Charles Platt - Garbage World

Garbage World is very much a novel of two parts. First published in 1967 around the time when ecological awareness was beginning to become a mainstream political concept, the book deals with a solar system wide society that has a rubbish problem. The waste and rubbish of human production is dumped on an asteroid which is inhabited by humans who were originally there to manage the waste, but have evolved into an autonomous group of humans who view other "clean" humans with distaste. These villagers scavenge the rubbish as its dumped on their asteroid, eating thrown away food and collecting the best bits of the rubbish. Those who get the best collections of rubbish rise higher in the ranks of their society. Its a sort of cargo cult of humans living on garbage.

But the asteroid is becoming unstable and needs to be managed. A survey team arrives to warn the inhabitants but there are hidden motives. Gaylord, a younger, more impressionable anthropologist on the survey becomes pulled into Garbage World's society. Despite his almost pathological hatred of dirt he gradually gets pulled into life, including beginning a relationship with the daughter of the village head. Gaylord, to use more modern parlance, goes rogue and joins in with an act of rebellion against the outsiders.

The first half of the book works relatively well. Its a fairly amusing commentary on the attitudes of a throwaway society, perhaps mostly targeted at the consumer rich society in the United States of the 1950s and 1960s. Platt is rather humorous, though much of the humour is rather scatological. We are encouraged to laugh at the student people who revel in dirt and rubbish, as well as the overly clean, prim and proper Earthers. Of course this is spoof, so it shouldn't be taken too literarily, but I did wonder whether there was an element of the author trying to portray less technological advanced people as behaving like this.

The second half of the novel is less satisfying. It becomes a rather tame adventure story where Gaylord, his new partner and the villagers try to escape the destruction of their society. At the end everyone engages in an orgy of dirt and sex. So the book begins with a interesting premise but abandons it to engage in a rather putrid adventure. No doubt there are some that were titillated by this odd combination of dirt and sex but it did little for me. Garbage World is an interesting footnote of 1960s science fiction, but it's not a classic.