The Offset
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
It is your eighteenth birthday and one of your parents must die. You are the one who decides. Who do you pick?
In a dying world, the Offset ceremony has been introduced to counteract and discourage procreation. It is a rule that is simultaneously accepted, celebrated and abhorred. But in this world, survival demands sacrifice so for every birth, there must be a death.
Professor Jac Boltanski is leading Project Salix, a ground-breaking new mission to save the world by replanting radioactive Greenland with genetically-modified willow trees. But things aren’t working out and there are discrepancies in the data. Has someone intervened to sabotage her life’s work?
In the meantime, her daughter Miri, an anti-natalist, has run away from home. Days before their Offset ceremony where one of her mothers must be sentenced to death, she is brought back against her will following a run-in with the law. Which parent will Miri pick to die: the one she loves, or the one she hates who is working to save the world?
File Under: Science Fiction [ Only One Leaves | The Choice is Yours | Last Hope | Counting Down ]
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Writing duo Natasha C. Calder and Emma Szewczak explore the pitfalls of parenthood in the context of climate crisis in their disturbing near-future dystopian debut. They postulate an Earth devastated by overpopulation and climate change, with only the experimental Project Salix, which will replant Greenland with genetically modified willow trees, standing between humanity and extinction. In the meantime, there's the Offset, a population-limiting stricture demanding that at 18, a child must choose which of their parents to execute. Miri Boltanski faces this terrible choice in just two days, forced to decide between her mothers, Alix, a retired pediatrician and the parent whom Miri loves most, and Jac, the brilliant scientist heading Project Salix and on whom the world depends. Alternating sections show how Miri wrestles with her decision in a decaying London while Jac travels to Greenland, fearing that Project Salix may have been sabotaged. The authors' integration of many difficult themes is marred by awkwardly handled flashbacks, stilted phrasing ("create a life that would embody and entomb their love"), and occasional thick gobbets of scientific jargon. There are some intriguing concepts here, but the shoddy execution detracts from the impact of this unsettling future tale.
