'Great science fiction often tackles portentous real-world events. The genre provides a heady platform for the extrapolation of ideas, imagining what might happen if a current situation were pushed to extremes. Tasmanian-born author Rohan Wilson embraces the liberty of genre conventions in his latest book. Having thus far examined his home state’s brutal colonial history in the novels The Roving Party and To Name Those Lost, he changes tack by leaping five decades into the future with Daughter of Bad Times, a layered novel that can be read as a doomed love story, a climate change warning and a searing commentary on Australian refugee policy.' (Introduction)