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Soft Apocalypse (2011)

by Will McIntosh(Favorite Author)

3.44 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

159780276X (ISBN13: 9781597802765)

languge

English

genre

Science Fiction

publisher

Night Shade Books

review 1: Eh. I'm probably not the right audience for this book; grim dystopian pre/per/post-apocalyptic stories are just not my thing unless they're very good and, IMO, this ... isn't. A flawed main character who gradually becomes more likeable over the course of the novel is a Will McIntosh trope, but in this instance, Jasper is so unlikeable from the outset that I struggled to get past that. The book is obviously expanded from a short story, much more so than his other novels. The novel covers something like 15 years in the story but the characters don't appear to age in any meaningful way. There are lots of interesting ideas amongst all the dystopia but they're all kind of just thrown into the mix with very little context and a lot of them don't come across as either plausi... moreble and/or coherent at least to me.
review 2: The end comes not with a bang, but starts with economic disparity. We are spookily on the same path as this relentlessly grim vision of our near future, where the rich live in walled compounds, and the rest barely scrape by(see most of South America today). Plague viruses - most likely engineered to clean out the riff-raff and bands of violent gangs called Jumpy-Jumps with their own wild dialect drive populations from cities out into rural areas searching for food. Dissident scientists create unstoppable bamboo which quickly covers most of the land but also slows down the murderous military, and the Dr. Happy virus, which begins as a way to curb violence in the masses, and finally becomes the only redemtive choice. Chilling, with good character development and a slowly devolving, but compelling, plot, this is unfortunately a cautionary tale. less

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