Really interesting, and wins points for bothering with characterizations. I’m not sure how much sense it makes, though. In this world both food calories and fossil fuels have become massively more expensive (due to engineered plagues and depletion/climate change, respectively). But this leads to more of the energy economy being driven by food calories? Mastodons are not an efficient energy storage mechanism! Where are the solar panels and nukes and wind turbines and tidal power?
Aside from that I have three main complaints. First, the book’s climax feels disjointed and loses the winning human scale of earlier action — the characters who’ve been built up in earlier phases are left on the sidelines while the action moves through redshirts and cipherlike Thai generals. Second, the sexual exploitation of Emiko is porny in an unfortunate way. And third, Gibbons seems underutilized to the point where he’s mostly just a Dr. Moreau throwaway.
The setting is pretty cool, though, and the neocolonial stakes are extreme and awesome. This is like Atwood’s dystopic genomic imagination but played out through believable institutions.
