Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Mother of Storms by John Barnes 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. 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 A Million Open Doors ) 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. "Hugo Award", "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.