Forecast

Fiction. The year is 2212, the weather is out of control, and Seattle is being rebuilt with electricity generated from negative human emotion. In a strange and turbulent world fueled by secrecy and voyeurism, a bored housewife named Helen vanishes, and Citizen Surveillant Maxwell Point, the man whose job it's been to watch her, must recount the years leading up to her disappearance. As Helen is drawn back to the city on an increasingly absurd errand to find a man she once loved, Maxwell begins to suspect foul play. But is he so dependent on the very thing he's trained to protect that it colors not only his judgment, but his grip on reality? In this novel inspired by the troubled relationship between an author and his craft, Shya Scanlon renders a surreal, dystopian world in which alternate motives are required and people must hide even from themselves—a world in which the only real freedom is powerlessness."Shya Scanlon's brilliant first novel inhabits the skin of science fiction while setting off fireworks more extravagantly imagined and coolly displayed than those ever fired into the night air by any conventional SF novel."—Peter Straub"Tipping its hat to authors like Stacey Levine, China Miéville and Jonathan Lethem, Scanlon's novel is part Science Fiction, part noir, part road narrative and part love story."—Brian Evenson