GAIA'S TOYS by Ore, Rebecca (pseudonym of Rebecca Bard Brown) - 1995

New York: Tor, 1995. Octavo, blue wrappers printed in black. Advance copy (uncorrected proof) of the first edition. Signed on the title page by Ore. This dark vision of America's future which "may be her finest individual work ... [is] set in a distant near future America, a devastated, environmentally degraded, authoritarian dystopia organized so as to oppress and humiliate the unprivileged, who comprise the vast majority of a world where technology has begun to fail and scarcity once again to reign. As in THE ILLEGAL REBIRTH OF BILLY THE KID, the protagonist's Identity is split and threatened and mocked; she is raped more than once, and is involuntarily seconded -- after being subjected to savage interrogations perhaps crueler than those found in George Orwell's NINETEEN EIGHT-FOUR -- into working as a government agent in a war against terrorism. The terrorists in this instance are convinced that through genetic engineering killer creatures can be shaped into defenders of a supine Gaia. There is a modestly uplifting ending, not entirely convincing." - John Clute, SFE (online). Hartwell, 200 Significant SF Books by Women, 1984-2001. Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, 1986-2009. A fine copy. (#154868)