2019/17: The Last Walk Out -- David Helton

Paintbrush was a good dreamer. She'd predicted at least two deaths ... a lot of minor accidents, and the sighting, last year, of a skyman. Nobody had seen a skyman around here for a generation, and then Paintbrush dreamt about one and told everyone about it the next morning, and that afternoon Breeze looked up and saw a skyman way over on the south Gorge rim. For a long time he looked down at the settlement through that big eye of his ... [p. 8]

Storyteller Gibbous Moon is seventy years old, and doesn't want to enter the slow decline of old age: instead, he has decided to adopt the old custom of the Long Walk Out, abandoning his settlement and heading into the unknown. Little does he realise that he's about to become a 'holopark' star, caught on a holo-camera and broadcast to colonies all over the solar system.

And the humans in those colonies begin to question whether the virus that made Earth uninhabitable so long ago is still a threat ...

Gibbous Moon, together with his daughter-in-law Paintbrush and her baby son (and a dog named Yellow) encounter a skyman named Allaby, who's beginning to realise that not everything he's been told is true. His colleague and long-distance lover, Jenny, finds herself involved in rebellion, and nominated for a desperate mission. And the religious factions -- the Keepers of Jerusalem, the Lazarines, the Pilgrims -- all have different ideas about what a return to Earth might mean for their followers.

This was a surprisingly entertaining read, though some of the characters occasionally reverted to archetype. (Jenny in particular sometimes reminded of a woman in a Sixties space opera. Accidental lesbianism! Self-indulgence with a side-order of nakedness!) Gibbous was a delight, and certainly the most likeable person in the book. The juxtaposition of hunter-gatherers and planet rangers fuelled a great deal of merriment -- The Last Walk Out is often very funny -- while emphasising the underlying theme, that humans are humans wherever you put them.

I found it hard not to read that catastrophic virus as benign ... but that's probably just my inner misanthrope at work.