From Salon.com, two reviews of SFF novels with Big Ideas: Arctic Rising by Tobias Buckell and The Mirage by Matt Ruff.
Buckell's Big Idea:
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In Buckell’s future, global warming has opened up the North Polar regions into a new frontier, rich with arable land, fresh habitable niches, and valuable resources of all stripes. Existing governments have stepped into the breach in places, and new polities have formed in others, including most prominently a floating city-state named Thule.
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Ruff's Big Idea:
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America, a jealous, backward, fragmented, fundamentalist-ridden failed nation, is responsible for the terrorist-driven, airplane-mediated destruction of the World Trade Towers of Baghdad, cosmopolitan metropolis of the United Arab States, that enlightened, progressive, technology-rich superpower in a continuum just one funhouse mirror removed from ours. The event occurs not on 9/11/2001 but on 11/9/2001, that off-kilter date serving as just the merest hint of the radical transvaluation Ruff has in store. And the novel is set more or less ten years after, in the long, grinding aftermath of that event.
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Has anyone read these? Anyone heard of Ruff (I've read and liked Buckell).