Mario the lone bookwolf's Reviews > Shift

Showing how it came to a devastating catastrophe in detailed retrospectives, while mixing it up with the current storyline, was hardly ever such a fun and enjoyment to read.

Well written, info dumpy preparations, debates, concepts, etc. for meta endeavors such as space colonization, a major war, an election campaign, or, going underground, are something that is often more a thing for hard sci-fi, because writers tend to avoid the extreme effort of putting any exposition in dialogue or action, instead of much easier static description, monologues, or omniscient narrator sequences.

But Howey switches between the past and current events, interlinking them, transporting the one or other subtle criticism, is something I haven´t read in that way before very often, it´s simply a new concept and premise that is an ultimate suspense creation engine. It´s limiting the number of possible books in such a setting, of course, but when the price for that is having such an immensely highly packed ride of a read, that´s totally worth it.

It would be interesting to know how these novels would have hit the market between 25 and 50, in real time, years earlier, where the reality inspired nuclear wasteland WW3 genre was a hot, radiating trending topic over decades. The end of the days, or at least of we world as we know it, has always been fascinating since the first apes lost their fur and got more colds and mental illnesses called consciousness and human intelligence. In contrast to the mainstream attempts of first describing the Mad Max style wastelands in urban or rural hellholes, then creating a wave of teeny angst driven reality tv gameshow clones, this new ideas popping up in sci-fi are opening deeper and more complex settings than the stereotypical Roman emperor style put in a dystopic, near future with lots of leather around uncompensated sexual instincts.

If you are into the meta planning scenario and slowly escalating thing after this one, try space opera, sci-fi, and hard sci-fi, where this element alone can be stretched to the length of average novels over the parts of a series. It opens very dense, inspiring, and thoughtful options to imagine the future not just from the protagonists´ perspectives, but to see it through the greedy salesmen´s and stupid politician´s eyes too.

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