Excellent - loved the worldbuilding. There were a few too many characters/points of view early on, but once they were sorted out in my memory, they were valuable.

While this may not be a uniquely Australian perspective on the future - other places have deserts - there's still definitely a strong Australian flavour running through this world. The Dead Red Heart, the dust and sand, the mad tankers (Sparks acknowledges a debt to Andrew Macrae's Trucksong), the caravans, the grim survival in the face of crappy odds. Also the place names that occasionally gave me a giggle, to see them cropping up in this devastated future.

Cat Sparks is a friend... but she'd never expect anything but the truth from me, so don't worry; this is definitely a fair review.

So it must be pointed out that you shouldn't come to this book hoping for a happy post-apocalypse world, or a happy post-apocalyptic story. That is not how Sparks rolls. There is unpleasantness and violence and maiming and death and loss and lots and lots of hideous sand. This is a world where human survival relies on following rules that enable communities to survive even if you don't understand them; where groups have to be wary of other groups because even though helping each other is a good idea, sometimes my group against yours might mean we survive at your cost. Did I mention the sand? There's a lot of sand. Life is hard and for most people, requires hard work and sacrifice. Well, for most people... and that (naturally) is one of the tensions that Sparks works through here. 

This is a world after global conflict, some indeterminate period in the world's past, that involved soldiers created by humans - robots, cyborgs, and all manner of variations on the theme. Exactly what happened in the past is never spelled out; I got the feeling that a whole bunch of conflicts got conflated and thus, a thoroughly mangled world - which isn't unimaginable. But the history itself doesn't matter so much, except insofar as the remnants can be either helpful or harmful to the humans still making their way. Coming off Isobelle Carmody's Obernewtyn series, this is refreshing, and I liked it: for most of the population survival is more important than history, and that makes sense. 

The novel is made up of a large and varied cast, whose stories eventually intertwine. There's an adolescent on a caravan in the desert fed up with her life; a supersoldier reawakened; an old, old woman eking out the end of her life; a grifter; and representatives of those doing better than everyone else, come to see what the rest of the world is like. It was good to read the variety of perspectives and remember that human survival will mean a diverse range of experiences.

The story at its most basic is a straightforward one. But the thing that really made this stand out was the world building. It helped that I happened to be reading this in a blast of hot days, but even if it had been the middle of winter I would have felt hot, felt parched, felt distressed by the unrelenting nature of the world - this is a world that really can't support humans very well anymore. But humans are determined and bloody-minded, and that comes through too.  

One thing that annoyed me was in the proofreading. There were a number of instances where commas were in weird places. And of course I can't now find an example because I forgot to mark them, so it looks like I'm complaining out of turn. But they were definitely there: commas as though there were three adjectives but there was only two, for instance. Not a problem with the story, but something that threw me a few times.

Overall this is (I can't believe) a great debut novel from Sparks. I hope she has more vices stories in her after she finishes her PhD... 

Hundreds of years in the future, the Earth has been rendered nearly unlivable by centuries of warfare. Some fortunate souls remain safe in their underground bunkers, enjoying the comforts their decaying technology has to offer, but the majority of the human race is forced to scrape out a living on the radioactive sands. Star and her sister, Nene, are part of a caravan that travels the wastes between villages. Their already dangerous lives are torn asunder when a flaming light shoots across the sky. The relic “angel” satellite is a harbinger of something much worse, something that has lain dormant for centuries, and is only now waking up . . .

The world building in this novel is crazy good. Sparks has built up a horrifying, sci-fi (but no too out there) future Earth. The use of artificial intelligence, chemical and biological warfare, and weather manipulation as an offensive weapon has stripped the planet of anything green, and poisoned the sky and the land. The devastation is so complete that no one remembers the world as it used to be, and though technology is everywhere, the decaying, almost feral mechs are beyond their comprehension. This is a world that, while horrible, is easy to get lost in.

This is only slightly problematic in that next to such a complex and vividly realized world, the characters that populate it seem small and flat by comparison. Star, Nene, and the others who populate Spark’s world are interesting, and decently developed for (what I assume is) a first book in a series. Yet, throughout the book, the setting is definitely the star of the show.

This is a great book for any lover of sci-fi, post-apocalyptic and/or and speculative fiction. Cat Sparks has created a brilliant world, and I dearly hope she is planning on writing more in this setting.

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher via Goodreads Giveaways in exchange for an honest review.

Tough to figure out what was going on for several chapters, but I kept going, and did enjoy this eventually. More to say later.

I found it a bit slow to start, but eventually the pieces came together. Interesting post apocalypse world.

I wanted to like it, but it was just too trivial. Another post-apocalyptic story, centuries after a war fought by AI driven machines and tech advanced humans. That some of the machines are around is ok, but the people? Nope.

Star is a teen who finds out she isn't her sister's sister and gets involved in the plot because she's magically a young version of the old soldiers. The cast is out of a paint-by-number can, and Grieve just blows whichever way the author wants him to blow. There's no real excitement or interest.

I am a judge for the 2017 Aurealis Awards. This review is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of any judging panel, the judging coordinator, or the Aurealis Awards management team.


Cat Sparks is a well-known figure in the Australian speculative fiction scene, both for her work as a prolific short story writer and editor. Lotus Blue is her much-anticipated debut novel.

Lotus Blue is set in a post-apocalyptic Australia, a land that has been ruined by both war and climate change. In this almost barren land, dominated by desert - the Dead Red Heart - people eke out a meagre existence in amidst the remnants of the technologies that were used to fight the wars that devastated the country.

There are many points of view in this novel - so many, sometimes, that I did find myself skimming over one or the other to get to the characters who interested me the most. Star, a seventeen-year-old who we meet travelling on a caravan with her healer sister, Nene, was the most compelling for me, along with Quarrel, a Templar - a warrior left over from the war, his body part organic and part machine. Star's journey is what ultimately shapes the main plot of the book, and it is what she discovers about herself along the way that kept me most enthralled as a reader.

This is a rich and complex world, and coming to the end of the book, it feels very much as though only the surface of the worldbuilding has been revealed. There is an almost cinematic realness to the pieces of this devastated Australia that we see - the ships that "sail" the Dead Red Heart, the warlord-controlled cities where people eke out their lives, and the technologies left over from the war - the bunker cities, the Tankers which roam the deserts and are hunted by the brave, the titular Lotus Blue.

There are going to be inevitable parallels drawn between Lotus Blue and other franchises - Sparks acknowledges that Dune was an influence, and anything set in a post-apocalyptic Australia is inevitably going to be compared to the Mad Max franchise. Neither of these comparisons really reveals the depth of Sparks' worldbuilding, or the strength of the characters which populate the book. All of them are human and flawed and heroic and as fascinating as the world.

I had high expectations for a debut novel from Cat Sparks, and Lotus Blue met them. There are some rough edges here and there, but nothing that detracts overmuch from the sheer wonder of the world that Sparks drops the reader into. If you're a fan of Sparks' short fiction, Lotus Blue is highly recommended. If you've not read anything by her before, this is a great place to start.

Fantastic, interesting use of nano-technology.
A post-apocalyptic tale that is a bit different.

Lots of POVs spammed at you from the beginning make this a more difficult read than it had to be. But it is a fun post-apocalyptic world to spend a couple hundred pages in.

I don't have much to say about this other then it simply didn't interested me, there where nothing really to sink my teeth into and I didn't care for anything in the book.