It's 2050, and life in the Lakes Country is teetering precariously on the knife-edge separating subsistence from disaster. CO2 emissions have dropped with the "Die-Off" of the last thirty years, but the world climate's slide to uninhabitable is just now slowing. It's still getting hotter - even in north-central BC, in Canada.The Wayback Machine picks up the story begun in "Mai Shangri-La" twenty years earlier. Humanity has been battered, but not beaten, by global warming bringing climate change and social upheaval, and a new generation of societal torch-bearers looks to the future. As a new climate regime asserts itself, though, the natural inclination to improve one's lot is once again pitted against human greed. At its heart, "The Wayback Machine" is a classic coming-of-age story of a boy's personal struggle to triumph over both nature and very human adversaries in his quest to become an adult. Danny's only fourteen, but he feels the responsibility for keeping up farm productivity to get through the winter. He believes the answer lies in the wise use of all available technologies - including the old machines like "Ferdie", his hundred year-old ethanol-converted tractor.It's been twenty years since Reuben James Runquist abandoned his retirement "Shangri-La" on the Gulf of Thailand and now, nearing his 100th birthday, he's an eccentric old curmudgeon who won't give up his techtoys on the rocky aerie he calls home. Life's wheel and Danny's storm-induced meeting with Reuben bring them both face-to-face with Angie, returning from a fifteen year absence with her fourteen-year-old daughter. An unlikely alliance of the Centenarian, the "Leuk-Kreung" Thai, her mysterious daughter, and the "new-homesteader" boy are all that stand between the Lakes District and a new feudalism - with them as the indentured labour.
