News from Gardenia

When Gavin Meckler’s light aircraft encounters a mysterious cloud near Didcot power station in Oxfordshire, and lands in a nearby field, he is bewildered to discover the power station is nowhere to be seen. In the eerily quiet landscape, a strangely silent tractor is making its way towards him. Gavin discovers he has landed two hundred years into the future, into a world that is wholly recognisable and yet utterly different. A gentle, peaceful, sustainable place where it is possible to travel from one side of the world to the other in a matter of minutes without burning fuel, and where everyone is a gardener because that’s how they can be sure to eat. As Gavin learns about this new world and the society he becomes part of, he also begins to learn about himself. In 1978, Robert Llewellyn read a novel that profoundly changed his view of the world. News from Nowhere was written in 1890 by the utopian socialist, William Morris, a man now more famous for his wallpaper. In it, Morris attempted to imagine the Britain of the 1980s.Morris’s benign fable couldn’t have been further from the truth, but decades later, driven to distraction by the torrent of dystopian books and movies that show the world descending into chaos and destruction, Robert Llewellyn has decided to write his own version of Morris’s novel. Like its Victorian predecessor, News from Gardenia a shows us a better future where we don’t burn anything to make anything else and which isn’t hovering on the brink of disaster; where aliens haven’t invaded; where meteors haven’t hit, and where zombies haven’t taken over. In short, a world where we, eventually, get it right. Everything in News from Gardenia could happen. There is no technology described within that hasn’t already seen the light of day. Llewellyn’s future isn’t perfect and may not be very likely, but it is entirely possible.