The story begins in Washington D.C., where research firm archival assistant John Patrick Blaxton investigates a claim for Hannah Massey, a Carnegie Mellon student who disappeared ten years ago, shortly before what the world comes to know as "Pittsburgh" occurred when an Islamic terrorist detonated a nuclear device in Katz Plaza, reducing half a million people and most of the Steel City to ash. It's an ambitious play and the first-time author pulls it off.
This is far enough in the future to require true vision in portraying how certain technological and geopolitical shifts could transform American life, but not so far in the future that the author wouldn't need to ground his concepts in present reality.
Published in 2014, Sweterlitsch shoots for a very difficult floor routine with his first book, aspiring to a hard boiled detective mystery set fifty or so years from today.
My introduction to the fiction of Tom Sweterlitsch is his debut novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow and this is one of the most thrilling pieces of futuristic science fiction that I've read. With nothing left to lose, Dominic tracks the murder through a web of deceit that takes him from the darkest corners of the Archive to the ruins of the city itself, leading him into the heart of a nightmare more horrific than anything he could have imagined. Grieving for his wife and unborn child who perished in the blast, Dominic relives his lost life by immersing in the Archive-a fully interactive digital reconstruction of Pittsburgh, accessible to anyone who wants to visit the places they remember and the people they loved.ĭominic investigates deaths recorded in the Archive to help close cases long since grown cold, but when he discovers glitches in the code surrounding a crime scene-the body of a beautiful woman abandoned in a muddy park that he’s convinced someone tried to delete from the Archive-his cycle of grief is shattered. While the rest of the world has moved on, losing itself in the noise of a media-glutted future, survivor John Dominic Blaxton remains obsessed with the past. A decade has passed since the city of Pittsburgh was reduced to ash.
0 kommentar(er)
