This is not the New Seattle Huckleberry Lindbergh left eight years ago. Street kids offer to take your paper receipts away for a dime. Coffee tables roam the city, selling insurance and equities. Everywhere you look there are ravens and Health and Safety signs, and everywhere you go there are constant reminders of the mayor’s “please don’t die for no reason” slogan.
Huck came to New Seattle to start his life again, but within hours of arriving in the city, he’s a wanted man. The cops want to head-hack into his memories, and the Man in Black wants to know where he’s hiding a particular fridge. Fortunately, Huck wasn’t alone when he entered the city: Nena was in the drongle that took him New Seattle. Her recollection of Huck may be fuzzy, and she may be a reluctant passenger, but she knows how to help - both Huck and the citizens of New Seattle. Her plan involves putting up with four walking, talking fridges and one extremely friendly spin-dryer, but if all goes smoothly, it will mean freedom for everyone.
The citizens of New Seattle are used to the yellow-clad Health and Safety workers coming to their homes to hand out leaflets on toe-stubbings and pamphlets on opening a door safely. The citizens now live in a city where cops will pull you over so they can plug a feed into the back of your neck in order to read your profile and hear your mood. If they don’t like what they find, they can take you to Head Hack Central, where they can dig into the deepest parts of your mind for information and memories. But this city, with a zero tolerance for danger and a population full of insecure, scared citizens, is about to be transformed. While the city is celebrating its newly constructed city wall, Huck and Nena will be slipping through to “the Otherside” to deliver a fridge full of deadly test tubes to the Man in Black. They are hoping that, with the fridge in the right hands, the mayor’s fear-inducing operation will be destroyed and the citizens of New Seattle (including Huck) will be able to start healing and living again.
Tim Scott has written a story that could only have come from an infinitely imaginative mind. Not only does the story surprise you with its creative use of description, and dialogue, but it’s funny! Yes, the appliances get the majority of the funny lines, but some of the secondary characters get a laugh in there, too. New Seattle’s Security Detail and medical staff try to use government-approved poetry, pictures of puppies and sound clips of sneezing cats to promote calmness; Mendes, who is in charge of a department that stops citizens from doing stupid things, has an Irony Virus to contend with at work. People who enjoy reading Douglas Adams and Jasper Fforde should check out Love in the Time of Fridges.
Tim Scott, author of Outrageous Fortune, has also written several children’s book. A graduate from Cambridge University in England, he has written for BBC Radio 4 and won a BAFTA award for co-writing and directing a children’s series.