28. Breakout by Richard Stark

Richard Stark is my favorite author. He is the pseudoym of Donald E. Westlake who has written all kinds of crime and mystery novels, including the screenplay for The Grifters. The Stark books were a series of caper novels, written in the early '60s and early '70s starring a tough, methodical and cold-blooded thief named Parker. They kicked ass. He wrote the last of the series "Butcher's Moon" in 1974 and it was a perfect ending to the series. For whatever reasons, he started writing Parker books again '97 and sadly they just weren't as good. The plots weren't as tight, Stark had trouble fitting Parker into the '90s and Parker just wasn't himself. He talked way too much, put on disguises, things like that. In the original series, there was no fooling around. It had lines like "Parker shot him." or "Parker hit him twice." or "Parker waited."

The basic structure of the Parker books is four parts. Part I Parker plans a job or gets involved in one. Part II we see the behaviour and personalities of some of the other characters, often involved tangentially or on the victim side of the job. Part III the job goes sour. Part IV Parker deals. There were some variations, and the overall story arc is really great, with Parker taking on the mob, but the real enjoyment of these books is a super-efficient character cleaning up the mess of life's screw-ups in order to save his own ass.

Anyways, I picked up the latest in the second iteration of Parker books, Breakout, at the new Bibliotheque Nationale here in Montreal. This time, Parker gets caught on a job and goes to a holding facility, where he decides to break out rather than wait for the cops to connect the identity he gave them to the real him and thus expose all the crime he's done over the years and finish his career for good. There is a pretty cool heist and the way things go sour are cool. It's all a bit implausible and it kind of lacks punch, but Westlake is such a good writer that he is always enjoyable to read. It's a quick and decent read, but I would only recommend it to completists. What I would recommend is you start reading the original Parker series, which starts with The Hunter (or Point Blank as the movie of it was called) and go from there, in order if possible. They will kick your ass.

27. Dark Mirror by Diane Duane

Okay, I just crossed a threshold to a higher levil of nerdiness. I just read a Star Trek novel, Next Generation at that. The author was recommended as one of the better of the series. I have nothing to compare it with, but Dark Mirror was entertaining and fun to read, but probably would appeal mainly to those who were familiar with the TV show. I watched the first few seasons of Next Generation and quite enjoyed it when it stayed on strategic and exploratory subjects. It started to get more and more soap-operaesque as the seasons went on and I dropped it.

The Dark Mirror crew deals with a parrallel, evil universe, the same one that the original Star Trek crew encountered (with Evil Mr. Spock, one of the most bad-ass concepts in the history of character development). This time, the evil universe has figured out how to pull things from our universe and they pull the good Enterprise into their universe in an attempt to take it over, send it back and infiltrate then conquer our universe.

Duane does a great job with the original characters and a pretty good job of developing the future history of the evil universe, where humans have conquered, destroyed or enslaved everything in the galaxy. Her portrayal of the evil counterparts is mixed. They were interesting, but not quite evil enough. The whole book is kind of G-rated, which is not inappropriate for the source material, but makes it difficult to portray real evil.

I think I may turn off this road now, but if I come upon some other Diane Duane star trek's for cheap, I may pick them up.

26. Flic Story by Roger Borniche

They have a giant used book sale at this Arena in Rosemount every year. I think most of the books are the ones the libraries are getting rid of. I picked this book up there, on a whim. It was a hardback missing the dust jacket, so pretty anonymous but the age and quality of the paper and binding caught my eye. It was written in 1973, originally in French, and is the true story of a french cop hunting down criminals in Paris in the period after the end of the Second World War. The author is the cop (flic is slang for cop in France) and he prefaces the book with a bit of bitterness, suggesting that all the books about crime are written from the criminals perspective and he wanted to show what it was like to be a cop.

The translation is a bit awkward, especially considering that a lot of the dialogue is in gangster jargon and french underworld sland. Also, the book moves forward jerkily, sometimes going to the past, sometimes changing perspectives (Borniche often narrates the criminals behaviour as if he were part of it, without any explanation of how he knows the things he knows. But once you get a quarter way through the book, the stories (and the main story, his attempt to collar France's enemy #1 of the period) really pick up momentum and those things stop bothering you. You also get the feeling that he really wrote this book on his own and his writing, though not the best, is honest and filled with real detail. He has a humble and sardonic voice, and though it is often marred by the translation, when he talks about trying to afford a new stove for his mistress (this means girlfriend in the context; he isn't married), it's endearing.

The french criminal scene of the '40s and '50s, at least according to this book, seems as cool as it is portrayed in movies like The Red Circle and Touchez Pas au Grisby! The gangsters (and the cops) are constantly stopping what they are doing to get something good to eat (and describing it in sophisticated detail), drinking wine, champagne and pastis (pernod mixed with water, turns all milky) and smoking cigars and black-market american cigarettes. They cops and robbers always seem to be hanging out in the same place. You get the feeling that Paris was a small place or that the culture was just very consistent.

I'm really glad I found this book. Besides being fun to read, filled with great heists, collars and characters, it also gave me a much stronger and more authentic sense of the french postwar criminal world. I'm also happy to discover they made a movie of it with Alain Delon.

25. Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks

This is another one of Banks' Culture novels, a collection which I've really loved. He is a great moralist, great in the sense that his books are powerfully moral without ever being preachy or getting in the way of the story. Feersum Endjinn concerns the earth far in the future. The technological and social situation is quite complex, almost too complex to describe here, but basically the future earth is in danger of "The Encroachment" a wave of black dust that may block out the sun and thus freeze the solar system. Instead of working together to address the problem, the leaders are fighting a civil war. Everyone lives in the ruins of giant statues and castles and have access to a virtual reality called the Crypt, all of which was left by a previous society. They don't know much about them, but suspect they have a way to fight the Encroachment. The book traces the paths of the various characters whose actions will impact the plot.

As usual, with the Culture books, there is awesome technology as well as really amazing descriptions and locations. His presentation of the Crypt as a kind of advanced internet in which people can exist for millenia as avatars (or copies) of themselves is thought-provoking and a reasonable guess as to the future of our own data net. So for sci-fi nerds, it's a great read. I think it may be a bit obscure if you're not familiar with Banks' style and the Culture books. For instance, there is a character who can only think and express himself phonetically and there are chapters and chapters written phonetically, which is tough at first (though once your brain is able to read it quickly, it's amazingly well-written).

I think it is quite obviously a metaphor for global warming in our own time and from that perspective, this book actually lacks some of the moral depth and complexity that his other books have. It all ends kind of abruptly and easily, suggesting there is some deus ex machina solution to human stupidity and selfishness that will save us all in the end.

I'm not really able to do justice to the fantastic and rich world that Banks has created here. He really is a master. I strongly recommend any of the Culture books (most of which aren't for sale in the States, or weren't), the listing of which can be found at his website.

For you Culture geeks out there, Feersum Endjinn takes place on earth and only gives very teeny hints to the origin of the Culture and the future of the humans who left the planet (referred to as the Diaspora). The only direct link to the Culture is, I believe, a tiny ant, but I'll need to dig a little deeper to confirm that.

24. A Conspiracy of Paper by David Liss

My dad lent me this because he wanted to know what I "thought about it." This worried me, but he assured me that it was an entertaining read and he was correct. It's kind of a heroic adventure (almost pulp) novel taking place in early 18th century england, when the modern notion of money and markets was just starting to develop. The hero is a jewish ex-boxer who has set himself up as a sort of Rennaisance bounty hunter, hunting down criminals and returning stolen material. It's a great idea, because the period is full of fantastic adventure potential. From the perspective of an entertaining read, it's pretty well executed. The plot is engaging and the characters, especially the hero, are well drawn out. There's lots of satisfying butt-kicking and revenge-getting. The plot becomes a bit overly complex and its mystery dependent more on many others holding out information rather than any real detective work. The author did some study in the field and knows the period well, but the language, the thinking and a lot of the goings-on in the book seem just a bit too contemporary. Probably it had to be done to make a rollicking adventure, but I guess I would have liked just a bit more detail and period verisimillitude. Compared, for instance, to Neal Stephenson's portrayal of the same period in his recent trilogy, A Conspiracy of Paper seems simplified, as if written for a poorly educated audience (i.e. the American book-buying public). Still, tons of fun and I'd definitely recommend it for a vacation read.

23. Buddha's Money by Martin Limón

Buddha's Money was discovered, reviewed and lent to me from the good folks at Mount Benson Report. I generally agree with most everything written there. The book starts out with some action and keeps delivering, which makes for a quick and entertaining read. It does go a bit astray at times and because of its pacing nothing is ever that deep. My favorite aspect of the book (and probably the element presented with the most depth) is the setting itself. I don't know much about Korea or Korean history (which is interesting in and of itself in that I know a fair amount about Chinese and Japanese culture and history) and Limón does a great job of describing that halfway world created by the impact of a foreign army on the local culture. I would like to get a better sense of the two main characters, though the thoughtful Chicano with a respect for history and the violent black GI are a pretty good team for investigating this kind of mayhem. One other thing to note is that it is quite brutal. So violent and cruel at times that it actually made me go and check when it was written. It was 1998 and the more grisly elements seem to come from someone writing something today rather than in the '50s or '60s, which is when I had originally thought they were published.

22. The IF Reader of Science Fiction edited by Frederik Pohl

Though a collection of short stories by different authors, it was bound in book format and was book length, so I'm counting it! The IF Reader is an anthology of the best stories of 1962 from IF magazine. They represent many of the major authors of the period, A.E. Van Vogt, John Brunner, Fritz Leiber, Fred Saberhagen. They were all fairly light, better read for their speculations and concepts than an involving story or deep theme (though, as always in sci-fi, many interesting human themes were present, just not touched on in depth in short story format). All pretty fun and light. Glad I passed the time with it. Probably, if I knew more about the history of science fiction literature, I would be able to put these stories in context better.

21. The Golden Spruce by John Vaillant

Non-fiction book #2!

This is the true story of a giant golden spruce in the Queen Charlotte Islands, a genetic freak, tourist attraction and sacred symbol to the Haida people, that was cut down by an ex-logger turned environmentalist. Grant Hadwin's story is the center narrative for an excellent history of the region and logging and wood production in the world.

It's not totally clear why Hadwin cut the tree down, but part of it was his outrage that this tree was protected while the rest of the Queen Charlottes was basically clearcut. He was angry about the little symbolic patches of trees that the big logging companies saved to show their concern for the environment. He didn't seem to know the power that the symbol held for the Haida people (who basically want to kill him now) and showed signs of mental instability.

It's an interesting and sad story, but it's the incredible greed and waste that surrounds the story, and the strong sense of the power of human consumption, that makes this book so compelling. I know this is my opinion already, but when you read about how the region was first completely raked clean of sea otters (for their fur), then of species after species of tree (starting from the best and biggest, to the smaller and lower quality), it really drives home how incredibly out of control we are as a species and how terribly we handle the planet. We are like rats that have taken over the house, are reproducing out of control and consuming anything and everything in our path. Foul creatures.

We can write some good books, though! And I strongly recommend the Golden Spruce.

20. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick

Found this one in a box on the street. I've read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik, but years ago, so I was curious about getting a better sense of Dick's writing.

My first reaction after finishing it was further annoyance at these snobby pseudo-intellectuals (like Margaret Atwood) who make this forced distinction between Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction, the former being considered adolescent and the latter somehow literature, because they supposedly deal with complex human themes that the former doesn't touch. All of the science fiction books that I have read this year have been very philosophical, with explorations of god, man's perception of himself and the meaning of existence.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch starts out in a future world where the earth is overheated to the point that living things can't go out in the day without dying. The wealthy take evolution therapy and the poor are slowly recruited to be colonists on distant planets. The colony effort is basically to get the people off of earth and is considered a punishment. Physical survival is not an issue, but morale is as most of the colonists just sit around and mope on their bleary, depressing planets. Their only escape is a drug called Can-D that puts them into an alternate fantasy earth reality. However, for the drug to work they need to have precise miniatures of the world they are going to enter. The biggest industry on Earth is the production of these miniatures and the drug.

That's the setting. The plot is quite complex and very open to interpretation. I think it's about an invasion of a single, powerful alien being in the personification of Palmer Eldritch, a space explorer who is trying to set up a new drug called Chew-Z that's supposedly way better than Can-D. The book is about the employees of the Can-D company trying to stop him. But because it's constantly dealing with alternate realities, it's difficult to figure out what's real and what's in the drug world and by the end, the two have blurred together. Plus, many of the colonists equate the use of Can-D with a religious experience, so there are all kinds of discussion of translation and transubstantiation.

It's quickly paced and has some interesting ideas. Dick does have a strong sense of the malleability of our reality and he plays well with that in his writing. He is also able to create a future with some big, crazy ideas and not get caught up in the tone and culture of the time he's writing in. I'll pick up another one of his novels in a bit.

19. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

It's obviously a science fiction classic and one that I've been meaning to read for a long time. I have to say that I really didn't like it very much. I'm sure there is a lot of contextual information of which I'm ignorant that would help me appreciate the book more and I'm also sure that it hasn't aged well (which is not necessarily a valid criticism of a work of art). I found it to be inconsistently structured, with long passages of conversation that were basically philosophical musings interspersed with short narrative steps forward. The philosophy was very annoying for me because most of it was relayed through the voice of Jubal Harshaw who talked like Travis McGhee. He had that early 60s american hip style where nobody can seem to say anything in a straightforward manner. There always has to be some clever little joke, exaggeration or sarcasm. And since all the philosophy was about human sexual relations, it didn't help that it was totally sexist. This free love perfect world seemed based on the idea that all the women were young and beautiful, playful and willing to do anything the men asked. They still cook the dinner even though all you have to do is push a button! And Michael's perfect world of free love, which all the characters in the book perfectly accept, had absolutely no room for homosexuality. Very convenient, indeed.

Perhaps this book was a real wake-up call to audiences of the late '50s. But today, it seemed like unsophisticated and self-indulgent rambings about north american sexual mores.

18. Hell's Witness by Daniel Sanger

I met the author of this book at a book-signing for another book. It turned out that he worked with my sister at Saturday Night and also wrote the article that really motivated me to watch FUBAR. He's a big FUBAR fan and we had a good conversation about that. He's also an investigative journalist who wrote an award-winning article about the biker wars in Quebec. That article, specifically about Dany Kane, the informant who mysteriously killed himself when his information led to a massive sweep of biker arrests, turned into this book.

Hell's Witness is structured around Danny Kane, his struggle to rise in the Hell's Angels and his relationships with the RCMP. It's written in a very straightforward style and structured basically in a straight line. Despite the details of biker excess, it's written with such a sober, journalistically legit style that I found a lot of it a bit dry. There isn't a lot of life breathed into these characters. On the other hand, that approach lends it a lot of credibility and there is no exaggeration or hyperbole, something I'm sure a lot of true crime books suffer from.

He spends a lot of time looking at the behaviour of the various police forces and they do not come off well. They seem to get so caught up in their missions that they lose sight of their real role. The money they spent on Kane compared to the results they got is questionable at best and Sanger does a great job of laying out these weird and complex situations where the RCMP is actively working against the courts to get a murderer acquitted or his case dismissed because he's the main key to their larger case.

Also, if you, as a western canadian, ever had the sense that french-canadians are wimpy, this book will break down that stereotype. Most of the Angels are french-canadians and they are more than just badasses. They really seem just nuts. They are constantly calling hits on each other and are quite creative with their methods. Bombing, hammering, chopping off body parts, all part of a day's work to these guys!

17. Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan

This was the perfect book to help keep the pace going. I read Morgan's first book, called Altered Carbon, that was basically a detective noir set in a pretty far cyberpunk future. It was well done science fiction. Market Forces is much more compelling and thematically rich, though still a classic male sci-fi book on the surface. It takes place near the end of this century. Globalization has continued to thrive and the world is controlled by powerful corporations. Division between the rich and the poor has become so extreme that London is separated into two distinct zones, divided by checkpoint barriers. The protagonist is a hot-shot financier working in Conflict Investment, the hottest growth area in the market. Basically, large corporations finance and manage small wars all over the world and reap huge profits off the weapons sales and subsequent cheap labour markets.

It's such a cut-throat world that to actually get ahead, you have a road duel with whoever's position or accounts you want to take. All the top execs drive around in armored, souped-up luxury vehicles and the best are like sports celebrities. I know it sounds kind of too over-the-top, but in the context of the book, it really works. How this state of affairs came to pass is slowly revealed and it fits in very well in what is ultimately a damning condemnation of global capitalism. The protagonist does some brutal things, but he's always wrestling with his conscience and begins to side with the revolutionary underdogs that he's financing.

It's macho writing and fun for people like me to read. The boardroom politics are well-constructed and gripping and there's tons of action: gunfights, street brawls and road battles. But the whole thing is very political. This is narrative entertainment with a political purpose balanced so well that neither side of the deal suffers. Good stuff. Strongly recommended.

16. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

Holy Karst! This is the first book I've read in way too long. I blame the internet. Over a month. I've lost my pace now and am going to have to really pound them out to get 50 this year.

I picked up The Forever War at a thrift store for a quarter. It had a nice '70s sci-fi pocket book cover and lots of accolades. It definitely comes out of the tradition of the '60s and the Vietnam war. The story concerns the life of a soldier recruited as a young man into a war against some unseen aliens and follows his career throughout the war as it progresses. What makes it interesting is that the engagements continue to be farther and farther away. The soldiers are put into stasis when they travel to the outer reaches. Most are killed, but those few who do survive come back to a future earth that is hundreds of years ahead of them. The protagonist's life spans 1800 earth years and by the time it's over things have changed radically. He goes through an entire period where heterosexuality is considered taboo and he's the only straight soldier in his platoon.

It's an interesting concept and ultimately is set up to show the ridiculousness of war. The story is fairly linear, though and lacks much actual conflict. It's more like an exploration of the theme rather than a real story, though the main character is sympathetic and well-written. It's okay.

15. Breed to Come by Andre Norton

Andre Norton is my kind of author. She's written a bazillion books, I'm sure all of which are entertaining. She loves cats and she spent a good deal of her life with a congenital physical illness that kept her in a lot of pain. I have a lot of respect for her in that her response was to just produce. She's a female sci-fi author who seems quite interested in the civilizations that would arise after we destroyed ourselves.

This book is about a future where humans are gone from a planet because of a self-created plague. It is told from the point of view of a society of cats who've evolved into sentient beings. They consider the humans demons from the mythological past. However, one of the cats has started to delve into the human's old dwelling places, teaching himself how to use their tools and he begins to suspect that some of the humans left the planet and may be returning.

It's a cool idea and her conception of how housecats evolve into a society is well thought out and entertaining. The book moves along briskly and is compelling to the end. I could have gone for something a little more drawn out and in depth, but this is a pocket sci-fi and novels in this genre have been designed to end quickly.

It's a good fun read and I recommend it.

14. The King of the Vagabonds by Colin Dann

I have been really in a reading rut these last couple of weeks. I'm stuck on two french books. I picked this one up because I found it at Value Village, it looked thin and easy to read and I'm interested in fiction about animals right now. It's about a cat in the countryside in England who is driven to leave his comfortable farm home to hang out with the tough wild cats who live in the fields and the old bomb sites. It was written for adolescents, as it's part of some british line of books which include Enid Blighton. The story is tautly constructed and moves right along. The basic plot could almost be about a human adolescent growing up, except for some of the social mores (it's not weird that his mother disappears to get laid by a wandering tom every now and then). There are plenty of cat details and it does a good job of presenting the challenges of a wild cat's existence in an exciting and adventurous way, without making it seem too fun. It definitely has that harsh british element to it. My only biological complaint is that a lot of the protagonist's character development is based on the notion that a well-fed cat doesn't hunt, which is untrue. Anyways, a fun read, which nobody else may ever come across again in my world, that I hope will spur me on to getting my pace back.

Well that's cool. I just did a bit of research and it turns out that Colin Dann is a very succesful author of children's books about animals. He wrote a series of books that started with The Animals of Farthing Wood about a bunch of animals driven from their forest home by developers, who band together against their own instincts to find a fabled nature reserve. It got made into an animated series and clearly has tons of fans. Sounds pretty cool.

13. Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding

Women are fucked.

12. The Bug by Ellen Ulman

My brother-in-law gave this to my dad for xmas, who read it and gave it back to him, who then read it and gave it to me. It is the story of a tech firm in the mid-80's, a programmer who becomes obsessed with a bug and the QA tester who first finds it. I have to admit that I was pretty sucked into the narrative. I read the book in a couple of days. It has two threads going on, a technical mystery about the source of the bug and two personal stories about the respective relationships (and their unravelling) of the two main characters. The programmer is often not very sympathetic and his descent into depression is frustrating because you feel that he's a bit too isolated. However, the rest of it rings very true. It portrays the corporate culture of that time (which really was the genesis of the dotcom boom) convincingly. And the other human relationships are quite compelling as well. Ultimately, though, it's the story of the bug itself that drew me in. You want to find out what caused it and the conclusion is satisfying, and goes a bit deeper, presenting an interesting theme on the relationship between humans and machines.

This is an interesting book, because it definitely has a chick side, spending a lot of time on people's feelings and relationships. But it also has lots of semi-hard technical passages which the guys will love. I'd recommend it.

11. Hang Dead Hawaiian Style by Patrick Morgan

This is the first in a series of surf spy pulp novels called Operation Hang Ten. They came out in the sixties and feature Bill Cartwright, surfing detective and ladies man. The first one I read had him hunting down a busload of hippies who were selling drugs to schoolkids (I kid you not). It got me hooked on the series. Hang Dead Hawaiian Style is a bit of a mess, but a fun read. He works for the man (he's hired by the CIA as a freelancer), but the whole time he's spouting anti-establishment rants like a watered down John D. McDonald. The rants are actually not badly written and the action is pretty aggressive, entertaining stuff, but the plot is terribly constructed. The second-to-main badguy is a doctor selling opium to the beach bums. He goes on and on about how removed he is from it because he's hired this dude to do all the transactions (a tough surfer with whom Cartwright has a surfing battle with) for him. But he also takes the girls home that he's got hooked and molests them for payment. And it took Cartwright chapters to figure out what was going on. I'm going to keep collecting the series, though.

10. Fugue for a Darkening Planet by Christopher Priest

This is another obscure post-holocaust dug up by master bouqiniste Lantzvillager and man this one is dark! The basic premise is that a nuclear war in Africa sends millions of immigrants flooding to the rest of the world. They hit England the hardest, where they come up against a newly elected and badly organized racist administration. It was written in the '70's so the initial response by the government seems unrealistic. Basically, the refugees boats aren't stopped and they end up swarming the land, taking over peoples houses and turning the nation into chaos.

The story is told from one man's point of view. Though it is written in the first person, it's extremely objective, almost cold as if he's watching over himself like a scientist. The structure of the book is interesting too, with no chapters, just brief sections divided by an asterisk, jumping around between 4 different narrative threads of time: the guy's life growing up, his deteriorating marriage, his flight from his suburban home with his wife and daugher and his lone travels after they are abducted from him. These are quite well woven around, so that it doesn't get confusing and you are driven forward to find out what happens.

This book presents a very pessimistic view of mankind. The island becomes divided roughly into four groups, the organized Afrim army, who seem to be supplied with weapons by the soviets, the official british army, who is trying to regain control, a renegade british army who is sympathetic to the african refugees, nationalist troops who are racist and all the refugees, now english and african. It's quite a mess as you can see and the atrocities are realistic and disturbing. Ultimately, the main character, who begins as a liberal-minded professor must slowly confront the feelings of anger and fear that are changing his behaviour.

The british are good at this sort of stuff. Like War of the Worlds, Fugue describes small details that give the reader a real sense of the breakdown of society. It makes you feel scared to have loved ones. A quick and absorbing read, I strongly recommend it.

9. The Space Merchants by Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth

My dad loves this book and I had read it a long time ago and thought it was okay. This time, I understand much better why he is so appreciative of it. It's a scathing attack on consumerism and I might have to say the most accurate prediction, in terms of social structures, of a dystopic future that I've read. The planet is overpopulated, run by giant mega-corporations. Most people are workers either blue or white collar, and basically trapped in a cycle of consumption and labor. They work to get the money to buy the useless things to which they are either addicted or so deeply brainwashed by constant advertising that they cannot do without. There are a few elites, who struggle hard to stay on top and keep the system in place.

It doesn't sound so original today, but the way it is described really spot on. A lot of the actual advertising techniques seem unsophisticated and you can tell that the book was written in the '50s. But the motivation behind it and the basic assumption that a world of endless cyclical consumption constructed on a fantasy of capitalistic renewal is incredibly powerful. The only political conflict comes from the Consies, ecological conservatives who are portrayed as a fringe group of total maniacs. The storyline and the way the actual conflicts of the narrative move forward are less engaging than the actual description of the society. But I strongly encourage everyone to read this book, at the very least to get a gander at Chicken Little.

We're fucked!