Shelter [Paperback]

Susan Palwick (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 12, 2007

The three basic human needs are food, water…and shelter. But in the late 21st century, compassion is a crime. You can get your memories wiped just for trying to help.
 
Papa Preston Walford's world doesn't allow for coincidences. Accidents. Secrets in the backs of closets. Or the needs of his own daughter.
 
Meredith Preston has reason to seek shelter. She needs protection from the monsters in her mind, in her history, in her family. And the great storms of a changing climate have made literal shelter imperative.
 
When a cutting-edge, high-tech house, designed by a genius with a unique connection to Meredith, overcomes its programming to give shelter to a homeless man in a storm, from its closets emerge the revelations of a past too painful to remember.
 
In the world of Susan Palwick's Shelter, perception is about to meet reality, and reality has mud all over it. The truth won't make you happy, but it may just make you whole.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Near-future San Francisco, lashed by climate-change storms, shelters a strange variety of stereotypical beings in Palwick's inflated third exploration (after Flying in Place and The Necessary Beggar) of social, technological, religious and ecological themes. Palwick's central conflict, anti-AI Luddites versus big business AI producer MacroCorp, sputters and fizzles somewhere behind two lengthy narratives of the same story—the fate of Nicholas, a brain-damaged child survivor of an African pandemic virus and adopted son of Meredith Walford, the daughter of MacroCorp's leader, Preston Walford, who dies of the virus and is soon "translated" into virtually immortal cyberlife, where he tries to remake society. Meredith and Roberta Danton, who suffers from state-prohibited "excessive altruism," try to save Nicholas from brainwiping with the help of "Fred," a soothing AI neo-Mr. Rogers, who turns into a verbose high-tech house. Younger readers may best appreciate this sprawling book. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

On parole from her sentence for "excessive altruism," Roberta becomes tangled in Merideth Walford's life again. As children, both were placed in isolation with the Caravan Virus, whose worldwide victims included Berta's parents. Merry's father, Preston, also died but, as the test subject of his company's new translation software, became the first online human. He befriended Berta because Merry refused to speak to him, and he continues meddling in Berta's life. In Merry's ex-husband's intelligent house during a massive storm, Merry finally tells Berta her side of the story of child-care AI Fred and her son Nicky, who were both in the day-care facility at which Berta worked. Then the house overcomes its security programming to let in homeless Henry. Preston tells some of his own perspective to the house, while Henry discovers who he was before a state-administered controlled strain of CV emptied his mind in punishment for vagrancy violations. Palwick's haunting, often heart-wrenching, sf-tinged story presents the terrible things people will do for love, and those terrible things' consequences, played out by humanly multidimensional characters. Schroeder, Regina
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 576 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; 1st edition (June 12, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 031286602X
• ISBN-13: 978-0312866020
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #339,580 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Shelter, June 28, 2007

By 

Eleanor Skinner (Albany, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shelter (Paperback)

I am a huge fan of Susan Palwick. My personal favorite Palwick book is The Necessary Beggar, but the others are also great.

Shelter is about a mentally ill child, an AI rights movement, a number of people bound together by complex family ties and social relations, and a homeless guy who takes care of cats. It is very gripping and you want to read it right through to the end.

Meredith wants to give shelter to her mentally ill child so he won't be brainwiped. Her child wants shelter from the monsters. Henry the homeless guy is looking for shelter to sleep in and shelter for his cats. Roberta wants the shelter of family after all of her original family die. The AIs and uploaded personalities are looking for the shelter of legal rights. Everyone is looking for physical shelter from a huge storm with flooding.

The amazon editorial review says this book is slow and recommends it for younger readers (since when do young people like slow things?). I would recommend it for sophisticated readers, whether older or younger, who can pick up on all the characters' complex emotions, and I read the book all the way through in a day and a half. It's not slow. It's just the size of a large dictionary. That means there's *more to read.*

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful!, October 21, 2007

By 

S. Perrault (Reno, NV United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shelter (Paperback)

I have had this book for a while but was saving it as a reward for finishing a major project at work. On Friday I finished the project, and Friday evening I started reading Shelter. I finished it at 2:00 Saturday morning, having paused only to eat dinner. It's a deeply engaging read that is moving without indulging in pathos and that makes thought-provoking points without being heavy handed.

Palwick creates characters who are vivid enough that I find myself wanting to meet some (and hoping never to meet others), and does a masterful job of creating sympathy for even the least sympathetic people in the book. She also does a fantastic job of creating suspense through an interesting structure that moves back and forth between the past and present, showing effects long before exploring the causes.

This book isn't as tightly constructed as her previous novel, The Necessary Beggar, but it's also much larger in scope and ambition. It exceeded both my expectations and my hopes, both of which were very high.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A not altogether hopeless Dystopia, August 20, 2009

By 

Daniel Nelson (White Bear Lake MN, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Shelter (Paperback)

A woman who has been damaged by her family and life's events finds her way to again wanting her life to have a purpose, and along the way is able to resolve some issues and change herself from being a victim of fate to being able to accept what has caused her deep psychic damage and gain the self-acceptance that enables her to once again be the force for good that she was before tragedy scrambled her life.
The setting is wonderful and dark in the SF Bay area.
The characters she interacts with are interesting, among which is an evolving AI, and the resolution is satisfying.
The portrayal of her inner states is masterful as she gradually opens up again to the world outside.
The world of a half-century or so from now is plausible and mildly depressive in nature, but it still left me by the end with a belief that things getting better was a strong possibility.
I thought this book was great!
Dan Nelson