Glimmering by Elizabeth Hand (July 2012, extensively revised 2nd edition, with 10s of 1000s of new words)
Requirements: ePUB Reader | 520 Kb
Overview: It’s 1999 and the world is falling apart at the seams. The sky is afire, the oceans are rising—and mankind is to blame. While the spoils of the 20th Century dwindle, Jack Finnegan lives on the fringes in his decaying mansion, struggling to keep his life afloat and his loved ones safe while battling that most modern of diseases—AIDS.
As the New Millennium approaches, Jack’s former lover, a famous photographer reveling in the world's decay, gifts him with a mysterious elixir called Fusax, a medicine rumored to cure the incurable AIDS. But soon, the "side effects" of Fusax become more apparent, and Jack gets mixed up with a bizarre entourage of rock stars, Japanese scientists, corporate executives, AIDS victims, and religious terrorists. While these larger players compete to control mankind's fate in the 21st Century, Jack is forced to choose his own role in the World's End, and how to live with it.
Originally published in 1997, Glimmering is a visionary mix of fantasy and science fiction about a world in which humanity struggles to cope with the ever-approaching End of the End.
Genre: Fiction, Speculative Fiction
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Requirements: ePUB Reader | 520 Kb
Overview: It’s 1999 and the world is falling apart at the seams. The sky is afire, the oceans are rising—and mankind is to blame. While the spoils of the 20th Century dwindle, Jack Finnegan lives on the fringes in his decaying mansion, struggling to keep his life afloat and his loved ones safe while battling that most modern of diseases—AIDS.
As the New Millennium approaches, Jack’s former lover, a famous photographer reveling in the world's decay, gifts him with a mysterious elixir called Fusax, a medicine rumored to cure the incurable AIDS. But soon, the "side effects" of Fusax become more apparent, and Jack gets mixed up with a bizarre entourage of rock stars, Japanese scientists, corporate executives, AIDS victims, and religious terrorists. While these larger players compete to control mankind's fate in the 21st Century, Jack is forced to choose his own role in the World's End, and how to live with it.
Originally published in 1997, Glimmering is a visionary mix of fantasy and science fiction about a world in which humanity struggles to cope with the ever-approaching End of the End.
Genre: Fiction, Speculative Fiction
From Elizabeth Hand's "Notes to the Revised Edition"...
I began writing Glimmering in 1994 as a near-future science fiction novel about a climate change-induced apocalypse. Today, 15 years after its 1997 publication, it reads more like a documentary. Terrorist air strikes against a New York City landmark, devastating storms and rising sea levels, fundamentalist terrorism of various stripes—eco, Christian, Muslim—viral pandemics, mass extinctions, melting ice shelves, rolling brownouts, economic meltdown, 3-D entertainment on a mass scale, music downloads, handheld computers—I loaded the book with these not because I anticipated they’d be part of my own near-future, but because I wanted to create an over-the-top, perfect storm scenario that would support a cautionary SF novel of the type I’d loved reading when I was a teenager in the 1970s, books like Dhalgren, The Sheep Look Up, Heroes and Villains. (The strange celestial effects which gave the book its title have yet to occur, and I completely missed the impact of cell phones, global email—then in its infancy—and social networks.)
In my wildest nightmares—and I’m a lifelong pessimist who’d written extensively about apocalyptic scenarios—I never imagined that the world of Glimmering would arrive so quickly, and “with such devastating impact. ...
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