feet. “It makes no difference if I am rich or poor. I am owned.”

Book Review:

Review by Kirstin Merrihew (MAY 14, 2010)

Unlike much of the world, the Thai Kingdom had avoided inundation by the rising oceans. It had avoided pandemic decimation of crops and population. It had kept the global agri-corporations from accessing and either exploiting or destroying its vast and precious seed banks. It had taken drastic, isolationist steps to preserve itself while most of the rest of the world faltered into massive contraction and potential extinction.

The white shirts of the Environment Ministry enforced the official policy of the Child Queen’s regime, burning fields and villages if genetic blight or plague struck, conducting customs inspections of the expensive goods imported on dirigibles and confiscating and destroying even items supposedly protected by large bribes. And, “mulching” any windups they discovered.

Windups — also called New People — were bio-mechanically engineered creatures from Japan that could pass for human beings except that their everyday movements were jerky — reminding natural people of windup toys. Emiko was one of these windups; she had been imported to Bangkok and was, by constitution, submissive: she had been designed to obey, submit, and please. Her current “master” was neither Japanese nor Thai; he was Raleigh, a Westerner whose “club” was bar, opium den, and bordello among other things. Emiko, who in severely underpopulated Japan would have been valued and accepted, was basically a slave and “genetic trash” here.

Emiko caught the eye of Anderson Lake, a representative of AgriGen, a so-called “calorie company,” i.e., one of the multinationals that had a stranglehold on genetically modified grains and other foodstuffs which were being sold at exorbitant prices to other starving nations. He ostensibly ran the SpringLife factory that produced next-generation kink springs which were commonly used to power items that had formerly run on oil. Lake’s factory employed not only Thais and “yellow card” Chinese refugees but also, on the dangerous manufacturing floor, towering elephantine megodonts with four tusks that sometimes rampaged. Lake’s factory was more of a sham than a real enterprise, however. His true preoccupation was trying to ferret out the top secret storage sites of the Thai seed banks and to do whatever he could to shift high officials away from isolationism and toward free trade. Lake hoped Emiko could become a valuable informant, but he also found himself vulnerable to her trademark silky skin and sexual charms, complicating both of their existences.

Meanwhile, Jaidee, the Tiger of the white shirts, a fervent believer in guarding his country’s borders and long-term survival, misjudged the changing political winds in the Kingdom. Accused by his superiors of overstepping his authority, he was made a scapegoat by those aligning for a crucial showdown regarding the country’s future. The immense pressure on the Kingdom to open itself to “free trade” and to “share” its seed bank with the world might crush Jaidee, not to mention Hock Seng, a scheming yellow card Chinese employee of Anderson Lake’s, and…Emiko.

Emiko had heard rumors of a place to the north where other New People had a community of their own, and she wanted to escape Bangkok and find her own kind. But as the city became a powder keg waiting to be lit, she got more, not less, entangled with Lake, Raleigh, a genetic scientist, and other mercenary or exploitative examples of humanity. She also discovered hidden strengths (and aggressions) within herself she’d never guessed at before. Would Emiko affect the entire course of history in the Thai Kingdom? Or would that be left to others, and would she end up as a bystander, a witness to ecological disaster?

The Windup Girl vividly depicts a dystopian future ushered in by radical climate change and the reckless depletion of our natural resources as well as mismanagement and “generipping” of our crops and other food sources. Paolo Bacigalupi invents a scenario that one hopes is not too prescient but which compellingly grabs the reader and doesn’t let go. This, Bacigalupi’s first novel (he had previously written award-winning short stories), creates characters and plot with assurance that builds immediate and continued reader confidence in the integrity of the unfolding story. His characters are blemished, greedy, ambitious, and ruthless. They often act “badly” but as one might expect in their unforgiving environment. The world in which he enfolds them leaks disease and death but continues to display irrepressible human ingenuity. Bacigalupi’s future is one where science’s interference with nature has led Mankind to the brink. Emiko and the other windups represent one tangent of scientific development that might outlive human beings, and although the idea of articifial “life” surviving us isn’t a new idea, Bacigalupi’s version teams with innovative perspectives about her construction and status. Although Emiko is reasonably accused of having no soul. the author convinces the reader that she possesses an inner life and has a survival instinct at least as insistent as that of any natural person.

This novel is a 2010 Hugo Award nominee — along with five others. Looking at the list through my own bias for science fiction that deals with space travel and alien civilizations in other star systems, I noticed a trend this year with a bit of a jaundiced eye: most of the nominees were about a dystopian future/fantasy earth. I’d hoped for more subject matter breadth. But when I read the publisher’s summary of The Windup Girl, it wasn’t to be passed up. Whether it actually wins the Hugo or not, this novel is visionary, gritty, cautionary and highly intelligent. It definitely ranks in the top echelon of science fiction. Bacigalupi is a great and already polished talent, and I expect many more terrific (but maybe not quite so terrifying) tales from him.

Editor’s note:  The Windup Girl has won the Nebula Award and tied for the Hugo Award. It has also been chosen as Time Magazine’s book of the year.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 233 readers
PUBLISHER:	Night Shade Books (April 20, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Paolo Bacigalupi
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of another 2010 Hugo and Nebula Award Nominee: The City and the City by China Mieville And another 2010 Hugo Nominee: WWW: Wake by Robert J. Sawyer

Bibliography:

• Pump Six and Other Stories (2008)
• The Windup Girl (2009)
• Ship Breakers (2010)
• The Alchemists (2011)
• The Drowned (May 2012)

“Ever since her family had died in such sad ways, ever since she herself had disappeared from official view, Toby had tried not to think about her earlier life. She’s covered it in ice, she’d frozen it. Now she longed desperately to be back there in the past – even the bad parts, even the grief – because her present life was torture. She tried to picture her two faraway, long ago parents, watching over her like guardian spirits, but she saw only mist.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (DEC 2, 2009)

In The Year of the Flood, two women, separately isolated, watch as a gene-engineered plague wipes out humanity in a stand-alone novel set in the same dystopian world Atwood first created in 2003’s Oryx and Crake.

Both women – Ren and Toby – are former members of God’s Garderners, a vegan, pacifist eco-cult who long predicted the “waterless flood” which destroys humanity.

Ren came to God’s Gardeners as a child, brought by her pouty, high-maintenance mother, Lucerne. Lucerne’s abandonment of her gated suburb and bland husband for a life of Saints’ days (St. Euell Gibbons, St. Farley Mowat of the Wolves) sack-dresses and soyberries, never quite convinces despite the manly, taciturn hunkiness of Zeb, a lover with a past.

Toby came as an adult, rescued from the doom of sex-slavery to her boss at SecretBurgers (ingredients rumored but never revealed!). Bright, middle class Toby’s future had crumbled with her mother’s mysterious illness, mounting bills, and her father’s ruin and subsequent death. Inheritor of debt, Toby could only shed her identity and join the other dropouts and rejects at the bottom whose non-official lives are brutal, vicious and brief.

The story shifts back and forth in time from its vantage point of the plague year. Toby, holed up at a fancy spa, calls on her survival skills – from journeying to her father’s grave to recover an outlawed rifle, to protecting her garden from gene-enhanced pigs. Ren, locked in the quarantine wing of a high-end sex club, watches her coworkers die of violence and plague and waits for rescue while her food dwindles.

Both women pass the time remembering the past, particularly their days with God’s Gardeners – an oasis of gentleness in a world shaped by cynicism, greed and violence, not that the Gardeners simply sit by, stockpiling food, encouraging self-sufficiency and waiting for apocalypse.

Atwood creates a character-driven page-turner replete with details that make her entirely privatized world come to life. Ren in her drab clothes, envying the slum kids their bright trinkets and colorful fashions, the Painball prison where the last left standing are released back onto the streets, the Mo’Hair sheep, the Liobams (lion and lamb), the eyecolor injections that go painfully awry.

Fans of Oryx and Crake will love this; those who haven’t read the earlier book will want to (there’s no reason to read them in order). Many writers conjure up prophetic dystopian visions but few do it with Atwood’s humor, imagination and brilliance.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 223 readers
PUBLISHER:	Nan A. Talese; First Edition (September 22, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AMAZON PAGE:	The Year of the Flood
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Margaret AtwoodMargaret Atwood Society
EXTRAS:	Official website for The Year of the FloodReading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of Oryx and Crake and our short reviews of The Robber Bride Lady Oracle The Handmade’s Tale

Bibliography:

• Double Persephone (1961)
• The Circle Game: Poems (1964)
• Kaleidosscopes (1965)
• Expeditions (1966)
• Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein (1966)
• The Animals in that Country (1968)
• The Edible Woman (1969)
• The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970)
• Power Politics: Poems (1971)
• Surfacing (1972)
• Lady Oracle (1976)
• Dancing Girls: And Other Stories (1977)
• Life Before Man (1979)
• Bodily Harm (1982)
• Encounters with the Element Man (1982)
• Bluebeard’s Egg and Other Stories (1983)
• Interlunar (1984)
• The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
• Cat’s Eye (1988)
• Wilderness Tips (1991)
• Good Bones and Simple Murders (1992)
• The Robber Bride (1993)
• Morning in a Burned House (1995)
• Alias Grace (1996)
• The Blind Assassin (September 2000) /
• Journals of Susanna Moodie
• Penelopiad: the Myth of Penelope and Odysseus (2005)
• The Tent (2006)
• Moral Disorder and Other Stories (2006)

MaddAddam Trilogy:

• Oryx and Crake (2003)
• The Year of the Flood (2009)
• MaddAddam (September 2013)

Other:

• Negotiating With the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002)
• The Journals of Susanna Moodie (2004)
• Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2007)
• The Door : Poems (2007)

About:

• The Fiction of Margaret Atwood by Gina Wisker (2009)
• Engendering Fiction : The Works of Margaret Atwood by Riengard M. Nischick (2009)

E-Book Study Guide:

• Study Guide for SURFACING (2002)
• Study Guide for THE EDIBLE WOMAN (2002)
• Study Guide for THE HANDMAID’S TALE (2002)
• Study Guide for CAT’S EYE (2002)

Movies from books:

• The Handmaid’s Tale (1990)

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Book Marks:

• Official web site for Margaret Atwood
• The Margaret Atwood Society
• Atwood’s speech on “Spotty-Handed Vilainesses” (very funny!)
• Notes on Margaret Atwood
• Reading Guide for The Edible Woman
• Reading Guide for Surfacing
• Reading Guide for Lady Oracle
• Reading Guide for Life Before Man
• MostlyFiction.com‘s short review of The Handmaid’s Tale
• Salon Magazine interview re: Alias Grace
• The New York Times First Chapter and Review of The Blind Assassin
• SF Gate review of The Blind Assassin
• MostlyFiction.com‘s review of Oryx and Crake
• MostlyFiction.com review of The Year of the Flood

“My father used to say he decided to leave America when he noticed that the poor had all begun to look alike.

He didn’t mean their faces, and he didn’t mean only the poor of the United States. He meant poor people everywhere.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (OCT 22, 2009)

The narrator of Theroux’s post-apocalyptic novel, Makepeace Hatfield (who lives up to the name), is the last survivor of an immigrant Siberian community – a place Makepeace’s British parents had come to to escape the material world. But the rescue of a starving waif awakens her longing for companionship, love and civilization, spurring the road trip that drives the novel.

Theroux’s vast, harsh landscape complements Makepeace’s lonely, hardscrabble, survivor’s life, and elements of stark beauty parallel human vulnerability and hope. The journey in search of others shares some elements with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and will attract the same readers. It’s a page turner of a road novel without a lot of faith in human altruism, but with plenty invested in communal ingenuity and individual resourcefulness.

Makepeace, disillusioned and battered, has a deep inner resilience that relies on heart for its strength. Theroux shapes Makepeace’s character in language that illuminates the relationship between what we tell ourselves and what actually is and the hope that bridges the gap.

Editor’s note: Far North has recently been selected as a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award. A surprising nomination given that the book is set in Siberia (but “written in American idiom” and  the author  was born in Kampala, Uganda, and now lives in London. To qualify for this “American” book award, the author must have an American citizenship, which one assumes he does, since he is the son of the American writer Paul Theroux. (See more on the other selections for this year’s finalists in this interesting The New York Times article.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 40 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux (June 9, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Marcel Theroux
EXTRAS:	Excerpt (scroll down)
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More post-apocalypse novels: O-Zone by Paul Theroux Our American King by David Lozell Snakeskin Road by James Braziel Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood The Pesthouse by Jim Crace The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Bibliography:

• A Stranger in the Earth 1997)
• The Confession of Mycroft Holmes (2000)
• The Paperchase (2002)
• A Blow to the Heart (2006)
• Far North (2009)
• Strange Bodies (February 2014)

“I tied the ropes around her wrists and ankles, tied her arms to her waist and legs, dumped her body in the back, secured her with the belts, and I took out the shotgun, angling the barrel into the floorboard on the passenger side. I left the Remington in the trunk with the propane tanks and food. Then I cranked the engine, reached back, and said, “Don’t worry. I’m just taking you home.”
~Rosser, Bounty Hunter

Book Review:

Reviewed by Doug Bruns (JUL 28, 2009)

There is a time in the future, only 35 years from now, when everything has gone to hell. The government is bankrupt and the country has disintegrated, leaving behind a loose confederation of city-states. The environment, a result of climate change and a killer ozone hole, has become a threatening and ominous force, churning up deadly sand storms, and tree-killing carbon clouds. Domestic travel, once possible with a visa, no longer held, a consequence of a government withdrawn from all but a few regions. “Free zones” are past things and getting to the “Saved World” is only possible through bribes, good fortune, luck and likely violence. “Harvesting Machines” roam where people come together, for surly they will die of something sooner rather than later. The machines pick up the dead and shrink-wrap them, stacking cords of bodies for harvesting. This is a nightmare world from which no one awakens. Bounty hunters roam the landscape and human trafficking is accepted currency. The south is barren and pocked with clay mines where slaves work until they are spent. Sand storms blow large vehicles off the road. If you can somehow make your way north, to, say, Chicago, where the government still works and a semblance of law and order exists, you might live out your days in a less miserable more bearable place. But, as the saying goes, you can’t get there from here.

This is the world as created by James Braziel in Snakeskin Road. Into it he drops Jennifer Harrison, aged 30 and pregnant. She is on her way north, to join her mother who nine years before, when visas actually meant something, left for Chicago, a Saved World city. Her husband, Matthew, a miner, has stayed behind in the south and promises he will follow her later, though she knows he won’t. We pick up Jennifer as things are starting to go from bad to very worse, and quickly. A monster sand storm has blown her bus clean off the road and tumbled it into a desert ditch. She survives, but is shaken, which is more than what many of her bus companions can claim. She is picked up by a patrol and taken to a fortressed city. There she finds a guia, a coyote, and hires him to take her north.

Braziel has created a world in which things cannot improve. And we, the readers are offered no relief or comfort. Our heroine is sold into slavery. She ends up in a brothel. A young girl, Mazel, abandoned by her mother to Jennifer’s care goes missing. Jennifer loses her baby. Mazel returns, but has apparently attempted suicide. They escape the brothel at great risk. But we soon discover they are being tracked by a bounty hunter with the requisite moral and ethical lack. (He relates in a flashback how as a young lad he mocked his aged and near blind grandfather, stealing from him and insulting him with impunity.)

Braziel employes a device throughout the book, a one-sided correspondence from Jennifer to her mother, which works rather well. These letters afford us insight into her tribulations and thoughts. They give Jennifer a voice that is otherwise lacking, rendering her more likable, which was important to me because I found her to be a wooden and two-dimensional character. She lacks the capacity to solicit empathy from the reader. I believe this to be a shortcoming of the novel, but the argument could be made that the world in which she exists is so devoid of empathy, sympathy or even a modicum of civility, that she could be painted in no other fashion. I will give Braziel the benefit of the doubt on this matter, that he wrote her–and the other characters too, for that matter–in this fashion–flat–to reflect the world in which they struggle to survive. This book is a page turner, though exasperating. The style is at times detracting and awkward, which impedes an otherwise exciting narrative. I confess that I am not a frequent reader of science-fiction or post apocalyptic literature. Consequently, I found it challenging to release entirely to the experience as is necessary for clear-headed reading enjoyment. I remember my young son taking issue with a minor scene in one of the Star Wars movies. He found it, the scene, implausible, as if the rest of the movie was not. That seems to be at the core of my mixed feelings about this book. It is exciting and fast paced, but occasionally distractingly hackneyed and stilted.

Great writing has the capacity to inform the reader, among other virtues. Good writing makes us want to be informed, but doesn’t usually deliver. Not to sound high falutin, but Snakeskin Road, like much writing in this genre, can inform, as well as entertain: What does the future hold? What possibly will the human species of North America experience in the coming generation? What are the consequences of our current actions on the world of say, 2044 (the setting for Snakeskin Road)? And bigger questions too. What is the core nature of our being, our society and our humanity? Snakeskin Road would have us believe we are in for it, a thorough thrashing, going forward. All evidence points to this assessment. My only hope is to personally avoid the Harvesting Machines.

AMAZON READER RATING:	not yet rated by customers
PUBLISHER:	Bantam (July 28, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AMAZON PAGE:	Snakeskin Road
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	James Braziel
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic-novels: The Road by Cormac McCarthy Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood Our American King by David Lozell Martin The Pesthouse by Jim Crace O-Zone by Paul Theroux Bob Bridges by Penny Perkins

Bibliography:

• Birmingham 35 Miles (February 2008)
• Snakeskin Road (July 2009)