Review: Aurora Connect by Keith Dixon

 

Genre: Future fiction

Description:

The world is burning, the seas are rising faster than predicted. Refugees have nowhere to go. So, in the middle of France on the Massif Central, the NEU (New European Union) is building a vast circular city 140 kilometers in diameter that, when finished, will be able to house a billion people. (For comparison, New York currently has a population of 8.6 million: Chongqing, the biggest city in China, has some 32 million.) Already this new venture – Aurora – is attracting businesses (Old Oil and new technology among others), bureaucrats, influencers, altruists, scammers and the power hungry. Into this mix a new natural disaster plops.

Author:

Keith Dixon is a British author who has been writing since he was thirteen. He is a two-time winner of the Chanticleer Reviews CLUE First in Category award for Private Eye/Noir novel. He is well known for his fiction in a number of genres: thriller, espionage, science fiction, literary fiction – his Sam Dyke series now runs to 10 books, his Paul Storey series of thrillers is up to 3. A recent venture preceding this one is his serial killer Porthaven Trilogy. He has also produced a number of standalone fiction and non-fiction books. And he does his own covers! He lives in France.

Access his website here.

Appraisal:

This novel is bang on the current money. It concerns itself with charisma; influencers; AI enabling vastly increased productivity, and deep fakes; communication that is, apparently, everywhere but connects nobody with anything. It considers what happens when (as is happening right now) the old order begins to break down due to political, commodity, population, and climatic shifts. It looks at a world heading for hell in a handcart sooner and faster than even the pessimists predicted. In fact, it is an holistic take on the tidbits we get in our fragmented news bulletins with a kickass plot wrapped around them.

Dixon may just have written our future. I hope not – but if he has, he has done so in wise, crisp, witty prose which this reader just gobbled up.

I recommend this to you unreservedly.

Buy now from:            Amazon US        Amazon UK

Format/Typo Issues:

No significant issues.

Rating: ***** Five Stars

Reviewed by: Judi Moore

Approximate word count: 95-100,000 words