Customer Reviews

Overshoot

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a wonderful book! I was so absorbed in it, I stayed up half the night reading, (the first time I have done that since becoming a parent). The premise is totally believable: the greenhouse effect is happening, and by 2032 the world is a disaster. The story takes place in Berkeley - which has not escaped the heat or other changes. Clee manages to create an 80 year old woman narrator that even very young people will identify with: she is spunky, with a dry, sarcastic sense of humor and totally down to earth. There is no dogma or preachiness or political correctness in this book, and the technological deus ex machina at the end reveals an author with a really complex and nuanced view of technology and nature. Much of the book is just about hard, day to day, real life, perhaps that is why the book is so terrifying. It's a novel of ideas that touches on everything from genetic engineering, to computers, to witchcraft. It woke me up!

"Overshoot" is a novel about global warming and other unexpected results of modern society.

What is ahead of us in the 21st Century? This novel gives us one possible scenario. Eighty-year-old Moira Burke shares her experiences, past & present, and her actions as a result of thes experiences. The good thing about this book is that it's easy to follow even though you jump back and forth between the 20th and 21st centuries. A diary-style storyline improves the readability greatly. What's interesting too is the fact that much of the 20th century part of the book is based on real hapennings of the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's of our current century. Now that I have aroused your curiousity, get the book, think about the happenings and guess about how it comes out in the long run.

"Overshoot" is an enjoyable read but it's not a "can't put it down" type of book.

Books about communities surviving catastrophic times are usually fascinating and this one is no exception. Overshoot tells the story of a group of senior citizens in the Berkeley hills trying to survive after global warming is about to bring the world to an end. Clee gets her descriptions of the SF Bay Area exactly right as she intersperses her characters' actions in 2032 with flashbacks from one woman's life, relating her encounters with ideas about mythology and (pagan) religion, environmental warnings, and a wealth of historical events covering several decades. Hard sci fi fans might not appreciate the references to synchronicity and Gaia beliefs in Overshoot, but I felt Clee skillfully weaves together aspects of culture and mysticism while still keeping her empirical feet (mostly) on the ground. She has a good ear for communal life, recognizing the importance of group actions. What she does with the birds is a nice touch too. Perhaps Clee's only misstep was in having her main character make a few odd choices, but this is a small quibble about a book that brings a lot of pleasure.

I read Overshoot after hearing about the author's first book, Branch Point. While Branch Point is very entertaining - a romp through recent history - Overshoot is a deeper, more serious, ambitious book. Take a group of people who are now in their 30s and 40s, and move them ahead in time to the year 2032, take the concerns and fears about global warming that are in the headlines now, put them together, and you have an angry, moving, wonderfully written book that showcases what social science fiction is supposed to be about. This is a future that people alive today may live to see. Yet, unlike so many "Apocalypse" books, Overshoot is not a downer. The characters suffer through some very disturbing rough times, but the ending is upbeat and hopeful, not sugar-coated or airy-fairy, and is plausible in the light of current advances in gene therapy and gene manipulation. And it isn't justone more example of an end-of-the-world novel where at the last minute the writer pulls a rabbit out of a hat and magically makes everything okay. This is a big book with big issues, not your usual escapist stuff.

A must read! I'm sick of people talking about El Nino when it's really global warming. I think Mona is right on. Very entertaining book.

I couldn't put this book down. Clee's future world is very believable. Her use of comtemporary political and social events as well as those in recent history really pull the reader into the story. Her main characters experienced what we experience today. This brings the characters close to our lives and makes it seem we could experience what they experience in the future. I found the future technology very believable, especially the genetic technology.

This is one of the best new-millenia books I've read lately. Much better than other like the Glimmering. I found her portrayal of pagans refreshing, and she gives a positive spin to the usual ravaged-earth setting. I recommend it to everyone who reads SF/Fantasy.

As far as I know, this is the only sf book currently in print which envisions what will happen to people alive today if global warming turns out to be the problem so many scientists fear it will be. While the more serious moments make the bookt believeable, the ending gives us hope. The characters are three-dimensional, and I loved the animals!

I picked this book up because some of it is set in my town, but I keep re-reading it because of the ideas she so intelligently expresses. This book is a warning about what could happen if we don't pay attention to the environment (are you listening, Exxon/Mobil? ). It is also a hopeful view about humans moving toward healing each other & the environment by rediscovering spirituality; yet Clee doesn't condemm technology. Technology, wisely used, is part of the solution.

I've heard that Ms Clee is working on 2 books -- I can't wait till they come out!

Let me start by saying that I don't judge novels by the message that the author is trying to deliver. I judge them by how effective they are at getting that message across. "Overshoot" has the right message, but the wrong delivery. The book is ineffective and unsubtle in almost every possible way. It's almost universally agreed that powerful novels don't feature long passages where the author simply drops the story and instead just starts directly telling the reader what their message is. In "Overshoot" the narrator is constantly breaking into lecture mode, going on for paragraph after paragraph about how evil it is to disrespect the environment. The resulting tone of preachiness is the book's defining characteristic, although there are any number of other annoying factors.

The book is set in Berkeley in the year 2032, when an ecological crisis and a series of international conflicts bring the world to the brink of disaster. The main character is an 80-year-old named Moira, who narrates her life through a series of flashbacks. Starting from when she was a child in the 1950's, she describes the events changing political movements that she witnessed during her lifetime. Perhaps the strangest aspect of the book is that once she reaches the 1990's, she simply skips directly to the present 2032 without giving us any clue as to what sort of disasters happened to turn the world into the shambles that's displayed during the final chapters. It's as if the author simply grew bored with the book around page 300 and decided to skip straight to the ending without caring whether or not it made sense.

While some of her descriptive writing is quite good, the author appears to have no understanding of how normal people talk during their everyday conversations. Her characters use words like "provisions" instead of "food" and "compact disc player" instead of "CD player", and there's one scene where Moira encounters a drug dealer whose speech sounds more like an uptight English teacher than a street person. Almost all of the dialogue in "Overshoot" sounds stilted and unrealistic.

Literally everywhere you look in this book there's something that annoys you. At one point a character who's a Neopagan complains about the stereotypical representation of her religion in the media, yet members of her coven have names like "Red Wolf" and "Blue Otter". If Mona Clee had actually spent some time (five minutes, maybe) researching the topic, she would probably have learned that Neopagans are not actually named after colored animals. She throws in lots of pop culture references to things like "Star Wars" and "Jurassic Park", but she doesn't do it very well. For instance, when she visits a cottage with a thatched roof, the Moira remarks that "there could have been hobbits living there". Hello, doesn't the first sentence of "The Hobbit" clearly state that hobbits live underground. (I know it's a minor complaint, but I'm a big Tolkien fan and stuff like that irritates me.) One twenty-page chapter consisted solely of two characters using the internet for the first time while saying thing like "This internet has the power to bring people together" and "This internet will change the way we view the world", causing we to wonder whether I'd accidentally picked up an ad for a now-bankrupt ISP.
In summary, learn from my mistake and don't bother with this train wreck of a book.