Welcome to Yellowcake Springs; a pristine, friendly, secure community of citizens involved in the maintenance of one of Western Australia’s CIQ Sinocorp nuclear reactor facilities. You have nothing to fear inside the heavily-guarded community, nestled in the quiet streets between the radiation Red Zone and the razor-wired fences.
Raise a family. Go to the park. Watch the sun set between the cooling towers. Lament the desperate lives of the lost ones living in the darklands outside the community, where overpopulation and starvation have created a lawless world. Feel lucky. You belong to CIQ Sinocorp now.
Read the sequel, Yellowcake Summer, released August 2013!
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
“Guy Salvidge’s Yellowcake Springs is a novel set within a slowly collapsing dystopian future set in Western Australia. The tone of the book is very close to the earlier cyberpunk novels without the glamour of the high tech wiz-bang gadgets of highly paid assassins or computer hackers. The gadgetry is replaced with a somber mix of overpopulation, economic decay, and environmental erosion. There is technical progress in evident, but its effects are muted within the overarching solemn background.
Yellowcake Springs is an interesting book. It moves a little slowly in some of the middle portions. For readablity, I would rate it a 6 out of 7. On the grittiness scale, I am going to say it is also around a 6 … very high for a book that is written as science fiction.
What gives this book it “twist” is an element of greater horror. If H.P. Lovecraft had the horror of human insignificance in an uncaring cosmos, and Ervin Sims’ End of The Age (review coming shortly) would highlight a cosmic origin and ending to history where humans have only token influence, this book seems to hammer home how vulnerable and ineffectual humans can be when the tide (or tidal wave) of demographics washes over them.”
– Russell Smith, Reflexiones Finales
Read the rest of the review.
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
“Guy Salvidge writes simply and he knows how to engage the reader with a flat economy of words. When I reached the end of the book I wanted it to continue, I wanted to see how this bleak future Australia turned out. It all seemed so real to me that I wondered if such a place as Yellowcake Springs really existed somewhere north of Perth and east of the sea. Is Western Australia dotted by nuclear power stations owned and operated by the Chinese? Is it all so dry there, so damn desperate to survive for any forms of life?”
– Dave Hyde, author of Pink Beam: A Philip K Dick Companion Read the rest of the review.
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
“The ‘world’ that Guy Salvidge creates was so realistic I had to keep checking the view out my window to make sure it never changed. I ended up loving this book so much I bought it in hard copy so I could lend it to my friends to read. This is not really my genre, but i’m hooked and I can’t wait for the author to bring out the next book!”
– Aya Danin, reader Read the rest of the review.