Arthur C Clarke Award winning author is what the book cover if America City proclaims … before telling you who the author is (Chris Beckett) … and then the title of the book. That order is significant, because Mr Beckett certainly didn’t win the award for this piece of fiction.
That perhaps sounds a bit harsh, and granted America City is quite good at extrapolating where we are at present, with regards to technology and the ecology of the Earth, and fast forwarding a century or so hence.
Also, from the perspective of where politics sits and seems to be heading, America City is a bit of food for thought in terms the wall across the border between Mexico and the USA, and all the hoo-ha that Trump stirs up.
Nonetheless, I found America City uninspiring and unsurprising. The story line and the characters were predicable. The final chapters had an inevitability about them and the hoped for twist just never transpired.
Nevertheless, America City was still good enough to make me feel inclined to hunt down Mr Beckett’s award winning novel Dark Eden.
