When she’s not gazing up into the night sky, the teen narrator of Inga Simpson’s terrific new dystopian novel, The Thinning, spends a great deal of time looking anxiously at the bright orange watch her mother has strapped to her wrist. Fin Kelvin is her name, and like the reader, she doesn’t know whether she’s living at the end of the world or on the cusp of something new.
Fin and her family have had to adapt to the demands of a rapidly changing world, one shaped by relentless resource extraction. They are reeling with grief as they try to survive on a planet on the brink of systems collapse. The Barrier Reef is dead, the last koala is gone, the Great Artesian Basin is contaminated, human fertility rates are plummeting and “the moon’s cycles are all out of whack” thanks to a space mining incident.
