News from the Squares

PLEASE NOTE: News From the Squares is now in production so your name can not be listed in the back of the book. However, you can pre-order a copy of the special Unbound Limited edition that will not be available in the shops.

In my last book, News from Gardenia, Gavin Meckler slips through a split in time and arrives two hundred years into the future. He discovers a world much changed from our own, a world with no money, no laws, armies or wars, no recognizable traditions or family structures and where nothing is burned to make anything else. At the end of the book he tries to return home to his own time, but something is amiss.

In News from the Squares, I am trying to create a very different world, another possible outcome for the human race that doesn’t require the total breakdown of society and a return to pre-medieval violence and disorder.

Gavin soon understands that he has travelled sideways through time to another possible future, as unlike Gardenia as our own era.

He arrives in the midst of a teeming mega city, a London that covers almost the entire landmass of what we currently know as the United Kingdom.

He soon discovers that this city exhibits a few other major changes in the way the human race lives and organizes the population. Once again it is a completely sustainable and highly technologically developed society, structured around a seemingly endless series of squares. In the center of each square there are huge fields dense with lush vegetation and trees.

Much of this environment is recognizable to Gavin, people still live in buildings, work, eat, sleep, get married, some have children, they vote in elections, use money and usually die of old age. The big difference is who administrates of this vast urban landscape.

The governing bodies, security services, medical establishments, companies, legal profession and scientists are all women.

Women make up the majority of the global population and run the majority of institutions, including the vast and slightly mysterious Institute of Mental Health where Gavin is required to live.

His arrival in this fabulously interconnected society causes something of a stir, ‘the man who came from the cloud’ is an instant minor celebrity, not something Gavin had ever experienced before.

He has also never experienced living in a world where women make virtually every decision affecting his life, where the men are more emotionally connected than he knew possible and where, for the first time in his life, he starts to understand that he’s an emotional being himself.

If women work and run the city while men look after the home and children, both out of choice rather than coercion, what would happen? How would children develop? Would society be more gentle, would sustainable systems be allowed to develop, would the profit motive be at the bottom of the contract rather than above the title?

These are all areas I want to explore in News from the Squares.