YELLOWCAKE SPRINGS
Yellowcake Springs - Winner (Best Fiction) IP Picks 2011
Shortlisted for the Norma K Hemming Award 2012
Synopsis written by Candice Fox of Interactive Publications:
Welcome to Yellowcake Springs; a pristine, friendly, secure community of citizens involved in the maintenance of one of Western Australia’s CIQ Sinocorp nuclear reactor facilities. You have nothing to fear inside the heavily-guarded community, nestled in the quiet streets between the radiation Red Zone and the razor-wired fences. Raise a family. Go to the park. Watch the sun set between the cooling towers. Lament the desperate lives of the lost ones living in the darklands outside the community, where overpopulation and starvation have created a lawless world. Feel lucky. You belong to CIQ Sinocorp now.
Author Guy Salvidge leads the reader through a time where an unchecked global population has created a slow, painful apocalypse for all but the elite. Inside Yellowcake Springs, the protection of CIQ Sinocorp provides security, employment and endless leisure in the constructed worlds of Controlled Dreaming State, where citizens using avatars can abandon their inhibitions and responsibilities. Inside the amber zone, Sylvia enjoys a carefree if mundane existence as an advertising consultant with her husband David, whose radical environmentalist interests provide endless gossip for her co-workers. In Controlled Dreaming State she meets Rion, a stranger from beyond the gates.
Outside Yellowcake Springs, Rion wanders a wasteland gripped by disease, famine and crime. His only chance to escape the darklands is through an affair with Sylvia, a woman from the inside. As he heads toward Yellowcake Springs, Ryan unwittingly becomes tangled in the sordid plans of Misanthropos; an environmental terrorist group whose plan to lower the earth’s population and destabilise CIQ Sinocorp will cost many innocent lives.
At the heart of the facility, Jiang Wei begins his training in the Controlled Waking State, the brainchild of Sinocorp employee Yang Po. Wei finds himself helpless to the whims of Yang Po’s experiments, which see Wei’s body and mind enslaved to the control of the corporation. As Wei, Sylvia and Rion’s lives converge in Yellowcake Springs, Salvidge’s novel promises devastation and terror against the backdrop of a frighteningly plausible Australian future. [CP]
Yellowcake Springs has been released!
On Amazon you can buy it in Kindle edition or Print edition
If you buy it from The Book Depository you'll receive free postage.
You could purchase direct from the publisher,Glass House Books.
Or if you'd like a signed copy, fill out the Contact Form on the Biography tab or send me an email at guysalvidge AT gmail.com
Welcome to Yellowcake Springs; a pristine, friendly, secure community of citizens involved in the maintenance of one of Western Australia’s CIQ Sinocorp nuclear reactor facilities. You have nothing to fear inside the heavily-guarded community, nestled in the quiet streets between the radiation Red Zone and the razor-wired fences. Raise a family. Go to the park. Watch the sun set between the cooling towers. Lament the desperate lives of the lost ones living in the darklands outside the community, where overpopulation and starvation have created a lawless world. Feel lucky. You belong to CIQ Sinocorp now.
Author Guy Salvidge leads the reader through a time where an unchecked global population has created a slow, painful apocalypse for all but the elite. Inside Yellowcake Springs, the protection of CIQ Sinocorp provides security, employment and endless leisure in the constructed worlds of Controlled Dreaming State, where citizens using avatars can abandon their inhibitions and responsibilities. Inside the amber zone, Sylvia enjoys a carefree if mundane existence as an advertising consultant with her husband David, whose radical environmentalist interests provide endless gossip for her co-workers. In Controlled Dreaming State she meets Rion, a stranger from beyond the gates.
Outside Yellowcake Springs, Rion wanders a wasteland gripped by disease, famine and crime. His only chance to escape the darklands is through an affair with Sylvia, a woman from the inside. As he heads toward Yellowcake Springs, Ryan unwittingly becomes tangled in the sordid plans of Misanthropos; an environmental terrorist group whose plan to lower the earth’s population and destabilise CIQ Sinocorp will cost many innocent lives.
At the heart of the facility, Jiang Wei begins his training in the Controlled Waking State, the brainchild of Sinocorp employee Yang Po. Wei finds himself helpless to the whims of Yang Po’s experiments, which see Wei’s body and mind enslaved to the control of the corporation. As Wei, Sylvia and Rion’s lives converge in Yellowcake Springs, Salvidge’s novel promises devastation and terror against the backdrop of a frighteningly plausible Australian future. [CP]
Yellowcake Springs has been released!
On Amazon you can buy it in Kindle edition or Print edition
If you buy it from The Book Depository you'll receive free postage.
You could purchase direct from the publisher,Glass House Books.
Or if you'd like a signed copy, fill out the Contact Form on the Biography tab or send me an email at guysalvidge AT gmail.com
REVIEWS
From:http://reflexionesfinales.blogspot.com/2011/09/yellowcake-springs-review.html
Guy Salvidge’s Yellowcake Springs is a novel set within a slowly collapsing dystopian future set in Western Australia.The tone of the book is very close to the earlier cyberpunk novels without the glamour of the high tech wiz-bang gadgets of highly paid assassins or computer hackers. The gadgetry is replaced with a somber mix of overpopulation, economic decay, and environmental erosion. There is technical progress in evident, but its effects are muted within the overarching solemn background.
Yellowcake Springs is a privately owned nuclear facility. The Japanese Corporate menace of the cyberpunk era has been replaced by a Chinese Corporate menace of today. The Chinese have made a deal with Australia to rule this little corner of their continent under their own laws. Both countries have a lot of problems and, when so many are dying in the streets, neither is very willing to rock the boat to worry about individual rights. There are four threads within the book that struck me in particular.
Economic collapse, presumably through overpopulation and the consequential environmental decay, have made much of the Australian countryside a no-man’s land. Although the countryside is depicted as a brutal place, the actual tone of the action does not seem to quite live up to the potential horror. It is interesting, but even though there are some similarities, you don’t have the sense of desperation present in say McCarthy’s The Road or Theroux’s Far North. I think this is unfortunate because this makes Rion, a young man born to the wastelands, a less sympathetic character then he might be otherwise. He is part of a bandit gang early in the novel, but both his participation, and the way that he participates, give an odd detachment to the character. The book is trying very hard to indicate that the split between the people who have choices, and those who have none, is widening. It states it, and comes very close to making you feel it.
Another major theme is increasing corporate control over the workplace. If today’s corporations use key word checkers to sort through resumes, and type stroke counters to measure productivity, then the corporations of the future are working very hard toward direct mind control. With the economy under so much stress, the cost of failure for the worker is also very high. As one of the Chinese bosses notes, if he fails, he is going to be going to the work gangs, and he is too old to survive that.
The final global issue is overpopulation and environmental degradation. With the planet having about 9 billion people at the time the story is taking place, the countries of the world are starting to run out of options. The desperation is enough that some self be-knighted folk are willing to wipe out a considerable number of people to slow or end what they view (plausibly) as the destruction of the world.
The last issue, in my mind one of the more interesting ones, is the issue of culture and survival. The remaining middle class spends its time in an artificial dream state (a more fanciful version of a Star Trek holo-deck if you will). If many of us live in a world of video games, digital on demand movies, twitter and chat rooms, they are simply pushing the envelope farther. It is fairly obvious that people will choose to live as slaves in ease, rather than free men with discomfort. At some level many of us already make that choice today. Yellowcake Springs is an oversized, barely disguised work camp. And its citizens are just fine with that so long as the air-conditioning is turned on. As a newly incoming Chinese worker notes:
There were fences, barriers and walls. But what enemy could there be out here, in the middle of nowhere?
However, it is obvious that the survival skills of these people are minimal. Rion, the child of the wastelands, who is anything but a sharp-actor, is better at quick footed survival than they are. When trouble occurs, it is an adventure for one of the middle class figures to walk 12 miles to the nearest town. When she is picked up almost immediately by the police, she is rather relieved, as she clearly has little idea of what to do with herself. The reaction of Rion to the these troubles is revealing:
Rion saw each of these trials as rituals…. If they were dejected, than he was elated; where they saw their lives being taken away from them, he saw his own being handed to him for the first time.
In other words, he views the shaking up of the status quo as an opportunity.
In the end Yellowcake Springs is an interesting book. It moves a little slowly in some of the middle portions so for readablity I would rate it a 6 on a ‘1 to 7” scale. On the grittiness scale I am going to say it is also around a “6”, not completely real in its effect, but very high for a book that is written as science fiction.
What gives this book its “twist” is an element of greater horror. If H.P. Lovecraft had the horror of human insignificance in an uncaring cosmos, and Ervin Sims’ End of The Age highlighted a cosmic origin and ending to history where humans have only token influence, Yellowcake Springs seems to hammer home how vulnerable and ineffectual humans can be when the tide (or tidal wave) of demographics washes over them.
Guy Salvidge’s Yellowcake Springs is a novel set within a slowly collapsing dystopian future set in Western Australia.The tone of the book is very close to the earlier cyberpunk novels without the glamour of the high tech wiz-bang gadgets of highly paid assassins or computer hackers. The gadgetry is replaced with a somber mix of overpopulation, economic decay, and environmental erosion. There is technical progress in evident, but its effects are muted within the overarching solemn background.
Yellowcake Springs is a privately owned nuclear facility. The Japanese Corporate menace of the cyberpunk era has been replaced by a Chinese Corporate menace of today. The Chinese have made a deal with Australia to rule this little corner of their continent under their own laws. Both countries have a lot of problems and, when so many are dying in the streets, neither is very willing to rock the boat to worry about individual rights. There are four threads within the book that struck me in particular.
Economic collapse, presumably through overpopulation and the consequential environmental decay, have made much of the Australian countryside a no-man’s land. Although the countryside is depicted as a brutal place, the actual tone of the action does not seem to quite live up to the potential horror. It is interesting, but even though there are some similarities, you don’t have the sense of desperation present in say McCarthy’s The Road or Theroux’s Far North. I think this is unfortunate because this makes Rion, a young man born to the wastelands, a less sympathetic character then he might be otherwise. He is part of a bandit gang early in the novel, but both his participation, and the way that he participates, give an odd detachment to the character. The book is trying very hard to indicate that the split between the people who have choices, and those who have none, is widening. It states it, and comes very close to making you feel it.
Another major theme is increasing corporate control over the workplace. If today’s corporations use key word checkers to sort through resumes, and type stroke counters to measure productivity, then the corporations of the future are working very hard toward direct mind control. With the economy under so much stress, the cost of failure for the worker is also very high. As one of the Chinese bosses notes, if he fails, he is going to be going to the work gangs, and he is too old to survive that.
The final global issue is overpopulation and environmental degradation. With the planet having about 9 billion people at the time the story is taking place, the countries of the world are starting to run out of options. The desperation is enough that some self be-knighted folk are willing to wipe out a considerable number of people to slow or end what they view (plausibly) as the destruction of the world.
The last issue, in my mind one of the more interesting ones, is the issue of culture and survival. The remaining middle class spends its time in an artificial dream state (a more fanciful version of a Star Trek holo-deck if you will). If many of us live in a world of video games, digital on demand movies, twitter and chat rooms, they are simply pushing the envelope farther. It is fairly obvious that people will choose to live as slaves in ease, rather than free men with discomfort. At some level many of us already make that choice today. Yellowcake Springs is an oversized, barely disguised work camp. And its citizens are just fine with that so long as the air-conditioning is turned on. As a newly incoming Chinese worker notes:
There were fences, barriers and walls. But what enemy could there be out here, in the middle of nowhere?
However, it is obvious that the survival skills of these people are minimal. Rion, the child of the wastelands, who is anything but a sharp-actor, is better at quick footed survival than they are. When trouble occurs, it is an adventure for one of the middle class figures to walk 12 miles to the nearest town. When she is picked up almost immediately by the police, she is rather relieved, as she clearly has little idea of what to do with herself. The reaction of Rion to the these troubles is revealing:
Rion saw each of these trials as rituals…. If they were dejected, than he was elated; where they saw their lives being taken away from them, he saw his own being handed to him for the first time.
In other words, he views the shaking up of the status quo as an opportunity.
In the end Yellowcake Springs is an interesting book. It moves a little slowly in some of the middle portions so for readablity I would rate it a 6 on a ‘1 to 7” scale. On the grittiness scale I am going to say it is also around a “6”, not completely real in its effect, but very high for a book that is written as science fiction.
What gives this book its “twist” is an element of greater horror. If H.P. Lovecraft had the horror of human insignificance in an uncaring cosmos, and Ervin Sims’ End of The Age highlighted a cosmic origin and ending to history where humans have only token influence, Yellowcake Springs seems to hammer home how vulnerable and ineffectual humans can be when the tide (or tidal wave) of demographics washes over them.
