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'To compare Cat Sparks’s new novel, Lotus Blue, to the “Mad Max” films would be a disservice despite the obvious parallels: vehicle caravans roaming deserts, warlords and lawless violence everywhere, a few strongholds of near-civilization battened down against the encroachment of barbarism. Yet Sparks’s post-apocalyptic wasteland is far more imaginative and richly rendered. More than mere warlords threaten the ragged survivors of this world. Rampant biotech and unchecked corporate greed have left it littered with still-functioning weapons of immense destructive capability. A number of characters journey through this dying terrain, intent upon their own agendas — all of which are disrupted when a powerful sentient war machine awakens in the desert and promptly sets about making everything worse.' (Introduction)
