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    Heron Fleet
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    Heron Fleet
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    Heron Fleet
    Ebook313 pages7 hours

    Heron Fleet

    By Paul Beatty

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Not far in the future, Francesca is an apprentice in the idyllic, agrarian community of Heron Fleet. She loves her impetuous partner Anya and the community acts as mother and father to her, as its founders intended.

    But outside Heron Fleet, the world is violent. Only a remnant of city populations, organised into violent despotic scavenger gangs, cling on by combing through rubble in search of food. They are the survivors of an ecological disaster. The causes have been forgotten, but the climate suffers with harsh, cold winters and short, hot summers.

    Between these two worlds, Tobias trades food gathered from agrarian communities for raw materials from the cities. But most of all he seeks books that might help him understand what happened to the climate; he believes that if humans are to have a long-term future, the agrarian communities must expand. Francesca rescues Tobias when his boat is wrecked by a storm and his arrival coincides with a crisis in Francesca and Anya’s relationship. This pushes Heron Fleet into a turmoil, which threatens the community’s cohesion and brings the ethical basis on which the community was originally formed into doubt.

    Heron Fleet asks many questions. To what extent is necessity an excuse for the suppression of basic human rights? How easy would it be for our comfortable society to become poor, nasty and brutish? Is there a natural urge to be literate? What is the proper duty of the individual to the community? The book, which has been inspired by a number of authors, including Margaret Atwood, John Christopher and Russell Hoban, will appeal to fans of speculative literature. Author Paul weaves gripping dystopian fiction with an underlying theme of global warming, posing questions about human nature and needs – both for today’s society and for the future.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTroubador Publishing Ltd
    Release dateFeb 1, 2013
    ISBN9781780886633
    Unavailable
    Heron Fleet
    Author

    Paul Beatty

    Paul Beatty is the author of the novels, Tuff, Slumberland and The White Boy Shuffle, and the poetry collections Big Bank Take Little Bank and Joker, Joker, Deuce. He was the editor of Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor. In 2016, he became the first American to win the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sellout. In 2017, he was the winner the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award. He lives in New York City.

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    • 3/5
      Set about a hundred years from now, the climate of northwest Europe, and the British Isles in particular has undergone a violent reversal when the North Atlantic Conveyor (aka the Gulf Stream) has collapsed under the onslaught of the defrosting polar regions. One year, winter came strongly and never really left, leading to social collapse as the food ran out and the army units sent into the cities to maintain order became the forerunners of the Scavngers that would spend their time looting the cities for survival. Meanwhile, a group of back to basic survivors have maanged to set up a community called Heron Fleet where everyone must work and gather the fruits of their toil. and while this may seem a rather idealistic society, the Powers in Heron Fleet have their own agendas; the Council is only interested in maintaining the Rule but the secretive Creche Mothers, who hold the power of birth over the society for man must not sleep with woman in order to bring children into the world but partner with a member of the same sex, hold the future generations of Heron Fleet to ransome.When Tobias comes to the wharves of Heron Fleet after escaping from a particularly violent Scavenger ganglord, he's rescued by Francesca who'd learnt her partner had been unfaithful to her with a boy. As Francesca and Tobias recover from their ordeal the darkest secrets of Heron Fleet are revealed to th horrified members.I quite liked the book overal though I felt the completeness of the collapse of society was rather too complete without any apparent attempt at succor from allies (or even enemies!) from less affected areas of the world and he was very cold blooded when it came to killing off the inhabitants of the fort in the City.