At Samurai Industries, Paul Carpenter studies his computer monitors to predict the movement of toxic clouds drifting across the Pacific Northwest. If he’s wrong, a sudden shift of wind can kill thousands. Nick Rhodes, a research scientist for the controversial Santachiara Technologies’ Survival/Modification Program, seeks better ways for humans to adapt to Earth’s hostile environment. His girlfriend, Isabelle Martine, is a kinetic therapist and political activist, violently opposed to the threatening new technology. They are among those who have opted to stay behind, scratching out a perilous existence on a poisoned planet where no one dares leave home without a face-lung and a daily injection of Screen.
But there are others who have traveled from Earth to the shining satellite cities in the sky. Among these is Victor Farkas who has come to Valparaiso Nuevo in search of a mad and brilliant scientist. Here in a world of fugitives ruled by the tyrannical El Supremo and his secret police, Farkas and his “guide” Juanito Holt will seek the man whose experimentation blinded him in the womb and yet endowed him with incredible extrasensory vision.
Meanwhile, disturbing rumors have arisen about the ultimate fate of humanity: that a powerful Japanese megacorporation is promoting a top-secret project to send humans permanently to the stars. That a group of conspirators from ravaged Southern California is planning a bloody coup d’état on Valparaiso Nuevo. That a rival corporation is funding biological research that will alter human genes and create a race of supercreatures to inhabit the dying planet.
Hot Sky at Midnight is a chillingly prophetic masterpiece, combining intimate personal drama with epic adventure and depicting a sweeping tapestry of individual human lives trapped in a monumental catastrophe as tomorrow’s men and women search for a new paradise among the social, political, and ecological ruins of our past.
At Samurai Industries, Paul Carpenter studies his computer monitors to predict the movement of toxic clouds drifting across the Pacific Northwest. If he’s wrong, a sudden shift of wind can kill thousands. Nick Rhodes, a research scientist for the controversial Santachiara Technologies’ Survival/Modification Program, seeks better ways for humans to adapt to Earth’s hostile environment. His girlfriend, Isabelle Martine, is a kinetic therapist and political activist, violently opposed to the threatening new technology. They are among those who have opted to stay behind, scratching out a perilous existence on a poisoned planet where no one dares leave home without a face-lung and a daily injection of Screen.
But there are others who have traveled from Earth to the shining satellite cities in the sky. Among these is Victor Farkas who has come to Valparaiso Nuevo in search of a mad and brilliant scientist. Here in a world of fugitives ruled by the tyrannical El Supremo and his secret police, Farkas and his “guide” Juanito Holt will seek the man whose experimentation blinded him in the womb and yet endowed him with incredible extrasensory vision.
Meanwhile, disturbing rumors have arisen about the ultimate fate of humanity: that a powerful Japanese megacorporation is promoting a top-secret project to send humans permanently to the stars. That a group of conspirators from ravaged Southern California is planning a bloody coup d’état on Valparaiso Nuevo. That a rival corporation is funding biological research that will alter human genes and create a race of supercreatures to inhabit the dying planet.
Hot Sky at Midnight is a chillingly prophetic masterpiece, combining intimate personal drama with epic adventure and depicting a sweeping tapestry of individual human lives trapped in a monumental catastrophe as tomorrow’s men and women search for a new paradise among the social, political, and ecological ruins of our past.
There's no mistaking the terminal phase of irreversible catastrophe. The climate has gone berserk. Rising oceans inundate swamps and deserts. Genetic engineers have yet to redesign the human body to cope with the crud in the air, the water, the food, the soil. Now time has run out. With Earth a lost cause, the satellite worlds twinkling in orbit are prime territory for takeover by the powerful and rich. They are a single battleground on which the richest and most powerful megacorps, Kyocera-Merck and Samurai Industries, fight, no holds barred. In the artificial purity of satellite air or beneath the bilious skies of Earth, despite newly evolved bacterial plagues and bribe-taking androids, Robert Silverberg's characters pursue destinies both outrageously self interested and heartwrenchingly familiar in a savagely funny story of our planets last gasp.
Description:
At Samurai Industries, Paul Carpenter studies his computer monitors to predict the movement of toxic clouds drifting across the Pacific Northwest. If he’s wrong, a sudden shift of wind can kill thousands. Nick Rhodes, a research scientist for the controversial Santachiara Technologies’ Survival/Modification Program, seeks better ways for humans to adapt to Earth’s hostile environment. His girlfriend, Isabelle Martine, is a kinetic therapist and political activist, violently opposed to the threatening new technology. They are among those who have opted to stay behind, scratching out a perilous existence on a poisoned planet where no one dares leave home without a face-lung and a daily injection of Screen.
But there are others who have traveled from Earth to the shining satellite cities in the sky. Among these is Victor Farkas who has come to Valparaiso Nuevo in search of a mad and brilliant scientist. Here in a world of fugitives ruled by the tyrannical El Supremo and his secret police, Farkas and his “guide” Juanito Holt will seek the man whose experimentation blinded him in the womb and yet endowed him with incredible extrasensory vision.
Meanwhile, disturbing rumors have arisen about the ultimate fate of humanity: that a powerful Japanese megacorporation is promoting a top-secret project to send humans permanently to the stars. That a group of conspirators from ravaged Southern California is planning a bloody coup d’état on Valparaiso Nuevo. That a rival corporation is funding biological research that will alter human genes and create a race of supercreatures to inhabit the dying planet.
Hot Sky at Midnight is a chillingly prophetic masterpiece, combining intimate personal drama with epic adventure and depicting a sweeping tapestry of individual human lives trapped in a monumental catastrophe as tomorrow’s men and women search for a new paradise among the social, political, and ecological ruins of our past.
At Samurai Industries, Paul Carpenter studies his computer monitors to predict the movement of toxic clouds drifting across the Pacific Northwest. If he’s wrong, a sudden shift of wind can kill thousands. Nick Rhodes, a research scientist for the controversial Santachiara Technologies’ Survival/Modification Program, seeks better ways for humans to adapt to Earth’s hostile environment. His girlfriend, Isabelle Martine, is a kinetic therapist and political activist, violently opposed to the threatening new technology. They are among those who have opted to stay behind, scratching out a perilous existence on a poisoned planet where no one dares leave home without a face-lung and a daily injection of Screen.
But there are others who have traveled from Earth to the shining satellite cities in the sky. Among these is Victor Farkas who has come to Valparaiso Nuevo in search of a mad and brilliant scientist. Here in a world of fugitives ruled by the tyrannical El Supremo and his secret police, Farkas and his “guide” Juanito Holt will seek the man whose experimentation blinded him in the womb and yet endowed him with incredible extrasensory vision.
Meanwhile, disturbing rumors have arisen about the ultimate fate of humanity: that a powerful Japanese megacorporation is promoting a top-secret project to send humans permanently to the stars. That a group of conspirators from ravaged Southern California is planning a bloody coup d’état on Valparaiso Nuevo. That a rival corporation is funding biological research that will alter human genes and create a race of supercreatures to inhabit the dying planet.
Hot Sky at Midnight is a chillingly prophetic masterpiece, combining intimate personal drama with epic adventure and depicting a sweeping tapestry of individual human lives trapped in a monumental catastrophe as tomorrow’s men and women search for a new paradise among the social, political, and ecological ruins of our past.
There's no mistaking the terminal phase of irreversible catastrophe. The climate has gone berserk. Rising oceans inundate swamps and deserts. Genetic engineers have yet to redesign the human body to cope with the crud in the air, the water, the food, the soil. Now time has run out. With Earth a lost cause, the satellite worlds twinkling in orbit are prime territory for takeover by the powerful and rich. They are a single battleground on which the richest and most powerful megacorps, Kyocera-Merck and Samurai Industries, fight, no holds barred. In the artificial purity of satellite air or beneath the bilious skies of Earth, despite newly evolved bacterial plagues and bribe-taking androids, Robert Silverberg's characters pursue destinies both outrageously self interested and heartwrenchingly familiar in a savagely funny story of our planets last gasp.