Whiteout

Sage Walker is a hot new science fiction talent who has attracted favorable attention with smart, stylish short stories that spin out realistic futures, stories that ask what the world will be like in the next century, and what the people will be like who live in it.

Whiteout, Walker's suspenseful first novel, takes us to twenty-first century Earth: a time when government means multinational corporation and life means a struggle to survive the effects of overpopulation, poverty, pollution, and hunger. One last hope remains: Antarctica, the only source of pristine water and food left on the planet. But Antarctica is protected from human exploitation by international treaty — and that treaty's due for renegotiation… The people who will influence who gets the biggest slice of the world's last resources run Edges, a company of media manipulators.

As for Tanaka, a Japanese mega-multi- national corporation, the current situation suits them just fine, and they'd like to keep it that way. Tanaka will hire Edges, and these high-tech image shapers will use subliminals, computer modeling, and plain street smarts to make sure Tanaka's status remains quo. Edges: a new kind of family, a group of friends and lovers in three different cities connected by Virtual Reality.

You do not roll over in bed and touch your lover's skin. You wire yourself up and live inside their skin, feeling the tense and shift of their muscles, watching what they see from goggles or camera-patches the size of silicon chips — Virtual Reality enabling an intimacy deeper than any achieved in the flesh. Edges: smart, savvy people manipulating data in the United States, politicians in Lisbon, and the fate of the ecosphere in Antarctica. Smart, savvy people unaware that their employers are withholding crucial information from them. Smart, savvy people who are in way over their heads…