Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} by Mother of Storms. I read an article recently saying that the big difference between old (anything not from the last ten years, I guess) and new is that the old stuff is more about technology and the new stuff is more about people. There's some truth in that, if you ask me, there's lots of exceptions, but basically there's some truth in it. You can turn it around if you like and say that in the old days the character where flat and two-dimensional and that the science is neglected and faulty in the new stuff. So why am I telling you this, you ask? Because some of you out there like the old stuff (give me science, I hear you cry) and some of you like the deeper characters of the new stuff. But why should we have to choose? I want both! Mother of Storm is one of those rare books that will give you this. Old style technology and science combined with characters that actually matter and that you can care about. Mother of Storms tells a couple of different, yet entwined, stories on the backdrop of The Big Eco Disaster. A lot of methane is released from the ice on the bottom of the ocean (I actually just read an article about this in the November 1999 issue of Scientific American), resulting in an accelerated greenhouse effect, resulting in warmer seas, giving us lots and lots of hurricanes. And not just small hurricanes either, no, we are talking several hundred kilometers wide and with wind speeds close to the speed of sound. Bad things are going to happen. We follow an enhanced (in more than one way, nudge-nudge) media starlet as she become a refugee in Mexico. We follow the last man in space as software optimisers invade his brain and change him into something else. We follow a patent-pirate as he tries to make a (very large) buck out of the situation. A young man going to Mexico to forget, the president of the US, her right hand (with a big bad secret), an old-fashioned journalist, the father of a raped and murdered fourteen year old, a meteorologist and his family, just to name the main characters. Mother of Storms isn't the kind of story that leaves you breathless with amazement, but it is a very well crafted and executed story that I'm very hard pressed to find anything wrong with. Probably one of the best Eco-disaster books of the 1990s (lots better than the bit of David Brin's Earth that I managed to read before it bored me into a four-week coma). Mother of Storms. I read an article recently saying that the big difference between old (anything not from the last ten years, I guess) and new science fiction is that the old stuff is more about technology and the new stuff is more about people. There's some truth in that, if you ask me, there's lots of exceptions, but basically there's some truth in it. You can turn it around if you like and say that in the old days the character where flat and two-dimensional and that the science is neglected and faulty in the new stuff. So why am I telling you this, you ask? Because some of you out there like the old stuff (give me science, I hear you cry) and some of you like the deeper characters of the new stuff. But why should we have to choose? I want both! Mother of Storm is one of those rare books that will give you this. Old style technology and science combined with characters that actually matter and that you can care about. Mother of Storms tells a couple of different, yet entwined, stories on the backdrop of The Big Eco Disaster. A lot of methane is released from the ice on the bottom of the ocean (I actually just read an article about this in the November 1999 issue of Scientific American), resulting in an accelerated greenhouse effect, resulting in warmer seas, giving us lots and lots of hurricanes. And not just small hurricanes either, no, we are talking several hundred kilometers wide and with wind speeds close to the speed of sound. Bad things are going to happen. We follow an enhanced (in more than one way, nudge-nudge) media starlet as she become a refugee in Mexico. We follow the last man in space as software optimisers invade his brain and change him into something else. We follow a patent-pirate as he tries to make a (very large) buck out of the situation. A young man going to Mexico to forget, the president of the US, her right hand (with a big bad secret), an old-fashioned journalist, the father of a raped and murdered fourteen year old, a meteorologist and his family, just to name the main characters. Mother of Storms isn't the kind of story that leaves you breathless with amazement, but it is a very well crafted and executed story that I'm very hard pressed to find anything wrong with. Probably one of the best Eco-disaster books of the 1990s (lots better than the bit of David Brin's Earth that I managed to read before it bored me into a four-week coma). Mother of Storms by John Barnes. With Mother of Storms , John Barnes has proven that his previous successes ( Orbital Resonance and ) were not flukes. Barnes has to be considered one of today's best SF writers. And with any kind of luck he'll stick with it for the next thirty years. Mother of Storms takes place about thirty years from now. The UN has become dominant and at the start of the book the US President is maneuvering desperately to avoid losing any more sovereignty to the UN. The UN undertakes a nuclear strike against the Siberian Republic's secret--and illegal--nuclear weapons caches buried in the Arctic seabed. The explosions result in the release of huge amount of methane from the methane clathrates buried there. The methane causes a near-runaway greenhouse effect with global temperatures going up by 10 degrees F in a matter of months. The hot, wet oceans are perfect breeding grounds for hurricanes which rapidly develop into storms of unprecedented strength, duration and number. I don't really care for the style Barnes used--I'm told that it's the thriller-best-seller style where a half dozen stories are followed simultaneously by switching from one thread to another every few pages. I don't care for it, but I can certainly live with it. I particularly enjoyed Barnes' cynical approach to government and above all the media. Central to the story is XV, a system which allows the 'viewer' to directly experience events from an actor/reporter's perspective. Barnes extrapolates today's trends to yield Passionet, the world's most popular "news" network. Passionet's reporters roam the world letting viewers directly experience events--with frequent bouts of sex between the surgically enhanced reporters to keep peoples' interest. I didn't find any parts which were unnecessary padding nor did I see any sex or violence which didn't fit into the story. I did find a few too many leaps in the plot where people did things for inadequate (beyond advancing the plot, that is) reasons. (For example, is it really at all plausible that the last US astronaut at the space station would be chosen to reactivate the mothballed Lunar industrial complex? Much more likely a team on the ground, even if he was more qualified. And why did it get mothballed to start with--the story's explanation, while clever and interesting strikes me as inadequate.) I particularly enjoyed the ambiguous character of Gates, a multi-billionaire who made his fortune by playing the patent system who turns out to be a pretty decent person, even if he continues to be a parasite on the rest of humanity. I also thought that Barnes did a nice job with the growing transcendence of the humans-turned-AIs. (Though I did think that it was a bit of a cop-out to end he story just as Humanity unknowingly approached Vinge's Singularity--but, then, who can write of a true Singularity?) A few cavils aside, I like this book a lot. Highly recommended. "", "Worldcon", and "NASFiC" are service marks of the World Science Fiction Society, an unincorporated literary association. "NESFA" and "Boskone" are service marks of the New England Science Fiction Association, Inc. Mother of Storms by John Barnes. Just in time for hurricane season, John Barnes brings us science fiction for meteorologists. Mother of Storms will probably be labelled as "a chilling ecological thriller!" but it's much more than that. A military--excuse me, peacekeeping--strike by the UN causes sudden, rapid global warming, which results in the birth of a superhurricane of unprecedented size, strength, and longevity. This storm spawns a number of daughter storms, which proceed to rampage around the planet, doing a pretty good job of bringing civilization to its knees. This book has flood, pestilence, and war; there's famine too, but it's mostly offstage. There's death and destruction of incomprehensible magnitude. Nations and coastlines crumble. Despite all this, a certain cheerful cynicism that pervades the book keeps it entertaining and amusing. That cheerful cynicism is also what makes Barnes' near-future society of 2028 so plausible. The world is quite different politically; the UN is the dominant political and military power, and the President of the United States is waging a constant battle to regain some measure of the States' former sovereignty. TV and newspapers have been largely supplanted by XV, which lets the public experience the full range of sensory experience being transmitted by a character. (Needless to say, this has revolutionized the porn industry.) The net still exists, but in a greatly expanded state (has to be; XV consumes an enormous amount of bandwidth). Cars drive themselves. There's a wonderful digression about a group of self- replicating robots on the moon who start to model some of the more unpleasant behaviors of societies. Unlike Barnes' previous books, Mother of Storms has a fairly large cast of viewpoint characters. This usually irritates me, but I didn't mind it here, and their interactions are pwell-handled and informative, although occasionally in moving them about the author's manipulations are a bit blatant. (Especially when one character's ex-girlfriend, who has just undergone a sudden and not entirely credible change in personality, is swept up by a Plot Device in Shining Armor and transported directly across most of Mexico and a good bit of the States to where she happens to bump into another viewpoint character.) They're not all necessarily good guys, either, although with the hurricanes wreaking wholesale destruction upon the world's coastal areas, ethical categories tend to become irrelevant. But even the Evil American Corporate Magnate is a pretty likable guy. There's an undercurrent of thoughtfulness in the theme of the role of the media. In the world of 2028 there has ceased to be any distinction between news and entertainment; for instance, the romance/porn network sends its characters to world hot spots, where they observe momentous events, think carefully scripted thoughts, and have mad, passionate sex as often as possible. But when subscribers all over the world are plugged into "reporters" who are shot, or drowning, or just angry and scared, those sensations are echoed by the "viewing public," which can cause global riots with a death toll approaching that of one of the superhurricanes. Conversely, the government can calm the rioters and encourage docility by having the nets broadcast feelings of peace and brotherhood. Does this constitute censorship or mind control? Who's at fault when people refuse to unplug, even to evacuate areas endangered by the storms? I realize I'm in the minority here, but I would have enjoyed this book more had it been a little less, um, graphic. I have this vision of an editor reading the first draft and saying, "Great book, John, but it really needs more sex and violence!" There's a subplot concerning full-sensory "snuff films" that contributes very little to the book, except to kick off a spate of assassinations that I could also have done without. (There was already plenty of senseless tragedy to go around by this point.) I was also rather disturbed by some of the graphic descriptions of violent death, such as a woman's head being squashed like a pumpkin, or, well, quite a bit of it can't be described on a family newsgroup. I realize the point of these tragic little vignettes was to illustrate on a personal, graspable level what was occurring on a global basis, but I still found some of the descriptions a bit offputting. I also think that the ending would have been improved if the last 50 or so pages had been compressed into about 20 pages; the end drags out to a bit of an anticlimax, although it's still full of nifty science, continuing slaughter, and messages of hope. Incidentally, Mother of Storms is written in the present, rather than past, tense. This isn't nearly as distracting as you might expect, and it gives a certain sense of immediacy to the story. I have yet to read a John Barnes book that I don't like, and Mother of Storms didn't disappoint me. It's a very ambitious book, but Barnes manages to handle the large cast of characters, the proverbially dull subject of the weather, and the nigh-destruction of civilization as we know it with humor and flair. Find this book, but read it somewhere inland. Mother of Storms. Publisher: Tor Books, New York, NY, U.S.A. Publication Date: 1994. Binding: Hard Cover. Book Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Fine. Signed: Signed by Author(s) Edition: First Edition. About this title. A single nuclear strike in the North Pacific unleashes a series of extraordinary and deadly hurricanes that inundate the Pacific rim, obliterating everything in their paths, while a small group of visionary technologists comes up with an unusual scheme to save the world. About the Author: JOHN BARNES is the author of more than thirty science fiction novels, including Orbital Resonance , A Million Open Doors , Finity , and Directive 51 . With astronaut Buzz Aldrin, he wrote the novels and The Return . He lives in Denver, Colorado. "About this title" may belong to another edition of this title. We accept Visa / Mastercard / Discover and PayPal Payments. Payments by Visa / Mastercard / Discover are shipped the same day as the payment is recieved. S/H for addresses within the United States is: Mass Market Paperbacks $2.99 each, Trade Paperbacks $3.50 each and Hardbacks $3.99 each. 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