Since a deadly virus and the violence that followed wiped out his parents and most of his community, Finn has lived alone on the rugged coast with only his loyal dog Rowdy for company.
He has stayed alive for two winters—hunting and fishing and trading food, and keeping out of sight of the Wilders, an armed and dangerous gang that controls the north, led by a ruthless man named Ramage.
But Finn’s isolation is shattered when a girl runs onto the beach. Rose is a Siley—an asylum seeker—and she has escaped from Ramage, who had enslaved her and her younger sister, Kas. Rose is desperate, sick, and needs Finn’s help. Kas is still missing somewhere out in the bush.
And Ramage wants the girls back—at any cost.
Click on the map for further information about The Otway National Park.
Few kinds of literature are as useful for criticizing human nature and institutions as is science fiction. Science-fiction stories can present fictional societies with problems or injustices that mirror or magnify aspects of a real society. Some science-fiction writers have created stories that are very pessimistic about human nature or the future. These stories are dystopias, which are the opposite of utopias. Dystopias present horrifying societies in which people live bleak, limited lives. In these stories, authors may imagine future ugly consequences that could result from present-day behaviors. Examples of dystopias include Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953). Later dystopias include Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and The Testaments (2019), Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), and Suzanne Collins’s young adult Hunger Games trilogy (2008–10).
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