William Dietrich, Getting Back (2000)
Good Reads meta-data is 370 pages rated 3.70/5.00 by 199 litizens
Genre: Sy Fy
Verdict: Mad Max réchauffé.
In the near future all the world’s problems have been solved by United Corporations which has a place for everyone and everyone is in place. Life goes on according to McKinsey management über alles. Each person is a good employee and a good consumer and that makes the world of twelve billion go around. But for Dyson it is boring, boring, boring, boring. It is as tirelessly and tiresomely predictable as the ideological squibs from News Corporation’s hacks. (Is that possible?)
The world is neat, clean, orderly, a kind of benevolent Big Brother society without the personal touch of Big Bro. Dyson is lazy at work, makes asinine remarks, and generally acts like an adolescent. He made me think of that midget, old what’s his name, Tim, or Tom, or Gone. He comes into contact with mysterious, glamorous Raven who tells him there is an alternative – Australia!
But wait Australia is a dead continent, thanks to the ScoMo Virus thirty years before. It is one big exclusion zone, now all but eliminated from the only source of human consciousness, Wikipedia.
Much of the middle of the book is how Dyson got there which I will spare readers. The point is that Australia has returned to its history and become a dumping ground for recidivists (look it up) criminals who are called morally impaired. (I tried not to take any of this personally.) See the reference to Mad Max above. Also dumped there are malcontents, misfits, and the likes of Dyson who are high-maintenance, squeaky, unproductive wheels. There is a twist to that at the end that seemed irrelevant to this reader.
The bulk of the book is survival in the Outback, surviving the morally impaired, surviving the relentless climate and distances, surviving Channel Ten testosterone broadcasts, and using the Australian salute. There are a few natives who, against the odds, and unknown to United Corporations, have survived the ScoMo Virus, becoming white aboriginals. A nice touch that. The smarty pants do not heed the advice of these oddities because it is vague and spooky. They should have.
True love conquers all, and in the end Raven saves Dyson and they start a new life. [Cue violins.] This is all ground he covered again (and better) in The Murder of Adam and Eve (2014).
Dietrich goes to the ends of the earth for his fiction, others have been set in the remotest Africa, Arctic, and the Antarctic, and while there are no acknowledgements in the Kindle edition I read, it is likely that he spent time in the Outback to write this tale.
I wonder if he came across any of Arthur Upfield’s Outback krimis? Shoulda.