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3.5 

Maelstrom

By Peter Watts
Maelstrom by Peter Watts digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

Second in the Rifters Trilogy, Hugo Award-winning author Peter Watts' Maelstrom is a terrifying explosion of cyberpunk noir.

This is the way the world ends:

A nuclear strike on a deep sea vent. The target was an ancient microbe—voracious enough to drive the whole biosphere to extinction—and a handful of amphibious humans called rifters who'd inadvertently released it from three billion years of solitary confinement.

The resulting tsunami killed millions. It's not as through there was a choice: saving the world excuses almost any degree of collateral damage.

Unless, of course, you miss the target.

Now North America's west coast lies in ruins. Millions of refugees rally around a mythical figure mysteriously risen from the deep sea. A world already wobbling towards collapse barely notices the spread of one more blight along its shores. And buried in the seething fast-forward jungle that use to be called Internet, something vast and inhuman reaches out to a woman with empty white eyes and machinery in her chest. A woman driven by rage, and incubating Armageddon.

Her name is Lenie Clarke. She's a rifter. She's not nearly as dead as everyone thinks.

And the whole damn world is collateral damage as far as she's concerned. . . .

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

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26 Reviews

3.5
“Deeply traumatized woman learns to beat people she doesn’t like with a big stick. This is not for the faint of heart, for a couple of very specific scenes which made me feel genuine fear disgust and empathy all at the same time. This book was hard for me, up until about 60% it was just a complete slog that I was just there for. Characters crawling and living their lives, evolution teetering slowly, but then at 70% it uncoiled like a great big spring and I finished in the course of an evening. I think I suffered really from knowing too much, and not really empathizing with the characters as much here as I did in the first book (which is wholly strange, as there are revelations here that I feel should have set off my Empathy Trip but didn’t). This book made me tired, and for that, I fault it. Keep in mind, I am writing this review as a huge fan of Watts.”

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