It was originally published by Hyland House in Australia in 1979, and simultaneously in USA by Harper & Row, under the title Misplaced Persons.

It can be read as science fiction, as a psychological study of adolescent alienation, as an allegory of man in the modern world, or as pure fantasy.

It questions man's existence, not inappropriately in Berkeleyan terms, and focuses on problems of relationships, between parents and child, between boy and girl, between adolescent and society.

In his own way, he has borrowed here and there, added this furniture to a common primal fear which he may or may not consider an original inspiration, and produced what amounts to a generification.

Long after Aldiss and Disch and the rest of those fellows are forgotten, this sort of story will have drifted into the folklore, and when the Almighty looks for what was truly viable in SF, this is what He will find, smoothed off and grayed like some slumped old range of timeworn mountains, far more often than He will encounter some sharp-edged cleft or some bright, shining peak.