Overshoot

Rating:
Summary: Absolutely unacceptable.
Review: I would have thrown up on this book, except that I got it from the library. ----Not very erudite, I know, but I hazard to say, the most concise and succinct critique you will find regarding this horrific tome.

Rating:
Summary: wait for the movie...
Review: I'm sorry, but I just can't be terribly enthusiastic about this book. It's not that I disagree with the political aim of this book--protecting the enviroment and stopping greenhouse warming--but Ms. Clee commits some really annoying structural mistakes in this book. For example, although the novel is set in 2032, we are only given the formal names of three cultural references from that time: a political candidate, a Mexican president, and a extremist sect. Thirty-five years of history without any presidents, wars, cars, musicians or anything else worth naming? This is laziness on the part of the author, nothing more. The main characters are all in their sixties and seventies, and this is used as an excuse to have them make Bill and Hillary references all the time. Did they fall asleep in '96 and not wake up until 2032? All of the inventors in her world certainly seem to have done so; the one technological innovation she mentions is connecting your TV to the 'net. Her enviromental arguments are similarly sloppy. At one point she mentions the 50,000 Bangladeshis that drowned due to flooding in 1994 as evidence that climactic change was/is accelerating. The quarter-million Bangladeshis that drowned in the early seventies? Conveniently forgotten--I guess their deaths don't support her conclusions. If you're really looking for a good, scary enviroment-based SF novel, go buy John Brunner's "The Sheep Look Up" or "Stand On Zanzibar", either of which has much better scholarship backing up the author's arguments.

Rating:
Summary: Great book.
Review: Keep an eye out for what she writes next. The best is yet to come from this wonderful new author.

Rating:
Summary: A Disaster
Review: Let me start by saying that I don't judge novels by the message that the author is trying to deliver. I judge them by how effective they are at getting that message across. "Overshoot" has the right message, but the wrong delivery. The book is ineffective and unsubtle in almost every possible way. It's almost universally agreed that powerful novels don't feature long passages where the author simply drops the story and instead just starts directly telling the reader what their message is. In "Overshoot" the narrator is constantly breaking into lecture mode, going on for paragraph after paragraph about how evil it is to disrespect the environment. The resulting tone of preachiness is the book's defining characteristic, although there are any number of other annoying factors.

The book is set in Berkeley in the year 2032, when an ecological crisis and a series of international conflicts bring the world to the brink of disaster. The main character is an 80-year-old named Moira, who narrates her life through a series of flashbacks. Starting from when she was a child in the 1950's, she describes the events changing political movements that she witnessed during her lifetime. Perhaps the strangest aspect of the book is that once she reaches the 1990's, she simply skips directly to the present 2032 without giving us any clue as to what sort of disasters happened to turn the world into the shambles that's displayed during the final chapters. It's as if the author simply grew bored with the book around page 300 and decided to skip straight to the ending without caring whether or not it made sense.

While some of her descriptive writing is quite good, the author appears to have no understanding of how normal people talk during their everyday conversations. Her characters use words like "provisions" instead of "food" and "compact disc player" instead of "CD player", and there's one scene where Moira encounters a drug dealer whose speech sounds more like an uptight English teacher than a street person. Almost all of the dialogue in "Overshoot" sounds stilted and unrealistic.

Literally everywhere you look in this book there's something that annoys you. At one point a character who's a Neopagan complains about the stereotypical representation of her religion in the media, yet members of her coven have names like "Red Wolf" and "Blue Otter". If Mona Clee had actually spent some time (five minutes, maybe) researching the topic, she would probably have learned that Neopagans are not actually named after colored animals. She throws in lots of pop culture references to things like "Star Wars" and "Jurassic Park", but she doesn't do it very well. For instance, when she visits a cottage with a thatched roof, the Moira remarks that "there could have been hobbits living there". Hello, doesn't the first sentence of "The Hobbit" clearly state that hobbits live underground. (I know it's a minor complaint, but I'm a big Tolkien fan and stuff like that irritates me.) One twenty-page chapter consisted solely of two characters using the internet for the first time while saying thing like "This internet has the power to bring people together" and "This internet will change the way we view the world", causing we to wonder whether I'd accidentally picked up an ad for a now-bankrupt ISP.
In summary, learn from my mistake and don't bother with this train wreck of a book.

Rating:
Summary: A Disaster
Review: Let me start by saying that I don't judge novels by the message that the author is trying to deliver. I judge them by how effective they are at getting that message across. "Overshoot" has the right message, but the wrong delivery. The book is ineffective and unsubtle in almost every possible way. It's almost universally agreed that powerful novels don't feature long passages where the author simply drops the story and instead just starts directly telling the reader what their message is. In "Overshoot" the narrator is constantly breaking into lecture mode, going on for paragraph after paragraph about how evil it is to disrespect the environment. The resulting tone of preachiness is the book's defining characteristic, although there are any number of other annoying factors.

The book is set in Berkeley in the year 2032, when an ecological crisis and a series of international conflicts bring the world to the brink of disaster. The main character is an 80-year-old named Moira, who narrates her life through a series of flashbacks. Starting from when she was a child in the 1950's, she describes the events changing political movements that she witnessed during her lifetime. Perhaps the strangest aspect of the book is that once she reaches the 1990's, she simply skips directly to the present 2032 without giving us any clue as to what sort of disasters happened to turn the world into the shambles that's displayed during the final chapters. It's as if the author simply grew bored with the book around page 300 and decided to skip straight to the ending without caring whether or not it made sense.

While some of her descriptive writing is quite good, the author appears to have no understanding of how normal people talk during their everyday conversations. Her characters use words like "provisions" instead of "food" and "compact disc player" instead of "CD player", and there's one scene where Moira encounters a drug dealer whose speech sounds more like an uptight English teacher than a street person. Almost all of the dialogue in "Overshoot" sounds stilted and unrealistic.

Literally everywhere you look in this book there's something that annoys you. At one point a character who's a Neopagan complains about the stereotypical representation of her religion in the media, yet members of her coven have names like "Red Wolf" and "Blue Otter". If Mona Clee had actually spent some time (five minutes, maybe) researching the topic, she would probably have learned that Neopagans are not actually named after colored animals. She throws in lots of pop culture references to things like "Star Wars" and "Jurassic Park", but she doesn't do it very well. For instance, when she visits a cottage with a thatched roof, the Moira remarks that "there could have been hobbits living there". Hello, doesn't the first sentence of "The Hobbit" clearly state that hobbits live underground. (I know it's a minor complaint, but I'm a big Tolkien fan and stuff like that irritates me.) One twenty-page chapter consisted solely of two characters using the internet for the first time while saying thing like "This internet has the power to bring people together" and "This internet will change the way we view the world", causing we to wonder whether I'd accidentally picked up an ad for a now-bankrupt ISP.
In summary, learn from my mistake and don't bother with this train wreck of a book.

Rating:
Summary: READ THIS BOOK!
Review: Mona Clee has developed believable and wonderfully compelling characters finding their way in an equally believable future. I had a hard time putting this book down. It is an interesting, fun and thought-provoking reading experience -- and that is a rare combination.

Rating:
Summary: I liked it!
Review: Mona Clee's novel is a wonderful evocation of a possible future. The tale gives us a warning about shaping up or getting shipped out, so to speak, but Clee also throws us a lifesaver: a hope that we can turn things around before it's too late. This book demonstrates how we are all connected to one another and to the planet. Buy it! Kim Antieau

Rating:
Summary: On the cutting edge
Review: The appeal of "Overshoot" is not to lovers of technology, this book not being classic genre SF. Rather, it is a spiritual paean to the earth and to the enlightened nature that hides within each of us like a pearl buried in the sand (or, in some cases, in a dung heap). The danger of global warming, ostensibly the theme of the novel, is merely the background: the true theme is the transformation of human nature that is entailed, requiring of the reader that he or she question why such a transformation is not already occurring, since the creation of a sane, livable society necessitates it. The journey of the main characters from their various starting points is both a pilgrimage and a mirror of the unfolding happening in the world as a whole.

Those interested in nature-centered spirituality will particularly like the character of the Wiccan high priestess, Rhiannon. To my knowledge, this is the first realistic and sympathetic portrayal of a Neopagan character in SF, or even in fantasy, the latter genre often featuring characters bearing little resemblance to the real article, however sympathetically portrayed. Of course, in a novel set against the backdrop of an imperiled planet, a Pagan priestess would naturally (no pun intended) be on the front lines of the action.

If the book has a shortcoming, it is that the progress of technology over the next 35 years is glossed over. Aside from the changes wrought by the overshoot itself, there is little attempt to grapple with the changes likely to be born of scientific progress. In an ordinary genre SF title, this flaw might well be fatal. In "Overshoot," it is necessary, because the book attempts to deal with the reactions of people as they are today to events likely to occur in the future as a result of our past and present folly, and dealing with new technology in the detailed vision appropriate to genre SF would both distract from that mission and, more importantly, render it less achievable. The end result is an imperfectly-accurate depiction of the future world, but all the more poignant a lesson for the present.

If you care about the planet, and especially if you feel the sacredness of nature, buy this book.

Rating:
Summary: A wonderful book: believable, terrifying, great characters.
Review: This is a wonderful book! I was so absorbed in it, I stayed up half the night reading, (the first time I have done that since becoming a parent). The premise is totally believable: the greenhouse effect is happening, and by 2032 the world is a disaster. The story takes place in Berkeley - which has not escaped the heat or other changes. Clee manages to create an 80 year old woman narrator that even very young people will identify with: she is spunky, with a dry, sarcastic sense of humor and totally down to earth. There is no dogma or preachiness or political correctness in this book, and the technological deus ex machina at the end reveals an author with a really complex and nuanced view of technology and nature. Much of the book is just about hard, day to day, real life, perhaps that is why the book is so terrifying. It's a novel of ideas that touches on everything from genetic engineering, to computers, to witchcraft. It woke me up!

Rating:
Summary: A great new-millenia book
Review: This is one of the best new-millenia books I've read lately. Much better than other like the Glimmering. I found her portrayal of pagans refreshing, and she gives a positive spin to the usual ravaged-earth setting. I recommend it to everyone who reads SF/Fantasy.