Yet You Cry When It Hurts
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
When the world is drowning, diplomacy is more than handshakes and headlines. Nitara Desai has spent her life negotiating international agreements, easing points of conflict, and averting disasters. Worst-case scenarios belong in her nightmares, not the IEC’s daily reports. On a calm day, being a director at the International Energy Consortium only requires fixing CarbonCon translators for flustered Brazilian delegates. A thankless job, but the world is still drowning in CO2—there’s no choice but to keep treading.
On a bad day, it’s not just the Brazilians acting up, but the Americans walking out, and now the Governor of Southern California insisting on a clandestine meeting. Then a text comes from Matti, her solid rock in the stormy seas: Guess what? We’re getting married!
Suddenly, an earthquake is slow-rolling through her personal life as well.
She waited too long: to tell Matti how she feels, to quit the unwinnable race to net zero, to grab hold of the things that make life worth living, not just trying to stay afloat. When the governor reveals an impossible technology that could save the planet, but it’s in the hands of a murderously ambitious man, it’s a catastrophe she can’t turn away from. And it’s almost enough to distract her from everything falling apart. Work first, always.
And maybe that’s been the problem all along.
Yet You Cry When It Hurts is the 4th of four tightly-connected solarpunk novels in a near-future climate-fiction series. It’s about our future, how the forces of greed are ever-present, how the fight for a just world never ends, and how it’s not strongmen who will save us but the bright cords of connection that hold the world together.
If you enjoyed the optimistic climate solutions in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future or the cozy cooperative future in Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot series, you will enjoy Nothing is Promised.
Customer Reviews
3.5stars-dramatic, edgy, complex
3.5 stars--YET YOU CRY WHEN IT HURTS is the fourth and final instalment in Susan Kaye Quinn’s adult, near future NOTHING IS PROMISED post apocalyptic, speculative fiction, Hopepunk, climate fiction series of interconnected story lines set in the year 2050. YET YOU CRY WHEN IT HURTS should not be read as a stand alone as it picks up shortly after the events of book three OF KINDNESS AND KILOWATTS.
NOTE: Hope-punk is a genre that often focuses on people fighting for a change in a dystopian setting such as a post apocalyptic society.
SOME BACKGROUND: In the past thirty or so years, the world has been ravaged by several pandemics, ecological disasters, and global warming to the point that air quality is questionable, and food stocks are in short supply. The few remaining people are forced to apply for a ‘family’ and a place to live, often placing a number of people together in order to thrive. AIs are the norm; implants are used to communicate but someone is siphoning the power, threatening the few who survive.
Told from third person perspective YET YOU CRY WHEN IT HURTS follows one man’s determination to take control of the world’s power supply. The people of Earth are struggling to find or make a clean, renewable source of power-Miller Zendek and James Ellis have developed something called zero point energy or ZPE, a system that opens up the universe and extracts energy, but in an effort to take control, Miller Zendek is ‘auctioning’ off the rights to the D-10 countries (think G7), hoping to become the world’s richest trillionaire. Nitara Desai, international treaty negotiator, is determined to stop Miller Zendek, at all costs, placing herself in the direct line of fire, a line that is quickly leading to her death. With the help of her team, and her best friend Matti, Nitara releases all of the specs and information about ZPE to the world, effectively destroying Miller’s quest for domination in the process.
Author Susan Kaye Quinn is a rocket scientist and an environmental engineer, and like the previous instalments YET YOU CRY WHEN IT HURTS reads like a PhD dissertation; a thought-provoking, detailed and complex physics lecture, in both science fiction and fact, often overwhelming the story line premise with copious acronyms (I had to keep a list), numerous people and culturally-specific names, as well as scientific terminology (again, both fact and fiction). The premise is well written, edgy and dramatic but often confusing and complicated; the characters are numerous, energetic and determined. The NOTHING IS PROMISED series is a cautionary tale of what ifs and whys.