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I've never cared much for stories that incorporate telepathy. Usually it adds little except perhaps a novel way to depict the violation of a beautiful woman's consent (looking at you, Star Trek The Next Generation). But Karen Lord uses telepathy to explore intimacy and consent in a positive way, albeit set against the backdrop of a genocidal catastrophe. Our heroine, Grace, is a middle-aged civil servant who gets assigned to be a liaison between her government and a group of refugees who have come to make a new home on her planet after theirs was destroyed. Not only that, but because of the stricter gender roles in the refugees' society, the survivors skew male at a rate of about 80%. So they and Grace set off on a cross-planet adventure to visit various communities whose values and genetics are compatible with the survivors' in order to help them find wives in a way that does not disrupt the existing society's mores. This may sound far-fetched, but in the notes, the author says that this was based on real events, specifically the aftermath of the south Asian tsunami on Dec. 26, 2004. A great many fisherman survived due to being out at sea when the tsunami came, while their wives and children, at home on a Sunday in their homes along the shore, mostly perished. Along the way... well, that's the whole story, isn't it. Ultimately the tale brings us all around the planet (which Lord says she envisioned as an intergalactic version of the Caribbean), hints at some time traveling as well, and then concludes on a hopeful, wholesome, and almost romantic comedy-esque note. I really enjoyed it and it's inspiring me to go back and try "The Galaxy Game" again.

This is a story about what we preserve in the face of incalculable loss, inspired by the real life histories of scientists, librarians, and archivists rescuing and defending knowledge during war, famine, and collapse. In this case, the collapse is a projected future where the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets collapse, flooding NYC almost completely. Although it is an extremely bleak future, it's not without hope or respite.

As an upstate New Yorker who has traveled through many of the places mentioned in the book, I found the author's imagining of how various communities along the Hudson and beyond would react to the shutdown of international commerce, advanced medicine, and so on to be scarily plausible. I learned a new word from this book, one that the author did not invent: "hypercane," a category of hurricane that has been proposed but not yet recorded, with sustained wind speeds of 500mph (800kph). Scientists theorize that this type of storm could occur when ocean water temperatures reach 50C (122F).

Preble Jefferson can see into the future, about 5 seconds. What happens when governments figure out what he can do? And what can such a person do against world superpowers? To illustrate his power, two of the few ways to defeat him are to get him in an elevator where the trip takes longer than 5 seconds, or to carpet bomb enough area that he can't escape and he can't see it coming until it's too late.

There's a few scenes of Preble Jefferson doing his thing. There's a middle section where Preble Jefferson and his friend & lawyer Fish, a paranoid anarchist, discuss ways to structure government power to protect against institutional despotism. That section is disconnected, slow, and ultimately not germane to the story. And a final section where Preble Jefferson becomes all right with being a monster in defense of his family and takes on everything and everybody.

There's a lot of game theory in the story that feels very amateur. Luckily Boldizar doesn't dwell long enough on any one instance where I wanted to stop and think about it.