Archive for the ‘Hugo Nominee’ Category

THE WINDUP GIRL by Paolo Bacigalupi

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.

May 14, 2010  Tags: , , , , ,   Posted in: Greed & Corruption, Hugo Nominee, Nebula Award Winner, Speculative (Beyond Reality)  One Comment

THE CITY & THE CITY by China Miéville

Think of the now-passed-into-history segregated American South where Caucasians and African Americans, then called Negroes, lived in the same cities and towns but attended different churches and schools, sat in different areas in theaters, used different doors and water fountains, and often ignored one and other when walking down the same streets. Think once-enforced apartheid in South Africa. Or think of Berlin while the Wall separated it and Belfast’s volatile Protestant/Catholic duality. The citizens of the city states Beszel and Ul Qoma in China Miéville’s THE CITY & THE CITY live in a somewhat similar situation: they co-exist on the same land, but they have separate facilities and they go to extremes to “unsee†the “foreign†co-residents…

August 15, 2009  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Allegory, Hugo Nominee, Nebula Award Nominee, Noir, Speculative (Beyond Reality)  No Comments