Tiger Eyes: a story of the future

Non-Dutch readers might know Tonke Dragt as the author of "The Letter for the King", a book which has recently been adapted into a Netflix series (...which I haven't watched.) This is probably also her most famous and beloved book over here. It even received a prize for being the best Dutch children's novel of the past fifty years. She also wrote science fiction for a slightly older audience - what we'd now call YA- and this book is one of those novels.

I'll just say a little bit about her life, because it's so interesting; She was born in what at the time was still the Dutch East Indies, and spend her early teens in an internment camp for Dutch women and children during the Japanese invasion of the country. It was during these years that she started writing, on bits of stolen toilet paper according to the bio in one of her books. You can imagine that stuck with me as a child.

Tiger Eyes is sequel to an older novel, which was published before scientists knew that the surface of Venus was a barren wasteland. Maybe it's therefore her youth in the tropics that led her to imagine the planet as home to a lush, gigantic rainforest "of towering heights and miles across". This in contrast to her vision of future Earth; a dense urban sprawl, dotted by the occasional nature reserve. We all have robotic domestic servants, and rain is scheduled to only fall at night. Tigers are extinct, and anything truly wild and dangerous has to be found off-planet.