Down There in Darkness

George Turner's Down There in Darkness will appear in time for the World SF convention in August 1999 in Australia, at which he is Guest of Honor. Turner, who died in 1996, was a significant and award-winning Australian novelist before turning to SF in the 1970s and becoming one of the great SF writers of the late twentieth century. His major books include Beloved Son, Drowning Towers, Brain Child, and Genetic Soldier. He was widely reviewed and was a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best novel.
This novel chronicles the future destruction and eventual rebirth of human civilization. It is linked to the future world of both Beloved Son and Drowning Towers, as well as others of his works. About a hundred years in the future, two men, one of them a policeman, are investigating a death involving a large international genetic engineering corporation. They become bothersome to the corporate owners and are taken out of action not by being killed but by being put to sleep for hundreds of years. But this may be a fate worse than death. They awaken to a distant future in which contemporary industrial civilization has been "cleansed" from the earth and what humanity survives is learning to live a very low-technology lifestyle, being bred eugenically to this life. The cleansing was done on purpose, an international plot by the rich and powerful who in fact rule the world - and who, in this distant future, are dying off. This is a complex and morally tortuous vision, and Turner's characters find it nearly impossible to adapt without killing someone, perhaps even themselves. Down There in Darkness is a serious and ambitious SF novel that completes the canon of a major writer.