Wilders

by Brenda Cooper

Overview

Coryn Williams has grown up in the megacity of Seacouver, where her every need is provided for—except satisfaction with her life. After her parents' suicides, her sister Lou fled the city to work on a rewilding crew, restoring lands once driven to the brink of ecological disaster by humans to a more natural state. Finally of age, Coryn leaves the city with her companion robot to look for her sister. But the outside world is not what she expects—it is rougher and more dangerous, and while some people help her, some resent the city and some covet her most precious resource: her companion robot. As Coryn struggles toward her sister, she uncovers a group of people with a sinister agenda that may endanger Seacouver. When Coryn does find her sister, Lou has secrets she won't share. Can Coryn and Lou learn to trust each other in order to discover the truth hidden behind the surface and to save both Seacouver and the rewilded lands?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781633882652
Publisher:	Pyr
Publication date:	06/13/2017
Series:	Project Earth , #1
Pages:	367
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Brenda Cooper is the author of Edge of Dark and Spear of Light, Books One and Two of The Glittering Edge series; The Creative Fire and The Diamond Deep, Books One and Two of Ruby's Song; and the The Silver Ship series. Her most recent short-story collection is Cracking the Sky. She is also the author of Mayan December and has collaborated with Larry Niven (Building Harlequin's Moon). Cooper is a working futurist and a technology professional with a passionate interest in the environment.

Editorial Reviews

04/17/2017
Cooper’s plodding coming-of-age novel posits a near future in which humankind has nearly destroyed Earth’s natural resources. Those in domed city-states such as Seacover (formerly Seattle and Vancouver) live in blissful ignorance of life Outside. After Coryn and Lou Williams’s parents killed themselves, the girls were resettled in an orphanage. At age 18, Lou became a rewilder, helping reclaim the land and save threatened species. When Coryn turns 18 a few years later, she takes off with her robot, Paula, in search of Lou. The Outside harbors dangers she never imagined, and by the time the sisters reconnect, neither trusts the other. The science fiction elements—including ecobots, domed cities, and artificial reality glasses—are believable and intriguing, and readers will be drawn into the dystopian depiction of the Outside and the various factions double-crossing each other for money and power. But Lou’s wariness about Coryn means she reveals the truth about her activities too slowly, putting significant drag on the plot and increasing the reader’s frustration instead of amping up dramatic tension. Agent: Eleanor Wood, Spectrum Literary Agency. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Engaging. . . . Cooper’s world feels…real.” 
—New York Times Book Review

“A captivating eco-thriller…. Wilders blends environmentalism, futurism, and science fiction for an engaging story with important messages about humanity’s relationship with the world around it.”
—Foreword Reviews

“Wilders is a vision of future America that’s by turns exhilarating and terrifying. With a heroine you can genuinely root for and a world that’s an all-too-likely outcome of our generation’s choices, Wilders is one of the best near-future adventures in years. Combining the ecology of rewilding, next-gen robotics, and the savage politics of a post-global America, this is a book that raises and answers more questions than most writers manage in an entire series. And there’s more to come!”
—Karl Schroeder, award-winning author of Lockstep
 
“A vivid picture of a world rebuilding from the edge of ecological ruin and the seeming conflicts between civilization and the nature it depends on.”
—Ramez Naam, award-winning author of the Nexus series
 
“Wilders is a fantastic voyage into a beautifully intricate solarpunk future. Cooper’s work is philosophically and psychologically relevant. Throughout Wilders, she gracefully examines the tensions between emerging technologies, human nature, and our ecosystem.”
—Gray Scott, futurist and techno-philosopher
 
PRAISE FOR THE WORK OF BRENDA COOPER:

"Spear of Light exceeds my already high expectations for a Brenda Cooper novel. The exploration of what makes us human shines through this entertaining read."
--J. A. Pitts, author of Black Blade Blues 
 
"I loved Brenda Cooper's Philip K. Dick Award-nominated novel Edge of Dark, but the follow-up, Spear of Light, is even better. Cooper pits human against post-human and brilliantly reveals the best and worst of her characters. This is a fascinating, well-realized world."
--Patrick Swenson, author of The Ultra Thin Man

"Like...most of Brenda Cooper's work, really, Edge of Dark is a wonderful fusion of the character's futurist and science fiction vision with well-drawn characters and character dynamics that propel the plot and action."
--Skiffy and Fanty

"Fascinating... Edge of Dark is worth reading for a unique vision of artificial intelligences... and Cooper gives you a lot to think about."
-io9

"An intelligent, thoughtful look at what it might mean to coexist with superior AIs that we ourselves have created. Brenda Cooper's universe is detailed, inventive, and ultimately dazzling. I will remember Chrystal for a very long time."
--Nancy Kress, winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula awards

From the Publisher

2017-05-02
The first of a near-future series about an uneasy balance between city and country.Sisters Lou and Coryn Williams live in Seacouver, a vast megacity that incorporates Seattle, Vancouver, and the small cities in between. Desperately unhappy with city life for some ill-defined reason, their parents kill themselves in a mutual suicide pact, landing the teenagers in an orphanage (although the megacity is technologically advanced, their social services seem primitive). Lou is overjoyed when she scores a plum opportunity as a rewilder, a rehabilitator of environmental damage outside the city, but Coryn is devastated to lose her only family. For two years, Lou sends infrequent, blandly cheerful emails to Coryn. Determined to find both her sister and the truth, Coryn departs Seacouver as soon as she comes of age, accompanied by her personal robot Paula and a dangerous level of naiveté about the world Outside. On her journey, she encounters dangerous weather, some new friends, opportunists who want to kill her and steal her valuable robot, and zealots of various stripes and unclear motivations who pose a danger both to the city and the barely rewilded landscape. Cooper (Spear of Light, 2016, etc.) is an unfortunate devotee of the tell-not-show school. Key scenes happen offstage. The supposedly smart and seasoned Lou never realizes that her bosses are manipulating her into rash action. Everyone says how stifling it is to live in the city, how flawed it is, how hard it is to fit in, and how great the divide is between rich and poor, but the reader doesn't spend enough substantive time in the city to see much evidence for these. Various factions jockey for power, but their motivations seem both too simple and too opaque. Perhaps more answers and complexity await in future volumes, but it doesn't seem promising. The potential for some interesting ideas languishes in a half-built world populated with barely sketched characters.

Kirkus Reviews