The Visit of Ariya Iddhi

Global Warming - governments everywhere have put it in the "too-hard basket." But not in Australia where the Prime Minister is loudly trumpeting his concern on the international stage. Behind closed doors, however, it's a very different story and one the P.M. wants to keep tightly under wraps. Then along come the Randters: two illiterate geriatric farmers tricked off their land at Wombat Hole in the desolate outback. Now struggling to survive homeless in the city, they meet an idealistic young Goth who helps them hide their deficiencies and get clerical employment in NOCCAM, the Australian government's elite climate change quango. Here they witness a seedy struggle between pure science and human greed. On one hand, CEO, ex-insurance manager, Jolyon Butters, doesn't want to rock the boat and has outlandish plans for self-aggrandizement. On the other hand, Australia's leading authority on climate science, the cold and clinical Dr Harry Kernot, is channeling information from a long dead scientist and monitoring disturbing climate news from Hell. The stakes are high. Will Australia's massive coal and cattle industries be forced to close down? Or will someone die to keep them open for 'business as usual'? In the wake of his bizarre and imaginative novel "Do Kangaroos Believe in God?," Andrew Thelander has taken an award-winning short story and expanded it into a masterfully dark comic novel that strips bare the forces at work around Global Warming action. A literary gem that future generations will read with delight - or disbelief.