Hundreds of years in the future, Earth. 2nd novel.
"It's hundreds of years in the future and the world is perfect. Total fulfillment and happiness are the official goals of the Compassionate Society, and any citizens who find themselves less than delighted are guilty of a PainCrime.
"Cartoonist Courtney Hall is trying to find her true place in a society whose computers and projections have assigned a happy life to everyone. Yet when one of her political cartoons runs afoul of the Ministry of Pain, Courtney finds herself a fugitive from justice - and a target of the omniscient Love Police.
"Her only escape is to drop through a manhole into a strange underground of discontent, a labyrinth of nests and tunnels beneath the surging metropolis. Now in a counterworld of orgasm junkies and biochip-implanted raccoons, a solitary rebel dreams of finding the edge." [jacket blurb, UK trade pbk, 1990]
"When considering Out on Blue Six , Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World spring to mind -- but only briefly. McDonald draws a far closer bead on the consumerist non-culture we're creating today in the West, a stifling capitalism which he parodies as an omnipresent and slightly inept bureaucracy whose enshrined duty is to provide each citizen with the greatest possible happiness. The great thing is that his depiction of a future-utopia-gone-off-the-rails-and-up-for-judgement is a million miles from 1984 's grey brutality, or Brave New World 's plastic sterility, or any brain-dead rendition of Thatcherite police state. His use of the language brings to his settings and characters a near-hallucinatory vividness, occasionally slipping into a kind of extended prose riff of cadence and brightness". --Michael Cobley (in Science Fiction Eye , Issue 8, Winter 1991).
"A satirical look at society in an 'utopian' police state. A quick, fun read". --Henry W.Targowski (in Mark/Space , 1995).
