Scott Russell Sanders (Earth Works: Selected Essays) delivers compelling science fiction with this collection of ecologically inspired stories that remind readers of our connection to nature by imagining a disconnect from it.
Grouped in what can be construed as a loose chronology, Sanders's straightforward episodes begin in the current day and progress into a future of ocean-based biodome cities that protect and isolate humanity. A young woman who sees characters from dreams in waking life is helpless when the apparitions begin to disappear as people cease to dream and then die. In a rural town, the mayor's husband dons a spacesuit and falls deeply asleep while the town and its visitors suffer incurable insomnia. In the future, a kind man in the Oregon City biodome teaches a young apprentice to care for robot animals in his animatronic park, or "disney." As in every society, rebels rise--an elderly couple scavenge for objects from the world before the domes, and citizens plot escape from the shopping malls and slenderizing parlors of the bubble cities, back into a world of moss, leaves, fossils and dirt.
Clear-eyed and philosophical, Sanders's vision of our collective undoing, and how we salvage the pieces, mixes intellectualism with magical realism in an uncommon unity of mind and spirit. Readers who prefer quiet contemplation and the occasional laugh or tear with their post-apocalyptic worlds will linger at this oasis of reflection filled with sound and fury. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads