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'If you're not an addict in Shard, you're a corpse.
'Shard was once the greatest city in the land, the new and improved Las Vegas. Now it's a cruel coffin. Crystal meth falls like snow, shambling hordes of Cravers stagger through the streets and Bulls throw their steroid enhanced physiques around like wrecking balls. Slinking in the shadows are the Hybrids, genetically spliced halfpeople. In charge of it all are the Masked, drug cartels who have replaced local government.
'Bastion and his family are survivalists. They scavenge what they can and try to avoid the attention of the ruling drug lords. As far as he knew they had succeeded... until the day his daughter is born and the two of them are kidnapped.
'Turns out someone was watching after all.
'Dumped in a science facility Bastion struggles to adapt. All he ever wanted was to escape Shard. Now, he has. He should be happy. Except all of his dreams are of his wife. All he sees are white walls, clockwork routines and a servant without a tongue. Everything is kept from him, his existence quarantined. One day he breaks out of his room. He looks for an escape. What he finds is another inhabitant of the facility. A creature called Zero, who reminds him of the one truth of Shard.
'Everything comes at a cost.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Affiliation Notes
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Preppers and Survivalism in the AustLit Database
This work has been affiliated with the Preppers and Survivalism project due to its relationship to either prepping or prepper-inflected survivalism more generally, and contains one or more of the following:
1. A strong belief in some imminent threat
2. Taking active steps to prepare for that perceived threat- A range of activities not necessarily associated with ‘prepping’ take on new significance, when they are undertaken with the express purpose of preparing for and/or surviving perceived threats, e.g., gardening, abseiling.
- The plausibility of the threat, and the relative “reasonable-ness” of the response, don’t affect this definition. E.g., if someone is worried about climate change and climate disasters, and they respond by moving from a riverbank location in Cairns, or to a highland region of New Zealand, this makes them a prepper. If someone else is worried about brainwashing rays from outer space, and they respond by making a tinfoil hat, that makes them a prepper.
3. A character or characters (or text) who self-identify as a ‘prepper’, or some synonymous/modified term: ‘financial preppers’, ‘weekend preppers’, ‘fitness preppers’, etc.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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[Review] Shards
2019
single work
review
— Appears in: Aurealis , no. 118 2019;
— Review of Shards 2018 single work novel
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[Review] Shards
2019
single work
review
— Appears in: Aurealis , no. 118 2019;
— Review of Shards 2018 single work novel
