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Yellowcake #1
Yellowcake Springs
Welcome to Yellowcake Springs; a pristine, friendly, secure community of citizens involved in the maintenance of one of Western Australia's CIQ Sinocorp nuclear reactor facilities. You have nothing to fear inside the heavily-guarded community, nestled in the quiet streets between the radiation Red Zone and the razor-wired fences. Raise a family. Go to the park. Watch the sun set between the cooling towers. Lament the desperate lives of the lost ones living in the darklands outside the community, where overpopulation and starvation have created a lawless world. Feel lucky. You belong to CIQ Sinocorp now.
242 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 21, 2011
1 person is currently reading
51 people want to read
About the author
Guy Salvidge
15 books42 followersIntermittently award-winning writer and relentlessly book-hunting reader.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
August 22, 2013
Bring on the mini-series -- this is one potent and imaginative sci-fi tale.
It starts with the setting: the whole concept of Yellowcake Springs is great. The vision of the future is a grim one, forcefully portrayed. CDS is unsettling, and CWS is truly nightmarish.
This is not a long novel, and it's divided into short chapters, so it moves like a bullet. Salvidge uses language in a really clear and sharp way too. Plus, he set up a varied and sympathetic cast (especially Jiang Wei and Rion).
I’ve seen parallels drawn between this book and the Mad Max movies, but I think that goes only as far as the bleak futuristic Australian landscape. At various points, I thought of The Manchurian Candidate, 1984, and Logan’s Run (the latter looks almost sunny by comparison). But Salvidge has established his own unique franchise here…I’m very much looking forward to reading the sequel.
It starts with the setting: the whole concept of Yellowcake Springs is great. The vision of the future is a grim one, forcefully portrayed. CDS is unsettling, and CWS is truly nightmarish.
This is not a long novel, and it's divided into short chapters, so it moves like a bullet. Salvidge uses language in a really clear and sharp way too. Plus, he set up a varied and sympathetic cast (especially Jiang Wei and Rion).
I’ve seen parallels drawn between this book and the Mad Max movies, but I think that goes only as far as the bleak futuristic Australian landscape. At various points, I thought of The Manchurian Candidate, 1984, and Logan’s Run (the latter looks almost sunny by comparison). But Salvidge has established his own unique franchise here…I’m very much looking forward to reading the sequel.
September 8, 2023
This is my second novel. It's a dystopian thingo. Much more info at guysalvidge.com or guysalvidge.wordpress.com
September 2, 2018
Brief Review
Yellowcake Springs is an impressive near-future story about Perth and the regional towns of the South West.
In the novel, Chinese owned Sinocorp, which includes a nuclear energy factory and its surrounding zones, is seen as an ideal place to live compared to regional WA, which has fallen into despair and dissaray.
Through short sharp chapters, Salvidge's threads follow three chief narratives: one thread follows Jian Wei, a gentle Chinese man, who has left his wife in China to work at Sincocorp and discovers himself being used by the corporation in its experimental 'Controlled Waking State'; another thread follows Sylvia, an Australian, who also works at Sinocorp; Sylvia is somewhat disenchanted with conventional life and often finds escape in 'Controlled Dreaming State'; and that of Rion, who's from the truly dystopian wild-lands of rural WA, and although of a gentle disposition, is desperate in his search for a better, safer place to live.
Salvidge’s work is very readable. The prose isn't poetic, but replete with sharp, specific details and and every scene is painted with imagery so the world always feels real.
There are shades of PK Dick here with the dream state worlds, but without Dick's inherent madness (as wonderful as Dick's chaotic narratives can be). Yellowcake Springs also reminds me of Bacigalupi's work with regards to its exploration of futuristic Asian issues and ideologies, along with its overall control.
Although speculative, Salvidge's work is grounded, and courageously explores the fusion of Chinese totalitarian-capitalist policy, the environment, and the tech world. The issues are real and Salvidge authenticates the world without being overly reliant on a flood of neologisms along with confusing tech jargon that science fiction is notoriously renown for.
Yellowcake Springs deserves more attention and critical acclaim. It is the best Australian dystopian novel I have read.
Yellowcake Springs is an impressive near-future story about Perth and the regional towns of the South West.
In the novel, Chinese owned Sinocorp, which includes a nuclear energy factory and its surrounding zones, is seen as an ideal place to live compared to regional WA, which has fallen into despair and dissaray.
Through short sharp chapters, Salvidge's threads follow three chief narratives: one thread follows Jian Wei, a gentle Chinese man, who has left his wife in China to work at Sincocorp and discovers himself being used by the corporation in its experimental 'Controlled Waking State'; another thread follows Sylvia, an Australian, who also works at Sinocorp; Sylvia is somewhat disenchanted with conventional life and often finds escape in 'Controlled Dreaming State'; and that of Rion, who's from the truly dystopian wild-lands of rural WA, and although of a gentle disposition, is desperate in his search for a better, safer place to live.
Salvidge’s work is very readable. The prose isn't poetic, but replete with sharp, specific details and and every scene is painted with imagery so the world always feels real.
There are shades of PK Dick here with the dream state worlds, but without Dick's inherent madness (as wonderful as Dick's chaotic narratives can be). Yellowcake Springs also reminds me of Bacigalupi's work with regards to its exploration of futuristic Asian issues and ideologies, along with its overall control.
Although speculative, Salvidge's work is grounded, and courageously explores the fusion of Chinese totalitarian-capitalist policy, the environment, and the tech world. The issues are real and Salvidge authenticates the world without being overly reliant on a flood of neologisms along with confusing tech jargon that science fiction is notoriously renown for.
Yellowcake Springs deserves more attention and critical acclaim. It is the best Australian dystopian novel I have read.
September 28, 2013
Yellowcake Springs is unlike any other book you've ever read. Guy Salvidge not only entertains, he also invites you to answer questions about the world and where it's going - and they are difficult questions. This dystopian version of Western Australia is only a fraction of a second away from how it is today, and that truly is food for thought.
May 20, 2012
Yellowcake Springs by Guy Salvidge (Glass House Books, 2011 ISBN 9781921869174)
When I got my copy of Yellowcake Springs by Guy Salvidge in the mail I set aside David Beckham’s autobiography – an interesting book in itself – and beheld this artifact from Australia with its fiery red cover dominated by a circular nuclear warning sign in the very center. Keep out! Stay away! It seemed to scream at me, You really don’t want to read this book! I opened it eagerly, and spotted the photograph of Guy Salvidge in the front papers – a scary sight and almost enough to make me drop the book in horror! But… I had to read this book; I’d been looking forward to it for a long time. Guy Salvidge is one of Australia’s new crew of writers active internationally; he’s won awards! Several of them, and this novel Yellowcake Springs, his second, is itself a winner of the 2011 IP Picks Best Fiction Award and in 2012 is on the short list for the Norma K. Hemming Award for speculative fiction in Australia. I can see why.
Set in Western Australia somewhere near Perth and in Perth itself Yellowcake Springs assembles a cast of main characters that we get to know well as we read into the novel. There’s Sylvia Baron (and, yes, she does resemble Sylvia Bohlen from Philip K. Dick’s MARTIAN TIME-SLIP) who is an advertising artist for a Chinese nuclear power community in the Australian desert: Yellowcake Springs. It’s her job to entice people there and make them feel safe and secure living next to a huge nuclear power complex. To do this she uses a technology called CDS – Controlled Dreaming State – by which dreams are manipulated and shared by online communities of people anxious to have some virtual fun away from their lives in what is the depressing and desolate land of near-future Western Australia.
Sylvia’s husband, David, is a sketchy character and possibly up to no good. He comes and goes in the novel but never seems able to truly connect with his wife, who is having a CDS affair with a man she doesn’t know or even know where he lives. This Rion, short for Orion, is a handsome down-and-outer who actually lives in a deserted town some distance from Yellowcake Springs. Using a CDS Console stolen in a raid on the local police station in which the area militia ousted the cops from the town of East Hills, Rion in his beyond shabby rotting apartment plans with the aid of this CDS Console to escape from his dead town and move up in the world. His CDS affair with Sylvia is, he thinks, his ticket out. But first he must escape from the militia yahoos who control his town and then make his way across the desert to Yellowcake Springs.
But, despite Sylvia and the Chinese nuclear corporation’s efforts to make Yellowcake Springs a flagship community, all is not well in this circular man-made town with its three zones: red for where the nuclear reactors are, yellow for where the workers work, and green for where they live, all surrounded by a barbed-wire fence and monitored by surveillance cameras.
The Chinese are the main villains in this plot and they have devised a variation of the Controlled Dreaming State that operates in the daytime, as it were, called Controlled Waking State. Chinese workers are sent to Yellowcake Springs to work on the reactors and a special crew is hooked up to the Controlled Waking State apparatus and must learn how to live and work in the CWS condition. This is not an easy task as once the Chinese experimenters are in CWS they begin to lose touch with reality and are never sure whether they are in CWS or are really awake.
In a future world of overpopulation, no water, the land turning to desert and lawlessness encroaching everywhere there are many unhappy people looking for someone to blame for their sorry lot. An oasis such as Yellowcake Springs with its huge nuclear cooling towers attracts the destructive attentions of these environmentalists or ‘mentals’ as they are known and the town becomes a target.
But life goes on in fits and starts for those living in the novel. There’s not much hope anywhere and even the big city of Perth proves a disappointment. Things are just going downhill everywhere. The Chinese are a remote omnipotent power, well intentioned perhaps, but without any soul. The Mentals are just lashing out with hate at anything technological even though they can barely survive without it. Everywhere is starvation and death but still the global population of humanity grows virtually unchecked.
At the end of the novel we see the fate of Yellowcake Springs. A town destroyed and rebuilt but, and here’s the true horror of this tale, remaining always the same.
Guy Salvidge writes simply and he knows how to engage the reader with a flat economy of words. When I reached the end of the book I wanted it to continue, I wanted to see how this bleak future Australia turned out. It all seemed so real to me that I wondered if such a place as Yellowcake Springs really existed somewhere north of Perth and east of the sea. Is Western Australia dotted by nuclear power stations owned and operated by the Chinese? Is it all so dry there, so damn desperate to survive for any forms of life?
Living here in the United States, in the semi-desert state of Colorado where the air is so dry and thin a discarded orange will not rot but will, instead, just dry out to a crusty sphere, I can still look around and see green trees and grass and flowers and hear the birds sing and the dogs bark. But the Western Australia of this novel takes the meaning of desert several stages further into aridness and despair. I see the landscape there in my minds eye, I see a once lush spring of water now dry and caked with cracked yellow mud, in which only a few desert creatures survive and mankind is not wanted. I see a yellowcake spring here and now. And I reach out to Guy Salvidge in the real Western Australia and I say, Tell me, Guy, tell me it isn’t so!?
-- Dave Hyde, May 2012
When I got my copy of Yellowcake Springs by Guy Salvidge in the mail I set aside David Beckham’s autobiography – an interesting book in itself – and beheld this artifact from Australia with its fiery red cover dominated by a circular nuclear warning sign in the very center. Keep out! Stay away! It seemed to scream at me, You really don’t want to read this book! I opened it eagerly, and spotted the photograph of Guy Salvidge in the front papers – a scary sight and almost enough to make me drop the book in horror! But… I had to read this book; I’d been looking forward to it for a long time. Guy Salvidge is one of Australia’s new crew of writers active internationally; he’s won awards! Several of them, and this novel Yellowcake Springs, his second, is itself a winner of the 2011 IP Picks Best Fiction Award and in 2012 is on the short list for the Norma K. Hemming Award for speculative fiction in Australia. I can see why.
Set in Western Australia somewhere near Perth and in Perth itself Yellowcake Springs assembles a cast of main characters that we get to know well as we read into the novel. There’s Sylvia Baron (and, yes, she does resemble Sylvia Bohlen from Philip K. Dick’s MARTIAN TIME-SLIP) who is an advertising artist for a Chinese nuclear power community in the Australian desert: Yellowcake Springs. It’s her job to entice people there and make them feel safe and secure living next to a huge nuclear power complex. To do this she uses a technology called CDS – Controlled Dreaming State – by which dreams are manipulated and shared by online communities of people anxious to have some virtual fun away from their lives in what is the depressing and desolate land of near-future Western Australia.
Sylvia’s husband, David, is a sketchy character and possibly up to no good. He comes and goes in the novel but never seems able to truly connect with his wife, who is having a CDS affair with a man she doesn’t know or even know where he lives. This Rion, short for Orion, is a handsome down-and-outer who actually lives in a deserted town some distance from Yellowcake Springs. Using a CDS Console stolen in a raid on the local police station in which the area militia ousted the cops from the town of East Hills, Rion in his beyond shabby rotting apartment plans with the aid of this CDS Console to escape from his dead town and move up in the world. His CDS affair with Sylvia is, he thinks, his ticket out. But first he must escape from the militia yahoos who control his town and then make his way across the desert to Yellowcake Springs.
But, despite Sylvia and the Chinese nuclear corporation’s efforts to make Yellowcake Springs a flagship community, all is not well in this circular man-made town with its three zones: red for where the nuclear reactors are, yellow for where the workers work, and green for where they live, all surrounded by a barbed-wire fence and monitored by surveillance cameras.
The Chinese are the main villains in this plot and they have devised a variation of the Controlled Dreaming State that operates in the daytime, as it were, called Controlled Waking State. Chinese workers are sent to Yellowcake Springs to work on the reactors and a special crew is hooked up to the Controlled Waking State apparatus and must learn how to live and work in the CWS condition. This is not an easy task as once the Chinese experimenters are in CWS they begin to lose touch with reality and are never sure whether they are in CWS or are really awake.
In a future world of overpopulation, no water, the land turning to desert and lawlessness encroaching everywhere there are many unhappy people looking for someone to blame for their sorry lot. An oasis such as Yellowcake Springs with its huge nuclear cooling towers attracts the destructive attentions of these environmentalists or ‘mentals’ as they are known and the town becomes a target.
But life goes on in fits and starts for those living in the novel. There’s not much hope anywhere and even the big city of Perth proves a disappointment. Things are just going downhill everywhere. The Chinese are a remote omnipotent power, well intentioned perhaps, but without any soul. The Mentals are just lashing out with hate at anything technological even though they can barely survive without it. Everywhere is starvation and death but still the global population of humanity grows virtually unchecked.
At the end of the novel we see the fate of Yellowcake Springs. A town destroyed and rebuilt but, and here’s the true horror of this tale, remaining always the same.
Guy Salvidge writes simply and he knows how to engage the reader with a flat economy of words. When I reached the end of the book I wanted it to continue, I wanted to see how this bleak future Australia turned out. It all seemed so real to me that I wondered if such a place as Yellowcake Springs really existed somewhere north of Perth and east of the sea. Is Western Australia dotted by nuclear power stations owned and operated by the Chinese? Is it all so dry there, so damn desperate to survive for any forms of life?
Living here in the United States, in the semi-desert state of Colorado where the air is so dry and thin a discarded orange will not rot but will, instead, just dry out to a crusty sphere, I can still look around and see green trees and grass and flowers and hear the birds sing and the dogs bark. But the Western Australia of this novel takes the meaning of desert several stages further into aridness and despair. I see the landscape there in my minds eye, I see a once lush spring of water now dry and caked with cracked yellow mud, in which only a few desert creatures survive and mankind is not wanted. I see a yellowcake spring here and now. And I reach out to Guy Salvidge in the real Western Australia and I say, Tell me, Guy, tell me it isn’t so!?
-- Dave Hyde, May 2012
January 3, 2012
One of my favourite reads for 2011.
May 17, 2020
Three protagonists. It would have been a better story with only one. The story of Jiang Wei is particularly unsatisfactory. Also, it ended quite suddenly.
September 24, 2018
Guy Salvidge's fictional writing eerily presages what seems to be developing as fact.
Not over the top, it gives me genuine creeps - especially when I see the way China is going with its "citizen monitoring"project.
The story is highly plausible.
I personally like a bit more levity, even when a story is dead serious; so, for me, this was the only downside to an otherwise solid piece of speculative fiction.
Not over the top, it gives me genuine creeps - especially when I see the way China is going with its "citizen monitoring"project.
The story is highly plausible.
I personally like a bit more levity, even when a story is dead serious; so, for me, this was the only downside to an otherwise solid piece of speculative fiction.
December 11, 2022
What a disappointing ending! I found the first 3/4 of the book engrossing with the storyline of different characters coming together. But... and for me, it was a big but... there was a real feel the idea of a sequel was put into the writers mind. If that wasn't the reason the rest of the novel just didn't gel, I can't think what was. This had not made me want to read any more from this author, who had a promising start with this premise.
July 28, 2020
I persisted and read all but the last 15 pages or so. I just couldn’t push on any longer. This book had promise and I really wanted it to be good. The author is local and I love the theme and genre.
It started ok, but it never really reached any great heights... and then it started to fall apart at the seams.
Not for me.
It started ok, but it never really reached any great heights... and then it started to fall apart at the seams.
Not for me.
September 23, 2024
I thought this was a great suspense story, fast paced, and a lot different interesting intertwined story lines. The only thing that really lacked was the love story angle and the brief sex scenes and such, which i could have done without. Which was the only reason i gave it a four star.
October 9, 2024
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. Looking forward to reading Yellowcake summer. Very thought provoking regarding multi billion/trillion dollar companies, many of which have multiple operations in Western Australia.
January 11, 2013
A cautionary tale. Scary possibility of another country buying land and settling a small province and claiming as its own.
The mining industry has sold out and the Chinese move in, building nuclear reactors in a fictional town in the northwest of West Australia. The people in town are under the Chinese government, passports are needed to get in and out. New technology CDS, Controlled Dreaming State, allow people to pretend to be someone else or in the Jiang Wei's case, meet with his fiancé.
I won't spoil it for anyone, but there is a group of people working against the Chinese corporation. A nice twist to the action. This is also Book 1 in the series.
School libraries would benefit from adding this book to their collection.
The mining industry has sold out and the Chinese move in, building nuclear reactors in a fictional town in the northwest of West Australia. The people in town are under the Chinese government, passports are needed to get in and out. New technology CDS, Controlled Dreaming State, allow people to pretend to be someone else or in the Jiang Wei's case, meet with his fiancé.
I won't spoil it for anyone, but there is a group of people working against the Chinese corporation. A nice twist to the action. This is also Book 1 in the series.
School libraries would benefit from adding this book to their collection.
May 27, 2013
Some time in the near future. A new group of recruits from China arrive at Yellowcake Springs, a secure community in Australia just outside a nuclear reactor.
People here have food, VR, and no reason to fear or know about what goes on outside the perimter. Where food is scarce and it's pretty much Mad Max but without the cool vehicles.
Jiang Wei finds out in training that he's one of the first to participate in a new "Controlled Waking State" experiment for Sinocorp. Sylvia works on PR for Yellowcake, while her husband's civil disobedience appears to be taking a more rebellious turn. Rion wants to come in from the wilds.
Salvidge has been writing for a while, but I think this is his first widely published novel. Taps into utopia/dystopia narratives with a pretty good effort.
People here have food, VR, and no reason to fear or know about what goes on outside the perimter. Where food is scarce and it's pretty much Mad Max but without the cool vehicles.
Jiang Wei finds out in training that he's one of the first to participate in a new "Controlled Waking State" experiment for Sinocorp. Sylvia works on PR for Yellowcake, while her husband's civil disobedience appears to be taking a more rebellious turn. Rion wants to come in from the wilds.
Salvidge has been writing for a while, but I think this is his first widely published novel. Taps into utopia/dystopia narratives with a pretty good effort.
May 15, 2012
I really enjoyed this look into futuristic Western Australian society!
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews