Rob Ziegler

Like Paolo Bacigalupi, who’s thanked, Ziegler has written a bleak post-climate change, post-American century future: in a world where the US is reduced mostly to groups of refugees who move south in winter and north in summer to escape the worst weather and take advantage of the remaining growing seasons, the currency of life is Satori seed: genetically engineered seeds that come from a company that’s turned itself into a living thing. Satori has also engineered Designers who make the show more seed; now one of them has defected—not to the US, as the government hoped, but for her own purposes. The stories of a soldier, a young refugee, and a Designer intersect in ways none of them could have foreseen. This is similar to pre-masterwork Octavia Butler—it’s about the power and constraints of biology, the multiple cruelties people inflict on each other when they are in need and when they see people weaker than they are, and so on. show less

This book was fantastic! I purchased it recently and decided to squeeze it in before June ended and I'm so glad I did. Beaulieu has created a surprisingly detailed world in a novella of about 175 pages. It's a sort of post-apoc, futuristic view on what the world would be like if everyone's minds were connected. It seemed like a mixture of telepathy and techology, with this strange thing called "The Light" that cuts people off from this connectivity but somehow enlightens them to the truths show more of the world and also turns them into junkies, eventually killing them. There are two (or maybe three) main characters, ladies from different backgrounds who have been affected by the Light in some way, be it as a junkie or someone whose lost those to the Light and they were very compellling. I wasn't sure who I was rooting for because even though they were at odds, they were all so relatable. Excellent world building and character crafting in such a short page count! I highly reccommend this, especially if you can get your hands on it for a discount (I have mixed feelings about novella prices) and I look forward to reading my other book by Beaulieu! show less

This novella requires patience - it takes awhile to figure out what is going on and to realize how the world ended up how it did - and in places the writing can be a bit rough.

Some time in the future, huge parts of USA (and probably the world) are under water and humanity had developed a wait of people to stay connected mentally (it is never made clear if it was genetics or implants) and had split into small groups, fully connected inside of these groups, even growing babies to do the jobs show more needed. And then the Light showed up - burning a person's connection to the world but being addictive enough to actually make people crave it.

Two women get caught into the Light - one of them lost everything but escaped and is now chasing the Light and its influence as part of a military operation and the other decided to give up and live with it. Except that nothing is that easy.

The big mystery is what the Light is - a drug or a religion or something else completely. And we get the answer at the end - not entirely surprising but not disappointing either. The characters and the world details serve as a background to that big question - which makes the novella less character-driven than it could have been (even if at least a few of the characters are developed enough to make someone care about them).

I was not sure what to expect from this novella - it is obviously a science fiction one while Beaulieu is a fantasy author. So I kept wondering of it will go into something else - but it stays strictly science fiction (and post apocalyptic). It won't be for everyone but I quite enjoyed it. show less

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

Whenever I think of the term "cyberpunk," easily my favorite literary genre back in the '80s when I was a teenager, I think of a very specific combination of qualities -- four or five different storylines that all merge into one at the climax, set in a day-after-tomorrow dystopia, one where the show more dizzying sci-fi inventions of Mid-Century Modernism have been turned on their heads, so that what the author is really exploring is the ways that cutting-edge tech has trickled down in a corrupted and heavily modded form to the street level of the lumpen proletariat, with the story's style and characters heavily influenced by the underground culture of its times (so in the case of classic '80s cyberpunk, for example, American and British punk music, which is how the genre got its name in the first place). And all of these things can be said about Rob Ziegler's contemporary Seed as well, a superlative cyberpunk novel but one you might not even recognize as such at first; for instead of revolving around pale computer hackers in London, Seed's heroes move among the decidedly sweatier circles of Mexican skaters in the American Southwest, and instead of being obsessed with virtual reality, this book deals with the much messier proposition of intelligent wetware and the coming agricultural apocalypse. Set in a world dealing with an unnamed past catastrophe where normal plants can no longer grow properly, the plot in general is fueled by the conceit that one private company eventually became the sole saviors of the entire American populace, by being the first to create an artificial intelligence that not only could genetically engineer seeds that would grow in this post-apocalyptic environment, but also literal living buildings made out of biological skin and bone, maintained by a small army of sub-intelligent clones who all operate under a hive-mind system. The various small storylines we follow throughout the book, then, all deal in one way or another with this central conceit -- there are the scrappy Latino brothers trying to survive in an anarchic, gray-market society, there is the "manager clone" who is thinking of defecting from the company (and taking all its confidential intellectual property with it), there is the disgraced military commander who has been ordered by a now cuckolded White House to go find this runaway clone, and on and on in this vein, each of them giving us a small specific look at this grandly epic universe Ziegler has built up step by step.

Now, just to be clear, like most genre novels Seed is filled with things that will drive non-fans of that genre a little crazy -- the dialogue can be a little stilted at times, some of the characters a bit too corny, and of course you need to be into bizarre science-fictional concepts in the first place to enjoy it at all -- and let's also be clear that even SF fans that aren't necessarily into cyberpunk will find some faults with this too, a book that can sometimes fixate too much on the action sequences rather than the "big picture" topics being discussed. But if like me you are a fan of early William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Charles Stross and other established cyberpunk authors, you will find this an incredibly satisfying read, nearly perfect at hitting all the beats that a story like this needs, while maintaining a fast pace and constantly offering up unique little speculative nuggets for your brain to chew on for a while. (I especially loved the reveal of who exactly is behind all these sinister goings-on at this shadowy company, but for the sake of spoilers I will leave that a surprise.) A book only for a niche audience, but a niche audience who will passionately love it for what it is, Seed will almost certainly be making CCLaP's best-of lists at the end of the year, and it comes strongly recommended to those who think in advance that they might be interested in it.

Out of 10: 8.9, or 9.9 for cyberpunk fans show less