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Fiction Contemporary

Water

by (author) H.E. Taylor

Publisher
Thistledown Press
Initial publish date
May 2007
Category
Contemporary
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781897235232
    Publish Date
    May 2007
    List Price
    $17.95

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Description

When all the animals are gone, and the world become a desert, where shall hope be found? After the extinctions, a post-human M?tis woman reaches out in hope and encounters a strange and unexpected future.
Billie Featherstone is one of few people to survive "the great extinction" thanks to a genetic mutation carried largely in the Metis population. Her skeleton is charged with Restart - a video game-like element for reanimating. She routinely patrols the biological war-plagued borders of her people's territory where extinctions abound, deserts spread, and post-humans struggle. Water is a solidly researched novel inspired by the mathematical extrapolation of the length of time a technological civilization can exist. From such thinking, Taylor creates a world of the future based on society's current environmental indifference.

 

About the author

Contributor Notes

Harvey Taylor lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba where he works as a computer programmer and writer.

Excerpt: Water (by (author) H.E. Taylor)

What do you do when you realize the world has gone wrong? To whom do you turn? There is no absolution for such crime, no accolade that matters after such knowledge, no escape except by useless suicide. You are trapped in that bright moment. In a way it is a polymorphously perverse reversal of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. Instead of the development of an individual organism mirroring the development of the species, it is how the extinction of species mirrors the extinction of our own hopes and dreams.

Once upon a time I thought there was a way. For one wild high season anything seemed possible, but something happened - the weather turned, the dream fell down, a crack in the armour of dawn let burst the blinding light and the whole world turned to stone. All the old categories, the hierarchies of despair, fell back into place, grinding out their relentless tune. The sleepwalkers stride resolutely towards a glorious future, and everywhere 'the ceremony of innocence is drowned', and everywhere the land lies in ruins, more desolate as more species die.

Come. Let us sing of the deaths of worlds.