Articles by: Mary Woodbury

Zodiac, Neal Stephenson

Sangamon Taylor’s a New Age Sam Spade who sports a wet suit instead of a trench coat and prefers Jolt from the can to Scotch on the rocks. He knows about chemical sludge the way he knows about evil — all too intimately. As he navigates this ecological thriller with […]

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Interview with John Atcheson of A Being Darkly Wise

I had the pleasure of interviewing author John Atcheson after reading his novel A Being Darkly Wise, which is the first part of a trilogy. I read this novel in the course of less than a week, deeply hooked on what it was saying and where it was leading us. […]

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Flight of the Goose: A Story of the Far North, Lesley Thomas

Flight of the Goose: a Story of the Far North is award-winning fiction set in the Alaskan Arctic. Told from both Kayuqtuq’s and Leif’s perspectives, Flight of the Goose is a tale of cultural conflict, spiritual awakening, redemption and love in a time when things were, to use the phrase of […]

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Fish Tank: A Fable for our Times, Scott Bischke

Fish Tank is an allegorical tale about how various fish species with both complementary and competing needs are faced with an environmental crisis and must come together to ensure their survival. This book has drawn comparisons to George Orwell’s Animal Farm and I think that this is a fair comparison. […]

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The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood

The Year of the Flood is a dystopic masterpiece and a testament to her visionary power. The times and species have been changing at a rapid rate, and the social compact is wearing as thin as environmental stability. Adam One, the kindly leader of the God’s Gardeners–a religion devoted to […]

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Pills and Starships, Lydia Millet

This page-turning first YA novel by critically acclaimed author Lydia Millet is stylish and dark and yet deeply hopeful, bringing Millet’s characteristic humor and style to a new generation of young readers. Click here for an interview with NPR. Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads Buy on Amazon

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Grumbles the Novel, Book One, Karen Faris

It opens in Pret-a-Porter, a swampy backwater of upstate New York when our heroine Pettie Grumbles is re-instated to the Special Services unit of the Post Office. With evil doers and potato pirates a foot, Pettie is given the mission to boldly go where no Grumbles has gone before and […]

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Carbon Dreams, Susan M. Gaines

At an oceanography institute in northern California, geochemist Tina Arenas studies climates of the distant geologic past. Heedless of life beyond her circle of scientists, Tina is immersed in a world of dinosaurs and shifting continents, where time is measured in ten-million-year spans—but when both her research and an extracurricular […]

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Submergence, J.M. Ledgard

Submergence is an example of an emerging genre: postmodern literary airport fiction. Offering myriad pleasures in its prose, it is studded with references and takes a nonlinear, episodic approach to a story featuring glamorous James More, an English spy and descendant of Sir Thomas More, and Danielle “Danny” Flinders, of […]

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Thirst, L.A. Larkin

Antarctica is the coldest, most isolated place on earth. Luke Searle, maverick glaciologist, has made it his home. But soon his survival skills will be tested to the limit by a ruthless mercenary who must win at any cost. The white continent is under attack. The Australian team is being […]

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A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists, Jane Rawson

It is 1997 in San Francisco and Simon and Sarah have been sent on a quest to see America: they must stand at least once in every 25-foot square of the country. Decades later, in an Australian city that has fallen on hard times, Caddy is camped by the Maribyrnong […]

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Beacons: Stories for Our Not So Distance Future, Various Authors

Beacons throws down the gauntlet, challenging best-selling and award-winning authors to imagine where we, and out planet, might be headed and, in imagining, help us transform the way we look at our world and change things for the better. From Joanne Harris’ powerful vision of a near future where ‘outside’ […]

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Interview with Tony White of Shackleton’s Man Goes South

Tony White Tony White is the author of Shackleton’s Man Goes South, which he wrote while a writer in residence at the Science Museum in London. 1. You were writer in residence at the Science Museum in London. Were you chosen among others to fulfill this writing position? Thank you […]

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The Green Storm, Bud Santora

Mike Guillory finishes his usual morning beach run on his family-owned Plover’s Island and notices that the sky and water are a strange shade of green. Unusually hot and humid for early March, this odd weather event climaxes in a bizarre late-night storm. The next day, Mike, his family, and […]

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Nature’s End, Whitley Strieber & James Kunetka

The year is 2025. Immense numbers of people swarm the globe. In countless, astonishing ways, technology has triumphed, but at a staggering cost. Starvation is rampant. City dwellers gasp for breath under blackened skies. And tottering on the brink of environmental collapse, the world may be ending. It is a […]

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