Robert Llewellyn (1) (1956–)

I'll start with the positives:

More actual things happened than in the previous book! Events occurred!
Robert Llewellyn ♥

On the other hand, I can't decide which of these negatives was more annoying:

- Bobby's poor grasp of punctuation and sentence structure
- Bobby's terrible opinions about feminism
- Bobby's terrible opinions about mental health
- Bobby's extremely bizarre opinions about team sports???
- The part in the introduction where he's like "I think all dystopian fiction was written by white men. I know you all told me a load of counterexamples when I said that on Google Plus, but... I still think it's true. Also all men are Nazis."

Also I cannot decide which of these lists should contain the point "Red Dwarf reference on the first page". YMMV.

Sorry, Mr Llewellyn. I love you but please, please get the third book proofread by someone who understands how commas work.… (plus d'informations)

News from the Squares is Robert Llewellyn's sequal to the sci-fi novel "News from Gardenia". In this second book we rejoin engineer, pilot and generally average bloke having a less than average few months Gavin Meckler after his plane esacpes from Gardenia in 2211. Unfortunately for Gavin passing through the space-time anomaly caused by the Gardenian power tethers doesn't return him to 2011. Instead it dumps him in another, alternative 2211 where the simple rustic life of Gardenia has been replaced by a mega-city states.

The city states cover what had been countries and make use of lots of high technology. The cities are built around repeating patterns of large buildings constructed (or rather grown) around central squares that provide growing spaces. There are "cars" but they are subterranean, as it seems are the railways, so the surface is completely pedestrianized. Oddly, heavier than air craft are illegal, so Gavin crashing is electric plane is a bit of an issue for those in power. And those in power are nearly all women.

The novel traces Gavin's slow realisation of his situation and the altered political state he finds himself in. The thesis put forward is that a society run by women might be a calmer, less violent, more well ordered one. Of course not all the women are pulling in the same direction and the human condition applies equally to both genders, so Gavin soon finds himself in potentially hot water. The idea of a female run society isn't new in sci-fi of course - its been seen before - but Robert Llewellyn has the advantage of introducing it from the point of view of an early 21st century "bloke" dumped in the middle of a society he can't always understand and isn't sure if he agrees or disagrees with. It also shows that a transparent, surveillance based society has both advantages and disadvantages: it wasn't clear that the author came down on one side or the other in that debate. The books also covers future digital economy technologies and information search and retrieval developments and consequences.

Over all the work is a well written sci-fi romp. Its probably only worth reading if you've already read News from Gardenia - there's too much that comes from the earlier book that isn't fully explained for new readers.… (plus d'informations)

News from Gardenia is the first book in Robert Llewellyn's semi-utopian "News from" trilogy. It follows an early 21st Century engineer called Gavin who, whilst flying to a meeting, gets sucked through an anomoly near Didcot Power station and ends up landing in 200 years into the future. The future Robert details for Gavin and us is one where the UK population has crashed, the economy has folded, climate change effects have made large scale changes and yet people are happy to work in community gardens. It shows that happiness is not necessarily associated with exchanging bits of paper or lumps of metal with numbers on them, but that people could potentially live by sharing.

In some ways what Robert has written is a sci-fi book about what some people in the "green" environmental movement and Transition Towns groups would like to see us move towards. What the book neatly skips over (though does describe as part of Gavin's missed history) is the turmoil that would need to be gone through to get from where we are now to where the Gardenians are in the book. The population crash is what makes the agrarian society he describes possible, and that's usually a topic that eco-warriors shy away from discussing. When you've only got a population in the UK of a million or two, then subsistence gardening does become a more believable option.

However not everything is rosy and utopian. Gavin's engineering skills are in demand by Gardenians who seem to have lost the ability to understand and repair their remaining advanced technology, despite having documentation to hand. There are also areas of the world that still hold out the old style economies and in those areas trade, business, religion and cities are still very much alive.

This book is an interesting take on a near future sci-fi. Its a relatively short read and at times I found I wanted to shake the Gavin character to get him to find out more about the society he was in and the technology they used. Despite being a well educated engineer with access to a ubiquitous information system he seems to be remarkably poor at quick back ground research!

I've a feeling that the book could have been two or three times as long easily, to allow a more in depth development of characters and settings. This is a shame as it would have been good to see how things like conflict and disagreement were handled in Gardenia... I just don't buy the idea that everyone loves everyone else nearly all the time. If they did, we'd still have loads of hippy communes from the 1960s thriving today.… (plus d'informations)