On a Wandering Planet, by Jean Harrison
I’m not sure if this book is badly written or if it’s just the editing and typesetting that’s to blame but there are numerous typographical and other errors and the way the narrative is structured makes it a more difficult read than it needs to be.
Having said that, I managed to finish it in a couple of days, albeit while taking a short holiday!
The setting is reminiscent of J G Ballard dystopian novels – particularly Concrete Island where a driver is stranded for years between motorways after an undetected crash. But the premise behind this story is an interesting one – overcome the problem of traffic congestion by building more and more, larger roads (12 lane M25 anyone?) and then knocking down all the houses to free everyone to live in a campervan. Ostensibly, this is to protect the natural world by corralling all the people onto the roads and overnight stops (think motorway service station but with each parking space secured behind metal screens and locked doors) before fencing them off from the world beyond.
For most people, what begins as a sort of ideal situation quickly deteriorates into an unpleasant peripatetic life, moving as demanded by an authoritarian state from one soulless overnight stop to another. The story follows one, lonely driver as she tries to reconcile her initial support for the idea with her increasing isolation and dislocation from nature and from other people. Forced, against her will, to care for a feral teenager, she must find a way of saving her own sanity.
This is an original idea of what our dystopian future may look like. I only wish it had been edited more effectively.
On a Wandering Planet by Jean Harrison (Cinnamon Press, 2015)
This book appears to be out of print. I did find one copy that had just sold on ebay but otherwise, second-hand bookshops may be your only hope of securing a copy.