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 Devil's Swamp near Baton Rouge, cleaning up a small pollution spill, when she and her new lover, Max, discover the mysterious Watermind. Reilly's 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 there's 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.
M.M. Buckner won the Philip K. Dick Award for her last SF novel, War Surf. She lives in Brentwood, Tennessee.