Flashback

This is a good book. It has most of what it needs to be a great one, in fact: good complex characters, a dystopian and well-realised future world, and a complex plot that drags you along with it and doesn't let you go.

Trouble is, it could have been a great book: it's spoiled for me, as a non-American, by Simmons' repeated forays into anti-Obamaism, anti-leftism, anti-liberalism - in fact, anything that he disagrees with in the America of today. He shouldn't have - because he comes over as a ranting right winger, and it jars the reader more than a little.

I don't think I will be buying any more Simmons - and I had most of what he's written over the last thirty years. It's a bit like reading new Niven - a disappointment, as disillusioned and grumpy elderly men sound off about how their dream is dying.

And I don't CARE.