If you're an SF fan, particularly if you're an Australian SF, fan you really must read Lotus Blue .

Cat Sparks is a hell of a worldbuilder and her post-apocalyptic Australia drips with atmosphere, tension and great ideas.

Wheeled sailing ships navigate a black sea of glass that was once a city, caravans of hard-bitten traders crawl across the blasted deserts, and the lethal relics of conflicts past both litter and roam the landscape, still taking lives centuries after their creation.

Star is a young woman living on one such caravan, riding its rocking wagons across the endless wastelands between the remaining human settlements. SHe's bored with her life of travel with her medico sister, and has plans to abandon the caravan at its next stop, to seek a life that is more than helping her sister bandaging hurt caravaneers.

While Star wrestles with how and when to abandon her travelling family, at a distant underground city - a relic of the pre-war times - a battered Templar supersoldier is being sent on a mission, his war-wracked and ancient body driving him forward on one final mission.

Another ancient is waiting out her many years at an old communications base, tending to a flock of followers that have gathered around her while wondering if she will ever see her equally old lost lover again.

All of them will find themselves facing a terrible threat of awesome power. An ancient war machine has reawakened, and its malevolent growth will draw all to it, where the future of the dark future could be decided.

This is a real page turner of a novel, with a pace that never slackens and an engine of imaginative ideas that brings to mind the best of dystopian SF. There are scenes of violence and grimness, but they never overwhelm the underlying sense of hope that leavens the bleak bread of Sparks' apocalypse, and makes this novel much more than just another post-apocalyptic SF dirge. Sparks can write, and she pulls the reader along through the story, raising the stakes and keeping the tension high, all the while showing us the wonderfully vivid world she has created.

Grab a copy, and shelve it next to Sean William's Metal Fatigue and T.R Napper's 36 Streets. Lotus Blue fits well among the best of Australian Science Fiction.

Five limping but still deadly supersoldiers out of five.