Nineteen in '19: America City

I've read far less in recent years than I would like. To help remedy this, I've set myself the modest target of reading nineteen books in 2019. When I finish one, a thumbnail review here will follow.

1/19: America City by Chris Beckett

The blurb: America, one century on: a warmer climate is causing vast movements of people. Droughts, floods and hurricanes force entire populations to simply abandon their homes. Tensions are mounting between north and south, and some northern states are threatening to close their borders against homeless fellow-Americans from the south. Against this backdrop, an ambitious young British-born publicist, Holly Peacock, meets a new client, the charismatic Senator Slaymaker, a politician whose sole mission is to keep America together, reconfiguring the entire country in order to meet the challenge of the new climate realities as a single, united nation. When he runs for President, Holly becomes his right hand woman, doing battle on the whisperstream, where stories are everything and truth counts for little. But can they bring America together - or have they set the country on a new, but equally devastating, path?

The review: like all the best speculative fiction, America City works well because it extrapolates credibly from the present day; it is very easy to imagine the climate changes that are described, and it is equally easy to foresee everyday tech developing in the ways imagined herein, both good and bad. In fact, some of the more negative uses of technology in the book's narrative might already be here, but let's not digress. When Beckett started writing this, the idea that a character like Slaymaker could become President might have seemed far-fetched but, again, this has sadly been overtaken by reality. Whatever, this book is a timely slice of fiction and, for the most part, is well-written too, although Beckett's prose can, on occasion, be a little too overt, a little too on-the-nose, when it might be better to let the reader join the dots. Curiously, this happens most when he is writing about protagonist Holly's husband, Richard. On the plus side, interspersing the main narrative with testimony from imagined American refugees is a neat way of moving the background and context along, without bogging the main characters down in it explicitly. And despite the underlying environmental theme, Beckett treads the line between "provocative" and "call to arms" well. Ditto the line between accessible page-turner and accessible potboiler. Has a credible bleak ending too; got to love a bleak ending.

The bottom line: thought-provoking, intelligent and all-too-plausible slice of speculative-fiction.

Since everything online is rated these days: ★★★★☆☆