I first read Michael Swanwick’s “In the Drift” well over 20 years ago. I had first read part of it as a short story in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in 1985. The book isn’t so much a novel as a series of related short stories and novellas that are set in a world where the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor near Philadelphia blew up. The drift is the mostly uninhabitable fallout zone that the reactor explosion poisoned. The stories are set about 100 years in the future and span several decades and partially follow some characters such as Keith Piotrowicz through them.

Ace published this as part of a restart of the Ace Science Fiction Specials line and it was in good company with the likes of William Gibson’s “Neuromancer”, Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Wild Shore”, and Lucius Shepard’s “Green Eyes”.

I have had mixed luck (mostly poor) re-reading novels that I regarded as classics or nearly so from the past. Some of these “classics” just do not hold up. Although not really an “old” classic, this was a reaffirmation that there are some good novels and stories from the science fiction genre that do hold up over time. I can recommend “In the Drift” as a good read. Swanwick is a good writer. ( )

http://www.leftfield.org/~rawdon/book... ( )