"The novel is the organ of becoming, the voice of a world in flux," says the character Knarf in Marjorie Barnard's futuristic fable of Sydney, Tomorrow and Tomorrow.
Knarf is a novelist himself, so you'd expect him to have some solemn ideas about what the novel can and cannot do.
But Rodney Hall, it seems, agrees; he would not otherwise have attempted to do something as difficult as write a futurist dystopia like this.

It works - which is to say it chills the heart in the way Hall probably intended it to do - because it isn't actually fantasy: it's not a beast fable such as Animal Farm, or, like Brave New World, full of technology unrecognisable for its times and therefore comic, sometimes unintentionally, in any era.

In fact, the most powerful thing about this book is that it could indeed, with a tweak here and some bad luck there, be a realistic depiction of our own world. Not for nothing has Hall subtitled his book "A fairytale of the day after tomorrow".