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Megacities, ravaged land, and companion robots. Could that be our future?

caption: Brenda Cooper's latest sci-fi novel 'Keepers' follows two sisters trying to save the Northwest wilderness after ecological disasters destroy much of the land.
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Brenda Cooper's latest sci-fi novel 'Keepers' follows two sisters trying to save the Northwest wilderness after ecological disasters destroy much of the land.
Photo courtesy of Penguin Random House

Imagine the Pacific Northwest in the future.

Seattle is now "Seacouver," a green, high-tech megacity in a weather dome. There's high-speed transportation up and down the West Coast. But ecological disasters have ravaged the land, making much of it uninhabitable. How do humans survive? It's a question author and futurist Brenda Cooper explores in her series "Project Earth."

In Cooper's latest book, "Keepers," two sisters have to work together to protect the wilderness that surrounds the megacities. The book follows a tension between people who want more land rights in the off-limits wildlands and those whose priorities are in the megacities.

"The future's going to be at least as complex as the present," Cooper predicts.

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