Tuskers

By John Janovy, Jr

TUSKERS is an explosive combination of sci-fi, college football, humor, and satire that will keep you wondering seriously about the social impact of this game we all follow so closely and emotionally. 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. Join the fans for this Game of the Centuries!

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Janovy, Jr
• Release date: Jul 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465805690

John Janovy, Jr

About the author:John Janovy, Jr. (PhD, University of Oklahoma, 1965) is the author of seventeen books and over ninety scientific papers and book chapters. These books range from textbooks to science fiction to essays on athletics. He is now retired, but when an active faculty member held the Paula and D. B. Varner Distinguished Professorship in Biological Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His research interest is parasitology. He has been Director of UNL’s Cedar Point Biological Station, Interim Director of the University of Nebraska State Museum, Assistant Dean of Arts and Sciences, and secretary-treasurer of the American Society of Parasitologists.His teaching experiences include large-enrollment freshman biology courses, Field Parasitology at the Cedar Point Biological Station, Invertebrate Zoology, Parasitology, Organismic Biology, and numerous honors seminars. He has supervised thirty-two graduate students, and approximately 50 undergraduate researchers, including ten Howard Hughes scholars.His honors include the University of Nebraska Distinguished Teaching Award, University Honors Program Master Lecturer, American Health Magazine book award (for Fields of Friendly Strife), State of Nebraska Pioneer Award, University of Nebraska Outstanding Research and Creativity Award, The Nature Conservancy Hero recognition, Nebraska Library Association Mari Sandoz Award, UNL Library Friend’s Hartley Burr Alexander Award, and the American Society of Parasitologists Clark P. Read Mentorship Award.

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