I was just digging around AMAZON.COM to see what was new and found GREENHOUSE SUMMER, by Norman Spinrad, a very well respected SF author.
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Reviews
From Booklist , November 1, 1999
The future isn't much fun, even for the rich, in old sf hand Spinrad's satiric ecothriller portraying a time after the ice caps have melted and raised sea levels worldwide. A sort of prosperity has crept over Siberia, one of the few areas where agriculture is possible. New York City survives behind a high sea wall; no one can afford the rent, but seafood is plentiful. Third World countries at the Equator (the "Lands of the Lost") are hot, dry, and poor, suitable only for the cultivation of marijuana in domes by First World "syndics." None of this matters, however. "Condition Venus" is imminent, in which the planet will suddenly become so hot that all life will boil away. Monique Calhoun--scientist, pampered First Worlder, and reluctant employee of the syndic Bread and Circuses--rushes to save the world, along with an unlikely assassin, "Prince" Eric Esterhazy. The two are almost a love story, but love stories are beside the point in Spinrad's caustic, gleeful, meticulously modeled scenario of doom. John Mort
Copyright¸ 1999, American Library Association. All rights reserved
From Kirkus Reviews
Global-meltdown yarn, part satire, part political comedy, part sober admonition, from the Paris-resident author of Russian Spring (1991), etc. Thanks to global warming, deserts are spreading, coasts are flooded, and icecaps are melting, but Siberia has blossomed into the most prosperous region on the planet. Scientists predict the onset of a runaway-greenhouse Condition Venus that will render Earth uninhabitable. The ineffectual annual UN climate conference moves to tropical Paris. But this year, the sponsors (the Big Blue Machine, the unreconstructed capitalists who run the planet) have hired Bread & Circuses to handle spin and gloss, and are providing lavish funding. Monique Calhoun of Bread & Circuses is told by Big Blue bosses to hire a party riverboat owned by the Bad Boys, a benevolent outgrowth of mafias, triads, and drug barons, fronted by Eric Esterhazy. The boat's crawling with surveillance devices. The Bad Boys agree to a joint party with Bread & Circuses, each hoping to spy on the other's clients, while Monique and Eric attempt to seduce one another in a complicated game of bluff and counterbluff. Clearly, the Big Blue Machine is desperate to grab Siberian money for their climate control schemes -- but to save their own financial hides, or to save the planet? For all his eccentricities, this time he's too obviously infatuated with Paris. Spinrad has a social conscience and isnt afraid to exercise it in public. The upshot's often shapeless, but funny, caustic, and dead on target. -- Copyright ¸1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. |
