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Book Review of The Gaia Websters

The Gaia Websters
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From Booklist
Cyborgs, robots, and their artificial kin usually get thumbs-down in ecologically oriented science fiction, but Antieau gives that convention a twist. Her second book begins as a relatively conventional, though poetically conceived and well-executed, novel set in a post-ecoholocaust future in which sections of the U.S. have become technology-barren preserves; within them, healers move gracefully among people who happily raise healthful crops and celebrate one another's diversity. But why does the heroine, healer Gloria Stone, remember nothing of her childhood? Why is she haunted by half-remembered computer codes? Who are the other soothsayers she feels compelled to rejoin? Antieau reveals her heroine's surprising real nature: Gloria is a robot programmed to be "reborn" with a different appearance every 50 years or so and to work at healing the catastrophic damage wrought by the very rampant technology that created her. An innovative, gripping, very satisfying tale.