Burning Paradise
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780765369178
- Publish Date
- Aug 2014
- List Price
- $9.99
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Hardback
- ISBN
- 9780765332615
- Publish Date
- Nov 2013
- List Price
- $28.99
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
Out of print
This edition is not currently available in bookstores. Check your local library or search for used copies at Abebooks.
Description
From Robert Charles Wilson, the author of the Hugo-winning Spin, comes Burning Paradise, a new tale of humans coming to grips with a universe of implacable strangeness.
Cassie Klyne, nineteen years old, lives in the United States in the year 2015—but it's not our United States, and it's not our 2015.
Cassie's world has been at peace since the Great Armistice of 1918. There was no World War II, no Great Depression. Poverty is declining, prosperity is increasing everywhere; social instability is rare. But Cassie knows the world isn't what it seems. Her parents were part of a group who gradually discovered the awful truth: that for decades—back to the dawn of radio communications—human progress has been interfered with, made more peaceful and benign, by an extraterrestrial entity. That by interfering with our communications, this entity has tweaked history in massive and subtle ways. That humanity is, for purposes unknown, being farmed.
Cassie's parents were killed for this knowledge, along with most of the other members of their group. Since then, the survivors have scattered and gone into hiding. Cassie and her younger brother Thomas now live with her aunt Nerissa, who shares these dangerous secrets. Others live nearby. For eight years they have attempted to lead unexceptional lives in order to escape detection. The tactic has worked.
Until now. Because the killers are back. And they're not human.
About the author
Robert Charles Wilson was born in California, but grew up near Toronto, Ontario. Apart from another short period in the early 1970s spent in Whittier, California, he has lived most of his life in Canada, and in 2007 he became a Canadian citizen. He resided in Nanaimo, British Columbia, and breifly in Vancouver. Currently he lives with his wife Sharry in Concord, Ontario, just north of Toronto. He has two sons, Paul and Devon. His novel Spin won science fiction’s Hugo Award in 2006. Earlier, he won the Philip K. Dick Award for his debut novel A Hidden Place; Canada’s Aurora Award for Darwinia; and the John W. Campbell Award for The Chronoliths.
Editorial Reviews
“The finest science fiction author now writing.” —Stephen King
“Outstanding…The various science and thriller plot elements are successful, but this is first and foremost a novel of character.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) on Axis
“The long-anticipated marriage between the hard sf novel and the literary novel, resulting in an offspring possessing the robust ideational vigor of the former with the graceful narrative subtleties of the latter, might finally have occurred in the form of Robert Charles Wilson's Spin….Wilson does so many fine things, it's hard to know where to begin to praise him.” —The Washington Post on Spin
“Spin is many things: psychological novel, technological thriller, apocalyptic picaresque, cosmological meditation. But it is, foremost, the first major SF novel of 2005, another triumph for Robert Charles Wilson in a long string of triumphs.” —Locus on Spin