Reviews and Praise for Seed
“Fans weary of common postapocalyptic tropes will greatly appreciate Ziegler’s imaginative world-building, vivid writing, and compelling and racially diverse cast full of unique voices.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Overwhelmingly, Seed is a taut yet teeming future-shock thriller, not to mention a worthy addition to the perverse, burgeoning canon of dystopian Americana.”
—The Onion AV Club
“Night Shade Books seems to have made it its mission to produce great, dark science fiction debuts on a regular basis—The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, Necropolis by Michael Dempsey, God’s War by Kameron Hurley and Soft Apocalypse by Will Macintosh, just to name the ones I’ve read in the last twelve months or so. To that list we can now add Rob Ziegler’s excellent debut Seed, one of the best SF novels I’ve read so far this year.”
—Tor.com
“Richly developed characters, a stark believable world, and agendas that are never 100 percent transparent make Seed an engaging read. Not light. Not heavy. But surely thoughtful and entertaining speculative fiction.”
—New York Journal of Books
“Seed is most compelling as a portrait of characters and a society struggling, and mostly failing, to adapt to changing circumstances. Even if everyone may not agree on exactly how technology and the environment will change in the next few decades, no one can deny that large changes are coming, and novels like Seed remind us that we will have to change as well.”
—Strange Horizons
“Hardwired into Ziegler’s post-apocalyptic vision of a US ravaged by famine and warfare, is an exploration of the extreme material scarcity that the collapse will create for generations to come. Through a Rust Belt landscape of decaying cities and starving refugees, Ziegler weaves a fast-paced action plot, creating a powerful metaphor for the choices we face today in a world of economic uncertainty.”
—The Guardian
“…superb first novel.”
—The Denver Post
“Seed is a tightly woven story set in the not so distant future of the late 21st century. A future so close that I could still trace the path that got us there, could still see the remnants of the lives we are all choosing, could see my own tough ass girls trying to scrabble through the dust and eek a life out of the ruin and rubble. It is true futuristic sci-fi without the cheat of sticking humanity on a fresh planet. Oh no, in Seed we are forced to live with the results of our heinous fuckery.”
—Think Banned Thoughts
“Rob Ziegler’s Seed was another exceptional post-apocalyptic novel, set in a 22nd century America that is inhabited by millions of starving migrants and ruled by a bioengineering corporation/living city/godlike entity named Satori. The government is essentially useless, now only good for helping distribute Satori’s genetically modified seeds to the people. Brilliant world building, an impressively thick storyline, and some powerful social speculation make this another “must read.”
—Barnes and Noble, Explorations blog, best SF releases of 2011
“Ziegler is a crisp, clean writer who doesn’t bother much with explanations of the science behind Satori or the history that brought mankind to this hellhole. He’s much more interested in working the grit and friction inflaming his narrative into convulsions of violence…At its best the book has the sizzle and urgency of a particularly involving, splatter-rich video game.”
—Westword