Stephen Markley

I wanted to like this book, but didn’t. The writing felt rushed and goal-driven, like I was being constantly shoved forward to the next plot point or flashback or oooooh foreshadowing, instead of helping me to know the characters and understand the story through them. The four leads ended up seeming rather simplistic, like four pinball flippers kicking the plot around.
Small errors in detail early on (like calling it the DMV when Ohio calls it the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, or, really, suggesting that a town full of pickup truck drivers wouldn’t have tied down the flag draped across the coffin) should have been a warning — specificity matters, details tell the story, and if I’m being honest I felt the author’s disdain for the semi-real place he’s using to set his story.… (mere)

An important topic and a fairly good work, but using a novel and following the stories of particular characters to explore how an important issue might develop in the short term future is nothing out of the ordinary for science fiction and I wonder if Markley is getting more credit than this book deserves due to this being perceived as a "literary" work. Perceived because of his first work being literary fiction and therefore his not being a "genre" author, that is; I didn't find the prose to be any more literary than one normally finds in genre fiction (and some "genre" authors have far more literary merit on the sentence level - which is not a criticism of Markley, hardly anybody can stand up to Ray Bradbury word for word) and the character development is at a level one normally expects from a book that's more interested in its issues than its characters. If Heinlein had been born later and more interested in ecology than the economy, he could have written something similar, albeit probably there would have been more sex in his version - but also he'd have had a few more memorable lines. If you're in need of a book on climate change and it has to be fiction, this would be a good choice, but if you're looking to learn about climate change in general, there's nonfiction for that. Strictly as fiction, this is a good book but not so great that it justifies it's near-Don Quixote length. I wonder if the success of Markley's debut discouraged proper editing.… (mere)