2044 and the US is coming apart at the seams. The people live nomadic lives and the new cold war is with the Dutch, fought mostly over the Net. This is your future, and Oscar Valparaiso's too - or it would be if he wasn't half human, half genetically modified.
Added by: Kahena | Karma: 11526.37 | Fiction literature | 12 November 2011
4
Walking on Glass
Walking on Glass is as underrated as it is brilliant. Iain Bank's enigmatic novel of artifice and the inherent failings of humanity has often left readers bemused and frustrated. This reviewer has little more to offer in terms of unlocking the complexities of this awesome book, save that part of Bank's brilliance is the way he never patronises his reader; choosing to tell his tale and allowing the books pervading theme of ambiguity to transcend from page to person. It would be easy (lazy?)to dismiss Walking on Glass as three separate stories that are destined to collide, but in doing so one would negate the true symbiotic and symbolic facets that flow through the narrative.
If Naomi had picked tails, she would have won the coin toss. She wouldn’t have had to go back for the yearbook camera, and she wouldn’t have hit her head on the steps. She wouldn’t have woken up in an ambulance with amnesia. She certainly would have remembered her boyfriend, Ace. She might even have remembered why she fell in love with him in the first place. She would understand why her best friend, Will, keeps calling her “Chief.”
Cruise Ship Blues - The Underside of the Cruise Ship Industry
Cruising is one of the fastest growing industries in the world. Attracting more than 12 million passengers a year, cruise ship companies are merging to become be-hemoths. And cruise ships themselves have swollen dramatically in size, now sometimes carrying more than 5,000 people on board. Not surprisingly, this growth is causing huge problems-problems that the industry would rather not acknowledge, and the potential cruiser would have a hard time discovering.
Originally published in 1939 and unavailable for over 2 years, a novel written just before the war, which prophetically describes how it would affect a town like Southampton.
