The Aviator (The Burning World) [Kindle Edition]

Gareth Renowden (Author), Dylan Horrocks (Illustrator)

Book Description

Flying around a world battered by rapid climate change and struggling with economic collapse in his hi-tech airship, Lemmy encounters the remnants of our civilisation – the artificial intelligences searching for the singularity, a rocking bishop in his flying cathedral, the last climate sceptics, the technovegans and deep green terrorists, billionaire libertarians in their bubble, and much, much more. Not to mention the goats, the girlfriend with bots in her head and the elixir of life (which is cheese).

"Part dystopian tome a la ‘Mad Max’ meets ‘Waterworld’, part stinging indictment of the mendacious ongoing campaign to deny the threats of human-caused climate change, The Aviator delivers a winning combination of wit and insight as it depicts the perils we may bestow upon future generations if we choose not to act on the greatest threat human civilization has ever faced."
- Professor Michael E Mann, climate scientist and author of The Hockey Stick & the Climate Wars.

"A brilliant and wickedly satirical romp through a post-climate change world."
- Sonny Whitelaw, author of Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis novels.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Gareth Renowden is an award-winning writer, photographer and truffle grower based in the Waipara Valley, New Zealand. Gareth's most recent book, The Aviator, the first in a new series set in The Burning World, was published in 2012. His book on climate change, Hot Topic - Global Warming & The Future of New Zealand, was published by AUT Media in 2007, and shortlisted for the Royal Society of NZ's inaugural science book prize. The Truffle Book (Limestone Hills Publishing 2005) won the Special Jury Award at the 2007 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in Beijing, and he was the keynote speaker at the 2007 Oregon Truffle Festival. He publishes the influential Hot Topic blog (http://hot-topic.co.nz/), covering climate change science and politics in New Zealand.

Product Details

• File Size: 585 KB
• Print Length: 384 pages
• Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
• Publisher: Limestone Hills Ltd (August 14, 2012)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B008Y0MFTM
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Not Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #348,307 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A great read with some slightly implausible premises September 6, 2012

By Arthur P. Smith

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

"The Aviator" puts us in an imaginatively envisioned near-future, with the world divided into small almost-isolated enclaves of wildly differing philosophies, moralities, technology levels and capabilities. The ostensible cause of the collapse of normal civilization is chaos associated with global warming, but the details of that collapse are for the most part missing here, aside from one soberly-drawn rescue mission to a fire-storm-ravaged Australia. How the world and the various characters portrayed got into the state they are in in this book is largely a mystery, but given those premises Renowden does a splendid job of weaving together an exciting story of exploration and discovery. His protagonist with his airship visits almost every continent from his New Zealand base, finding beacons of hope and enlightenment and at the same time doing battle with radical fringes on all sides, from anti-technologists to frontiersmen to high-tech televangelists to Islamic fundamentalists. At times the novel reminded me of some of the ambience and free-wheeling twists and turns of Neal Stephenson's novels - "Snow Crash" and "Anathem" particularly.

Advocates of the "Heartland Institute" and libertarians of the "Atlas Shrugged" variety will probably not appreciate Renowden's portrayal of their ultimate ends, but he has at least as much fun with radical environmentalists. His sympathies seem more clearly to lie with the Singularitarians - but even there Renowden introduces conflicts and concerns (particularly associated with the behavior of the airship's Artificial Intelligence) which suggest a deep thoughtfulness about what really matters in life and in our future. The novel ends with a number of loose ends (where is the airship's owner? What is going on in Europe?...) that anticipate a sequel - I'm eagerly looking forward to it! Read more ›

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Simply enjoyable September 11, 2012

By Debbie Steel

Format:Kindle Edition

Sci-fi is a departure from my normal reading matter, but I was hooked on The Aviator from chapter one. Rarely have I come across a book that manages to combine so many things: adventure, romance, characterisation and a critical message - ignore climate change at our peril. OK, so perhaps it's a little far-fetched in places (only time will tell), but I can't wait for the next instalment.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars An Enjoyable Read September 6, 2012

By Johnmacmot

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

I found The Aviator an enjoyable read and look forward to the next volume. As in all good SF, the underlying issues are serious, but Renowden's writing is fluent and his humour and satirical eye when applied are sharply entertaining. The book certainly spans the globe, and familiar New Zealand settings shifted into a much-changed future state were intriguing. I liked how the relationships between Artificial Intelligences and humans were developed. It's an entertaining piece of fiction, but leads the reader to consider the kind of future we are setting up for ourselves, and in that respect, it contains real heft. Good price too!

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Kiwi science fiction with a message August 18, 2012

By Dr Ken Perrott

Format:Kindle Edition

This science fiction novel is set in a post-catastrophe world - in the not too distant future. Hardly an unusual scenario but I found its approach to the question of post-catastrophe social organisation intriguing. How would society reorganise after social collapse brought on by a world-engulfing crisis? In this case one of the possible outcomes of climate change? The usual scenario is some sort of tribalism, and usually a warring tribalism. But would it be that simple? After all, humanity would still have reservoirs of knowledge. Surely that would make simple tribalism unlikely?

Gareth Renowden's solution is simple. Consciously or not he has simply extrapolated the ideological or issue-advocacy obvious in today's internet blogs and forums into the post-catastrophe society. Today's digital "silos" become tomorrows tribal groups. And, yes, they are just a inward-looking, suspicious and hostile to others as today's silo communities are. Except they have real weapons. These tribal groups, or ideological ghettos, give scope for some nice irony and humour in the book.

Renowden's post-catastrophe societies include the inevitable fundamentalist religious communities. But also communities based on artificial intelligence, technophobia, libertarianism, cynical "green" politics and so on. And, yes, there is even a climate change denial community - actively denying the world-wide catastrophe had anything to do with human-caused climate change. In fact still warning about an imminent ice-age (naturally caused of course)!

So you can imagine the scope for irony and humour there. Especially as Gareth Renowden is an author the climate change denial community love to hate. And they don't hold back on expressing that hate....
Author's credentials

This is Renowden's first venture into fiction. His earlier books include Video -The Inside Story (1982), The Olive Book (1999), The Truffle Book (2005) and
Hot Topic - Global Warming and the Future of New Zealand (2007). The last book was short-listed for the Royal Society of NZ's inaugural science book prize. He also writes regularly about climate change issues for the influential Hot Topic blog.

I must at this stage declare a common interest in the defence of science against science deniers, and to being a fellow SciBlogger of Gareth's. But I know a good read when I see one and believe Gareth has adjusted to a fictional style very well. (I can already see a number of jibes about this coming from the local climate change denial ghetto - if their denigration of truffle farmers is anything to go by).
An entertaining story

The story involves the hero (Lemmy) and his romantic partner (Kate) travelling the world in a high-technology blimp (hence The Aviator). Home for them is New Zealand - specifically D'Urville Island at the top end of the South Island. They encounter the ideological ghettos during their travels, mainly in the USA - or what remains of it. Many of these encounters end in conflict, and a few shoot-outs - but they form a working relationship to one rich high technology group. A group based on concepts of interaction between human and artificial intelligence and belief in the `singularity` -" a point where the exponential acceleration of technological progress, especially computing power, would bring a merging of human and machine intelligence."

Room for some interesting concepts and adventures there. Enhanced by the presence of Jenny, the blimp's autopilot - herself an artificial intelligence which may even have some scope for emotions or something similar. There are some interesting interactions between Jenny and Kate when Kate receives artificial intelligence implants during treatment after an accident. This is enhanced by Jenny's ability to interact with Kate's thoughts and feelings - that puts a real damper on Kate's love life!

So there is plenty of scope there for an entertaining story. With adventure, romance and humour. All this appealed to me as I prefer hard science fiction which is reality-based. With technology and machines not too unexpected or "magic." Not set so impossibly far into the future that its hard to relate. I really don't like the common fantasy genre of much of today's science fiction.

So here comes my major complaint. Part of the story-line involves a certain amount of genetic engineering (hence the goat on the cover). Not too far-fetched as New Zealand has plenty of current research in these fields. Just that I found the effects on humans by the product produced by the genetically engineered goats are bit "magic." OK I guess if you enjoy a little fantasy, but not quite realistic science. I'll leave that to readers and I am nit-picking as it didn't really destroy the credibility of the story for me.
Catastrophic but not alarmist

As you might expect, Renowden has a serious message behind the adventure, humour and entertainment of his story. After all, he writes often on the issue of climate change and he starts the book with a quote from Ray Bradbury about writing Fahrenheit 451:

"I WASN'T TRYING to predict the future. I was trying to prevent it."

He makes his message clear in a brief appendix:

"The Burning World is our planet, but not as we know it. It is one future, a place that might be born of the things we do today. As long as we carry on increasing the carbon content of the atmosphere by using it as a cheap sewer for the waste from the burning of coal and oil, and continue felling forests, then the earth will continue to warm, and some of the things that Lemmy experiences in his short life will come to pass. Not as I have written them, perhaps, but in some form and to some extent these impacts -- the rising seas, the extreme weather, the melting ice, the changes in rainfall patterns -- will shape the lives of everyone on this planet over the next hundred years and for millennia beyond.

The Burning World is not a prediction. It is intended as a warning, an illustration of the potential consequences of our actions. In its imagining I have tried to stay within the bounds of realistic possibility -- stretched a little in the interests of the story in one or two places (or throughout, some might argue) -- but most of the main climate change impacts to be found in The Aviator are grounded in things we can see today, brought forward in time. When Lemmy and Thunderbird fly over the Greenland ice sheet and note that even the highest levels are melting, at the time of writing (in 2011) I thought that might be a reasonable projection of the state of the ice twenty to thirty years hence. And then, shortly before publication I learned that it's already happening. We can only hope the same is not true for some of the other impacts I have dreamed up."

An important clarification - but it won't stop Renowden's harshest critics from calling him "alarmist." They will do so even without reading the book.

The fact that home base for the blimp was New Zealand, and realistically so, appealed to me. I have watched New Zealand develop a respectable batch of fictional writers during my lifetime, but we are still short of science fiction writers. Hopefully this book will contribute to a growth in this genre too. The cover describes it as "The Burning World Book One" - so that looks promising.

I highly recommend this first book to science fiction fans and am certainly looking forward to the next book in the series.

*Paperback format available mid-September. Read more ›

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars It turns out, it won't be a comet October 17, 2012

By Gregory T. Laden

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

The Aviator by Gareth Renowden explores a post-apocalypse world where the apocalypse is not nuclear war or a large object hitting the earth, or even an outbreak of zombi-ism, but rather, climate change. The story itself is an excellent read and even qualifies as a page turner. But there is another element that readers don't need to now, but would enjoy knowing: The author has the science on climate change right.

The truth is, a future Earth with continued climate change could look a lot of different ways, but the planet ala The Aviator is a reasonable approximation of a switched over climate, brought to us by someone who knows the science well. I'm less sure about the interaction between Artificial and Regular "Intelligence" depicted here, but it does produce an interesting interaction between fictional tropes. Climate change is real and unfettered could easily look like it does in this book. Artificial Intelligence is, in my mind, still imagined, and the use of the concept in Renowden's book is highly speculative. So, we have an interesting mix of higher and lower probabilities mixed together with what is otherwise a well imagined and very well told story regardless of the science fiction itself.

I have truly enjoyed it.

More About the Author

Gareth Renowden is a writer, photographer and truffle grower based in the Waipara Valley, New Zealand. His latest book is The Aviator, a story set in a world being battered by climate change and economic collapse - the first in a series dealing with the Burning World. Here's the blurb:

Flying around a world riven by climate change and economic collapse in a hi-tech airship, Lemmy encounters the strange remnants of civilisation - people searching for the singularity, a rocking bishop in his flying cathedral, the last climate sceptics, deep green terrorists, billionaire libertarians in their bubble, and much, much more. Not to mention the goats, the girlfriend with bots in her head and the elixir of life (which is cheese).

Gareth's recent book, Hot Topic - Global Warming & The Future of New Zealand, was published by AUT Media in 2007, and shortlisted for the Royal Society of NZ's inaugural science book prize. The Truffle Book (Limestone Hills Publishing 2005) won the Special Jury Award at the 2007 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in Beijing, and he was the keynote speaker at the 2007 Oregon Truffle Festival. He publishes the influential Hot Topic blog (http://hot-topic.co.nz/), covering climate change science and politics in New Zealand.