Indigent Earth By Scott Overton
Will the rich and powerful abandon the Earth?
Sudbury author Scott Overton has conjured up a compelling adventure story that explores today’s social divides taken to the extreme.
The inequality between Earth’s rich and poor has grown even larger since the Covid-19 pandemic. Studies proclaim that the world’s eight richest men own as much wealth as the poorest half of the Earth’s population, and the planet’s two thousand billionaires account for more than 60% of the world’s total wealth. Where will it end?
Along with that, we’ve all witnessed 2023 as a year of disastrous heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and devastating floods. Climate change is here with a vengeance. What if it’s too late to turn things around?
In Overton’s new science fiction novel Indigent Earth, the wealthy “one-percenters” have abandoned our ravaged planet 500 years earlier to go live in space colonies, leaving the survivors on Earth to live in stagnating communities known as Allocations. Now the colonists plan to come back. Earthman Killian Morningcloud dreams of the colonists’ return, hoping to become one of them. Colonist aristocrat and celebrity Natira Celestia is eager to visit Earth and meet the “noble savages” she’s sure must live there. Killian and Natira’s calamitous meeting will shatter their dreams and hurl them into a struggle for survival as they pursue the darkest secrets of the rich and powerful.
“It’s an entertaining and gripping adventure story,” says Overton, “but with strong themes of colonialism, and economic inequality. The truth is, being on the wrong side of the ‘privilege gap’ could happen to any of us in the years to come.”
Are things really so bad that those with the means might actually abandon the Earth? Overton points out that we’ve been polluting our home planet for most of human history, but especially in the past century, when we’ve devastated plant and animal species, acidified vast oceans, and turned the very climate against us.
“I don’t want to believe there’s no hope of fixing these problems,” Overton insists. “But too many of the world’s most powerful people are still blocking the changes needed because their personal fortunes are threatened. And since billionaires are now dominating space industries, I don’t think my fictional scenario is implausible.”
Still, he stresses that Indigent Earth is an adventure, not a lecture. “Killian and Natira are about as different as two people can be—both strong-willed with deep convictions, yet forced to work together. So, it was fun to write such a charged relationship.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
A well-known radio morning host for more than 25 years in Sudbury, Overton has built a second career as an author. His radio-themed debut novel Dead Air was shortlisted for a Northern Lit Award in 2012, and his science fiction/thriller novels The Primus Labyrinth, Naïda, and The Dispossession of Dylan Knox have been well-received too, with readers most often comparing them to the work of Michael Crichton. The writer considered the ‘dean of Canadian science fiction’, Robert J. Sawyer, said of Overton’s thriller Augment Nation: “Scott Overton is a terrific writer and his vision of tomorrow is both realistic and frightening. Read this book!”
Indigent Earth and all of Overton’s books are also available online in eBook and print (find them at your favorite outlet using these universal book links: https://books2read.com/IndigentEarth or https://books2read.com/ScottOverton ). If they aren’t in stock at your favorite local store, they can be ordered. Or ask for them at your local library.
MORE INFORMATION
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