Shadow of Heaven

In this 1969 novel, the agricultural land of the major continents has been rendered sterile by a terrorist bio-attack. Populations are crammed into coastal conurbations in a process called 'the Compression'. To maintain food production, giant anti-gravity rafts have been put aloft, three miles up, to provide replacement agricultural land. The protagonist, newspaper journalist Vic Sterling, makes the illicit journey to International Land Extension 23 - "Heaven" to the millions caught in the Compression - in search of his missing half-brother. He finds himself walking into a rapidly escalating struggle for power and survival.

This is not amongst Bob Shaw's best novels. The premise looks unlikely: a comparative few anti-gravity rafts, even show more at fifteen miles long, would not be able to replace the loss of agricultural capacity of an entire continent. The novel is set in the 2090s, a century after the original bio-attacks, but life in the Compression is painted little differently to 1960s America. Vic Sterling, for example, works in a newspaper office where information still has to be looked up in card indexes. True, space is at a premium, leading to some effective Caves of Steel-style descriptions of multi-level cities where space is at a premium, but this rarely convinces. Shaw is better at describing the effects on the individual - claustrophobia and agoraphobia are regularly mentioned - but these problems are quickly glossed over when the plot needs to move on.

The imagery is effective enough - this was my first re-read of this book in more than forty years, and the scene painting worked well - but Shaw's trademark command of prose was lacking and the invention does not make up for the anachronisms that we now see in the story.

The book was first published by Ace in the USA, with an abridged edition appearing from New English Library in 1970. The title was re-sold to Corgi who published it in paperback in 1978, proclaiming it, rather inaccurately, to be the "first publication in Great Britain". Shaw later made some revisions and the novel reappeared from Gollancz in 1991, with a new paperback edition in 1992. I have not seen these and so cannot comment on whether the revisions made much improvement. Certainly, the earlier paperback incarnations from the 1970s can only be recommended to collectors and completists. show less

Early Bob Shaw (1969), when novels were done in less than 180 pages. With someone with Shaw's imagination, this leads to cramming a bit too many ideas for any of them to get much traction. Set in the US after the Compression, when the interior of the country was laid waste and everyone had to move to the coasts and eat kelp. Heaven refers to the Ile's (International Land Extensions), anti-gravity farms floating several miles above the ocean. Our hero is a journalist, so we get a chapter at his paper with his editor. Forget that though, because it's not relevant until the too-tidy ending. Next chapter he visits his mom in her super-tiny apartment and learns his step-brother has disappeared. With no intervening steps, acting on a hunch, show more he somehow manages to get himself smuggled into Heaven in a cargo container. He almost gets killed by automated container openers, probably what the smuggler intended, but forget that because it's never relevant again. He meets his brother, who has become the local ruler of others who escaped the Compression to live in Heaven. Most of the rest of the book is the back and forth battles between the two. While it's nice to finally have a plot line, it's not all that interesting. There's a brief but great set piece at the end, and then the aforementioned tidy wrap-up.

A time-passer but no classic. show less

[NEL abridged edition]
Short novel set in a future where an act of terrorism has rendered much of the world's arable land unusable without reducing the population. As a result, most of the first world population is crammed into narrow urban strips along the seaboard, with much of the feed coming from the sea. There is a small amount of arable farming carried out on multi-mile-wide anti-gravity disks high in the atmosphere, where some of the remaining uncontaminated soil has been placed for security. No people are allowed there and the disks, nicknamed Heaven, are farmed by robots. But when a reporter's brother goes missing, he realises that Johnny has fulfilled a childhood fantasy and run away to Heaven. Stirling follows him, using his show more job as a reporter as cover for tapping into the underground railway. What he finds there is a community of refugees, and a rule that nobody can break the community's cover by returning to the surface. Stirling has no intention of staying, but his brother has no intention of letting fraternal loyalty get in the way of his plans for the disk.

It's an interesting concept and story, but time has not been kind to it. Giant anti-gravity disks, but the press room where Stirling works uses card indexes to store their data? There are too many things to break a twenty-first century reader's suspension of disbelief for it to quite work for me now, which is a shame. One for the Oxfam box. show less

I have mix results with Bob Shaw. Some books I cannot finish and others are good. This one was good enough to finish and had some great moments. Average for 1960s SF.

Read in junior high or high school. It was the weird cover with the eye in the apple that did it. I vaguely recall that the book did not live up to the cover.