It occurred to me while reading this book that J.G. Ballard really is the high-lord grand poobah of Science Fiction disaster novels. There’s at least five of them I can think of off the top of my head that all follow a similar plot: Nature goes screwy, and everyone dies, or is very likely to die in the near future. One would think that he’d have been gobbled up as a new age saint by the environmentalists as a result, but he hasn’t. Why?

I have to say I put off reading this book for quite a while. It received mixed reviews in the press, and all of my friends who took a stab at it either gave up half way through, or finished it and hated it. Those are never good signs. When my superiors gave me this assignment, I wasn’t exactly falling over myself with excitement, and I dragged my heels for several months before even cracking the thing open.

And I instantly wished I hadn’t.

You know, I think I might be getting smarter. Well, realistically, that’s not possible - my neurology is pretty much locked-in at this stage in life, and in fact I’m loosing cells, but I’m better educated than I was, say, 15 years ago. I know more. If I’m not actually smarter, at least I’m thinking better - that’s got to count for something, right?

Back in February I reviewed “Fleet of Worlds” by Larry Niven and Edward Lerner ( http://www.republibot.com/content/science-fiction-book-review-2-%E2%80%9... ) and I was fairly gushing in my review. I was pleasantly surprised - no, more than surprised: I was pleasantly flabbergasted - at how good a book it was. Though I’d known of the book, I was uncharacteristically unenthused about it, and when I finally deigned to read it, I was blown away, and I was very excited at the prospect of a sequel.