Tuskers

TUSKERS takes place on the day of a football game between the University of Nebraska and the University of Oklahoma in the year 2090. Nebraska has not lost a game in ten years, but must win this last one to complete the perfect Winning Decade. Global warming has turned the American central plains into a desert. A brilliant chemical engineer has devised a way to make petroleum products from slime corn, a desert-loving perennial invented by molecular biologists. As a result of his patents, this engineer owns a company named Anti-Environmental Products, Inc. (AEPI), whose raw material-corn slime-is the crude oil of the late 21st Century. Nebraska is now the petroleum source for much of the world, and thus the engineer's wealth. But this guy hates Nebraska and will use everything in his power to make the Tuskers lose! The molecular biologists also have succeeded in resurrecting woolly mammoths from DNA in carcasses appearing in the rapidly-melting polar ice cap. The first, and largest, of these mammoths is Archie, the University of Nebraska mascot, and the team is now known as the "Tuskers" instead of the "Cornhuskers" as earlier in the century. TUSKERS not only is science fiction, it also is satire, exploring the American obsession with football as a national sport as the world experiences global climate change, political turmoil, and accelerating technological advance. In the end, the book is not so much about sport as it is about our preoccupation with sport as a displacement behavior in a world that is changing so rapidly we cannot control it.