From storm drains, illegal dumps, and flooded landfills, all of North Americaβs most advanced technology flows down the Mississippi Riverβmicrochips, nano-devices, pharmaceuticals, genetically modified seedβand lodges in the Louisiana delta. Out of this mire emerges a self- organized neural net, drifting in the water: the Watermind. It can freeze, boil, condense, and moveβseemingly at will.
Both infuriating and sympathetic, CJ Reilly is a brilliant, sexy, self-destructive MIT dropout running away from Cambridge and the suicide of her ironic, emotionally- distant father. She is working as a laborer in Devilβs Swamp near Baton Rouge, cleaning up a small pollution spill, when she and her new lover, Max, discover the mysterious Watermind. Reillyβs more interested in investigating it than containing it, but when it kills someone and escapes into the Mississippi, corporations, governments, protesters, the Coast Guard, and a really wacky underground journalist get involved. And thereβs no longer any question that it must be destroyed before it reaches the ocean. Watermind is Philip K. Dick meets The Blob, a postmodern combination of camp SF motifs and writerly ambition attacking serious subjects.
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