As I continue to write News from the Squares in every spare moment I can, I experience the true joy and pain of undertaking such a task. I just want to quickly say that as I pass the 50,000 word mark, I think the whole idea is working. I’ve been brutally cutting, changing and re-writing but the essential elements are holding up.
Being immersed not only in the story and characters, but the conceptual world I am attempting to create is stimulating and all engrossing. Everywhere I look I’m seeing concepts and technologies, ideas and social changes that seem to back up my original concept.
The simple notion of a world primarily run by women is incredibly complex and full of very obvious pitfalls. The ‘Oh, let’s just make women rule the world then everything will be fine’ simplicity really won’t wash. When I mentioned the idea to my wonderful sister-in-law recently she reacted strongly ‘Oh, that would be awful! All those women being bitchy and catty to each other, the world would be a nightmare!’ ‘Well, it might not be better.’ I said rather pathetically, ‘but surely it would be very different.’ One of the many things that inspired the notion of a gentle matriarchy was reading ‘The End of Men’ by the American journalist Hanna Rosin. It makes fairly sobering reading for any man, any father who has sons and any woman who quite likes the odd bloke in her life. The statistics are shocking; the enormous increase in the number of women college graduates all around the globe and the corresponding vertiginous drop in male graduates has to be telling us something. The mechanisation of production and corresponding drop in demand for human strength as an essential part thereof, combined with the corresponding increase in demand for work requiring ‘people skills’ all gesture to the shift of power and influence toward women. I’m not totally swayed by all of Rosin’s arguments but her research is solid enough, and the raw statistics as well as my experience speak louder than any intellectual or sociological theory . In keeping with the original ideas behind News from Gardenia, a future that isn’t either embroiled in or recovering from a catastrophic societal collapse brought on by zombies or asteroid devastation, I am working on the notion of gradual change over the next 200 years. Not some apocalyptic struggle where scantily clad warrior maidens cull the male population in a Gothic blood bath of revenge slaughter, although I might write that book one day just because the cover could be really sexy. No, ‘News from the Squares’ is using the notion of a gradual social change where less men hold the reigns of power and women have to, like it or not, fill the vacuum. We have seen the concept of the dead-beat dad in families all over the world, indeed I’ve met a few myself. What if we had a dead beat Prime Minister or President who just didn’t show up to work very often. ‘Who needs the stress?’ he says as he slopes off to watch the footie. Extreme maybe, but the increasing number of women who are the main breadwinners in a household and the steady decrease in jobs exclusively carried out by men is pointing in one direction only. This, of course, has to be balanced by the enormous number of very powerful, driven, determined men who could use fairly extreme measures to cling to power, there’s a couple of them about I think. Right, back to the book. And by the way, thanks for the support, it’s a great driving force.