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Burning Paradise

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Burning Paradise

By: Robert Charles Wilson
Narrated by: Scott Brick
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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.

Classics Fiction Science Fiction
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Critic 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

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I enjoyed listening to this. The plot is interesting and the characters are believable. Fairly short, it makes for a great light sci-fi read.

Interesting plot

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RCW specialises in these alternative reality stories. His characters are always believable people who are stuck in unbelievable situations. In this case, it is an alternative USA, one ruled by the Hive. A sort of proto culture of microscopic aliens that live in a cloud orbiting the earth. Given that RCW is a serious SF author and does not use AI to write his novels, you know that it will get to be a far deeper and twisted view than the original premise.
It is a wonderfully deep variation on the ideas of Robert A. Heinlein's puppet masters meets Jack Finney's invasion of the body snatchers in a different USA. With perhaps a little of Roger Zelanzy's epic road adventure thrown in for free. As in the world all are damned, so it is not so much a damnation alley as a damnation earth. It is the inference more than the plot of the afore mentioned classic.
As with all good SF, I could not work out the ending. When it came, it was rewarding and shocking in equal measures. What I loved about it is the duality in the view, the good and the bad. It is just like life. Next up Last year.

Another alternative view of the world

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