#115. THE SEA AND SUMMER By George Turner

Published : 1987
Pages : 364
Overall Mark : 8/10

2041 : In a dangerously overpopulated world, Francis Conway is Swill – one of the ninety percent who subsist on the inadequate charities of the state. Government corruption, official blindness and unchecked global climate change have conspired to turn his home – and those of billions like him – into a watery tomb. Now Francis seeks desperately to rise above his circumstances and escape the approaching tide of disaster. But here, at the end of everything, there is no higher ground...

GEORGE TURNER (1916-97)
George Reginald Turner was born in Melbourne in 1916. Prior to his career in SF, he was a critic and an established mainstream writer, winning the prestigious Mile Franklin Award for The Cupboard Under the Stairs. His first SF novel, Beloved Son, won the Ditmar Award – one of nine he accumulated – but he is perhaps best known for his stunning novel of climate change run amok, The Sea and Summer, winner of the 1988 Arthur C Clarke Award. He was named as a guest of honour for the 1999 World Science Fiction Convention but died before the event.

VERDICT
I actually found this book really enjoyable – the characters, though pretty standard, performed some interesting roles in this book about a future plagued by social division and ecological disaster. Turner gives us a story that takes class distinction to a new level and creates a world that is scarily possible in a world plagued by natural disasters as well as man made ones.