Splinterlands: Books 1-3 Splinterlands / Frostlands / Songlands by John Feffer (Paperback)

Splinterlands

Part Field Notes from a Catastrophe, part 1984, part World War Z, this striking dystopian novel takes us deep into the battered, shattered world of 2050. The European Union has broken apart. Multiethnic great powers like Russia and China have shriveled. America's global military footprint has virtually disappeared, and the United States remains united in name only. Nationalism has proven the century's most enduring force as ever-rising global temperatures have supercharged each-against-all competition and conflict among the now three hundred-plus members of an increasingly feeble United Nations. As he navigates the world of 2050, Julian West offers a roadmap for the path we're already on, a chronicle of impending disaster, and a faint light of hope. He may be humanity's last best chance to explain how the world unraveled—if he can survive the savage beauty of the Splinterlands.

Frostlands

Arcadia's defense corps is mobilized to fend off what first appears to be a routine assault, one of the many that the community must repulse from paramilitary forces every year. But as sensors report a breach in the perimeter wall, even eighty-year-old Rachel Leopold shoulders a weapon and reports for duty. The attack, it turns out, has been orchestrated by one of the world's largest corporations, CRISPR International, and it is interested in stopping Rachel's research into stopping global warming. As Arcadia prepares to defend itself against the next CRISPR attack, Rachel contacts Emmanuel Puig, the foremost scholar of her ex-husband's work, to get information that she can use to stop CRISPR. Arcadia intersperses the action with short reports from Emmanuel on his interactions with Rachel as they meet, via virtual reality, in different parts of the world—Brussels, Ningxia, and finally Darwin. The novel concludes with an explosive, unexpected twist that forces a re-evaluation of all that has come before.

Songlands

2052. The world is a mess. The climate change meltdown has triggered an endless cycle of natural disasters. Nationalist paramilitaries battle against religious extremists. Multinational corporations, with their own security forces, have replaced global institutions as the only real power-brokers. Waves of pandemics have closed borders with such regularity that travelhas become mostly virtual. Aurora, a middle-aged sociologist, tries not to think about how the world has turned so chaotic and dangerous. At university, she focuses on her students. At home, it 's her children. She devotes her spare time to writing poetry. She 's relatively comfortable, but not particularly happy. And she 's angry at how small her life has become.Then one day a strange woman walks into Aurora 's life and, in an instant, the world 's chaos gets personal. Suddenly the obscure professor has a target on her back and the fate of the world in her hands. Her salvation, and that of the planet as well, lies in the mysteries locked inside the head of this enigmatic woman who has appeared on her doorstep. Unlocking those mysteries will take Aurora on a virtual journey around the fragmented globe and up against the world 's most powerful corporation.