Publisher’s Blurb
Out of Africa comes a dead man walking upon the water – a portent of the political adventures into whichj Knowle Noland, ex-convict, ex-traveller and captain of the 80,000-ton freighter Trieste Star, is about to tumble headlong.
Choked, disease-ridden towns, robots and prison gangs tending the bare, poison drenched countryside are all characteristic of Knowle’s world; only in Africa is the soil still fertile and the people still relatively vital. On the coast of Africa, near Walvis Bay, Knowle runs his freighter aground; and there he meets Justine and the destructive destiny that purges him of guilt and frees him from hallucination.
Brian Says

Earthworks is a bleak and hallucinatory vision of Malthusian over-population, enlarged from the novella Skeleton Crew, where criminals are condemned to work on the polluted land. Knowle Noland decides in the end that to precipitate world war might be a way of starting over again: more a sixties solution than an eighties one.

FIRST EDITION: Faber & Faber, 1965