I mostly enjoyed this.
The story starts mid-action, as it should, and the kind of action is really my thing. The prose is also great from the start, even made me consider checking those books out (she’s the only person to have wonn the Hugo for best novel three times in a row, and now she’s a finalist again, alongside other known names who are also previous winners.
Gee, how do these people even do it?! 
)
Although I enjoyed the first scene a lot, the second scene does one of my pet peeves in short-stories: a flashback. Explaining things right after an opening action scene is a structure I see
A LOT when I read around in SFFH Magazines. It would be OK if I only saw it once in a while, but there are some magazines that publish at least one story with that
exact same structure in
every single issue. It bothers me because, I mean, can’t you scatter the worldbuilding through the story, instead of infodumping? ( I wrote a story with that structure once, to see if I would finally praise editors. It didn’t work.
).
The dystopia is such a bad future, so terrible, so over-the-top, that I don’t think it will ever happen, not under any circumstances whatsoever. Well, let’s hope I’m right. I liked the host’s commentary when she said that the problems were solved with food and cultural heritage.
