A dead man is walking on the water – a sign of the political adventures into which Knowle Noland, ex-convict, ex-traveller and captain of the freighter Trieste Star, is about to stumble headlong.
Knowles’s world is one of choked, disease-ridden towns, robots and prison gangs tending the bare, poison drenched countryside. Ecology has become a meaningless word from the past. Only in Africa is the soil still fertile and the people still relatively vital. On the coast of Africa, Knowle runs his freighter aground; and there he meets Justine and the destructive destiny that purges him of guilt and frees him from hallucination.
Knowles’s world is one of choked, disease-ridden towns, robots and prison gangs tending the bare, poison drenched countryside. Ecology has become a meaningless word from the past. Only in Africa is the soil still fertile and the people still relatively vital. On the coast of Africa, Knowle runs his freighter aground; and there he meets Justine and the destructive destiny that purges him of guilt and frees him from hallucination.
Reviews
Aldiss' dark vision of collapsing society and withering earth is poignant and brutal . . . [a] richly detailed world
This is Aldiss' speciality ... the pace is maniacal, the swirl of events and ideas exhausting