2100

In Phillips’ SF novel, an Australian born in 2000 and cryogenically frozen in the 2030s emerges just in time to celebrate his centenary in a much-changed world.

James Lawson, a Canberra businessperson who’d been in stasis until medical technology could safely remove his brain tumor, wakes up in the year 2100. Lawson’s care team fires up microscopic bots to cure him, feeds him soup, and fits him with a detachable emotional regulator—effectively a tranquilizer, attached behind the ear. As he recovers, he acclimates himself to his new surroundings. Climate change has rendered Australia even hotter and dryer, with ocean waves now lapping at the Sydney Opera House. An economic collapse in the 2040s wiped out much of the world’s wealth, including Lawson’s trust; due to that and a pandemic, a mere 10 billion people populate the communes and megacities of the world’s four European Union–like blocs. Before long, Lawson heads back to Canberra to figure out his place in the new society, answering incredulous and obtrusive questions about his era for school groups and advising a production of Hamlet, set partly in a turn-of-the-millennium burger joint. Phillips presents some masterful worldbuilding in this novel, and, at his best, his writing is very funny, as when a child asks Lawson if he got to “fly in a spaceship, or meet David Attenborough,” and he responds that he “watched it all on television.” The premise of a skirt-chasing, beer-loving, formerly nouveau riche bloke waking up in a free-love communitarian almost-paradise of Gaia worshippers is a strong one, but the plot is nearly free of conflict. Lawson visits a series of places and has conversations about how the current world works, pays too much for beer, and has trysts with a few women. Except for the tech, including a self-driving car with easily hurt feelings, this could be the story of a few months in many people’s lives right now.

An Aussie Everyman toddles through an intriguing but underexplored post-collapse world.