Drowning Towers

Under its original title, The Sea and Summer , this book recently received the Arthur C. Clarke Award as the best SF novel published in England in 1987. Australian writer Turner envisions a 21st century nightmare that is the result not of war but of economic and climatic forces already underway. Massive unemployment has combined with the greenhouse effect (raising global temperatures and the sea level) to produce a society in which nine-tenths of the population lives in high-rise ghettos, jobless and demoralized. The social fall of the Conway family and their sons' desperate fight back up the ladder through scholarships and government service expose the viscera of the system. Although his story contains some romantic notions about poverty, and characters such as tower boss Billy Kovacs, a knight in tarnished armor, Turner also asks hard questions and is particularly skillful in his examination of a major Thomas Disch theme: the problems and responsibilities of intelligence in such a milieu. A fine, thoughtful novel. (September)