Not for lack of warning, climate change became the defining issue of the twenty-first century. The All-Consuming Nation also examines how planners failed to take into account the environmental costs, as early warning signs-whether smog over Los Angeles, the overuse of toxic chemicals such as DDT, or the Cuyahoga River in flames-provided evidence that all was not well.Įnvironmentalists from Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson and Paul Ehrlich to Ralph Nader and Al Gore cautioned that modern consumerism imposed unsustainable costs on the natural world. Mark Lytle argues that Nixon's view of consumer democracy contained fatal flaws - if unregulated, it would wholly ignore the creativedestruction that, in destroying jobs, erodes the capacity to consume. Advertising, popular culture,Īnd mass media persuaded Americans that shopping was both spiritually fulfilling and a patriotic virtue. By the end of the twentieth century, consumerism triumphed over communism, socialism, and all other isms seeking to win hearts and minds around the world. High wages, full employment, new technologies, and a rapid growth in population known as the 'Baby Boom' ushered in a golden age of economic growth. As Maya and her comrades spiral closer to uncovering the AIs' vast conspiracy, this band of violent womenhalf-clone and half-machinemust battle both sapient ageships and their own traumas, in order to settle their affairs once and for all.In his 1958 'kitchen debate' with Nikita Khrushchev, Richard Nixon argued that the freedom to consume defined the American way of life. The highly evolved AI of the galaxy will do whatever it takes to keep humanity from regaining control. but they're not the only ones in pursuit of the secret at the heart of the planet Dimmuborgir. Decades later, she and her team of broken, diminished outlaws must get back together to solve the mystery of their last, disastrous mission and to rescue a missing and much-changed comrade. Maya has died and been resurrected into countless cyborg bodies during her dangerous career with the Dirty Dozen, the most storied crew of criminals in the galaxy before their untimely and gruesome demise.

and will do whatever it takes to keep humans from ever controlling them again.

But the universe's highly-evolved AI has its own opposing agenda. In Locus and British Fantasy Award nominee Cassandra Khaw's first novel, a crew of diminished former criminals get back together to solve the mystery of their last, disastrous mission.

The all consuming world