Reviews: Buckell, Tobias

Very definitely a hell below

Sly Mongoose — Tobias S. Buckell
Xenowealth, book 3

Tobias S. Buckell’s 2008 novel Sly Mongoose is the third book in the Xenowealth sequence. Now, you might ask “why start with the third book?” There is a very straightforward answer: I wanted to read a book that gave me license to gratuitously embed this image:

Also, this specific book and I have some history, which I will get into later on.

Chilo isn’t Venus but it’s a lot like Venus, from the dense atmosphere to the furnace temperatures down on the ground. The good news is that like Venus, Chilo does have a region where the temperatures and pressures won’t immediately kill humans. The bad news is that region is thirty kilometers above the surface.

Which brings us to the balloon-cities of the sort featured in that gratuitously embedded image above.

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18 Feb 2016 / 0 Comments

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A Rising Tide

Arctic Rising — Tobias Buckell

Tobias Buckell’s 2012 novel Arctic Rising takes us to a global-warming future in which the arctic is increasingly clear of unsightly ice … as well as the animals that used to live there. Open seas mean access to all the resources of the north; ports are springing up all around the Arctic Ocean. Prosperity abounds in Canada and other, less important, nations!

But someone always has to be a spoilsport. Possibly because Canada’s benefit is the bane of most of the rest of the world, which must cope with rising sea levels and increasingly savage storms.

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26 Nov 2015 / 0 Comments

Miscellaneous Reviews