News from the Squares Read online

  News From

  the Squares

  Robert Llewellyn

  Dear Reader,

  The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound.

  Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and e-book wherever books are sold, in shops and online.

  This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. Here, at the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.

  Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.

  If you’re not yet a subscriber, we hope that you’ll want to join our publishing revolution and have your name listed in one of our books in the future. To get you started, here is a £5 discount on your first pledge. Just visit unbound.com, make your pledge and type NWSSQ3 in the promo code box when you check out.

  Thank you for your support,

  Dan, Justin and John

  Founders, Unbound

  Also by Robert Llewellyn

  FICTION

  News from Gardenia

  The Man on Platform 5

  Punchbag

  Sudden Wealth

  Brother Nature

  NON-FICTION

  The Man in the Rubber Mask

  Thin He Was and Filthy-haired: Memoirs of a Bad Boy

  Therapy and How to Avoid It (with Nigel Planer)

  The Reconstructed Heart: How to Spot the Difference Between

  a Normal Man and One Who Does the Housework, is Great in Bed and Doesn’t Get All Iffy When You Mention Words Like Love and Commitment

  Behind the Scenes at Scrapheap Challenge

  Sold Out! How I Survived a Year of Not Shopping

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Preface

  Rough Landing

  New Reality

  The Panel

  Big Steps

  Massive Wad

  Meet the Press

  Perfectly Benign

  Not Born to Shop

  A Unique Yuneec

  The Weaver Women

  Museum of our Past

  Museum of our Future

  Anger Mismanagement

  An Unusual Proposition

  The Erotic Museum

  I Want Him!

  Back to School

  Skimming the Waves

  Selective Breeding

  Jungle Tracks

  Olumide Smith

  Riding the Nyumbu

  Roar of the Weavers

  Lagos to Rio

  A World Built by Women?

  One Second Scan

  Rest Before the Storm

  The Recording

  Inappropriate Image

  Officer Velasquez

  The Vote

  Voyage Home

  Talking Cure

  Pete’s Plan

  Fractal Fireworks

  Weather

  Fly Away Home

  Subscribers

  About the Author

  For my children Louis and Holly

  and maybe one day their children

  and then possibly, their great grandchildren,

  just so they can have a laugh.

  Preface

  Utopia, Dystopia and Men

  I read Anthony Burgess’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’ when I was 15 years old. The pages gripped me with terrifying intensity, I thought it was an ingenious, original and exciting book that created a grim future world at once stimulating and nauseating. I quickly followed that by reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, an equally influential book with an utterly convincing and cruel vision of the direction the human race might be heading.

  Of course, during the 1970s, in the middle of the Cold War it was mandatory to read Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell because we needed to understand how bad communism was. Nineteen Eighty-Four was part of the English syllabus; we HAD to read it, which immediately made me suspect the motives of the teachers who forced it on us.

  Three books by three white men, three books about the future that became enormously influential for many years. Reading them made me suspicious of technology, of the lies of politicians, of the lies of corporations telling us everything would be fine. They taught me to be dismissive and cynical of technological and social development, nuclear power, better guns, bigger banks. In some ways, looking back, and with a better grasp of the history of the period, this was not altogether a bad thing.

  It was around the same time that I somehow ended up reading two other books that would have an equally powerful, and in some ways balancing, effect on me. One was Approaching the Benign Environment by, among others, R. Buckminster Fuller. The second was The Limits to Growth by Donella and Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William W. Behrens III. What inspired me to read these books or how I heard about them now totally eludes me; they’re not exactly the sort of thing you’d expect a 16-year-old boy to gravitate towards, but I read them avidly.

  Much of the content and meaning escaped me altogether and some of Buckminster Fuller’s ideas struck me as barking mad. (We don’t need to worry about nuclear waste, we can just shoot it out into space.) However, I believe both these books made a huge impression on the youthful culture of the era.

  It was around this time that the first pictures of the earth taken from space were seen by the human race. We could suddenly see that we really did live on a little blue-green planet floating in a vast and inhospitable void. The image was used on the front cover of another publication I devoured with nothing short of obsessive fascination, The Whole Earth Catalog, created by the incredible Stewart Brand.

  These publications challenged many of the perceived notions of the period; that constant and never-ending expansion, consumerism and ‘growth’ were all good things; that the only financial and political system that worked was based on such notions, and everything else was doomed to fail.

  I was still in my mid-teens when I went to see Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Although originally released in 1968 when I was 12, it became such a cult classic that art house cinemas ran the film for years, which must have been where I saw it, sitting in the back row sharing a spliff with my teenage hippie pals and saying ‘oh wow, man’ every now and then.

  I was entranced by the vision, the extraordinary scope and imagination of this film. Human evolution, technology, artificial intelligence and really cool space ships pointed to a far more hopeful way to think about the future and what it could hold.

  It stimulated my interest in computers, in ingenious hardware and body-hugging space underwear. Even now, the vision of this film – the understanding of space, the art direction, the set design and the proposed technology – is nothing short of breathtaking. However, m
ore importantly than any of this, it had an inherent optimism, not that the world would be perfect, but that the human race would continue to evolve and explore.

  There are many theories that works of dystopian or utopian fiction are inspired by the era they emerge from. Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, all written in the early- to mid-twentieth century, tell us a lot about the struggles and challenges those generations were facing: totalitarianism, communism and the expansion of state control. But there was also a feeling of optimism in the rapidly emerging ‘subculture’; there was the NASA space program, breakthroughs in technology, achievements in medicine and our understanding of the planet we live on and the universe that surrounds us.

  While A Clockwork Orange is a small masterpiece of ‘literary’ fiction, much admired by the well-educated elite, it is still dystopian fiction.

  For me then, it sits in the same misery pit as The Road, World War Z, Mad Max, The Terminator, or any number of recent sci-fi films and stories utterly obsessed with doom, the inherent violence and short-sighted aggression of the human condition, the end of days, pseudo-religious nonsense and Armageddon.

  All these stories depict a world gone mad, bad and dangerous to live in. So, is the dystopian novel or story essentially a white male fantasy? I suggested this on the social networking site Google+ and was impressed with the breadth and depth of knowledge that flooded in through the comments.

  I was pointed to multiple examples of science fiction books, mainly about zombies, doom, death and destruction that were written by women. I was also reminded of The Handmaid’s Tale by the wonderful Margaret Atwood, which, although about as dystopian as you can get, is written from the perspective of an even-further-into-the-future world where, she implies, things have improved.

  However, I’m going to stand by my claim that dystopian visions are, in the main, created by white males and I wish to put this claim in context; it is in part influenced by the work of the German sociologist Klaus Theweleit and his extraordinary work first published in English in 1987 as two books, titled Male Fantasies, Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History and Male Fantasies, Volume 2, Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror – I love those titles. Male Fantasies are not what they might sound like, i.e. books exploring what men think about when they are busy self-abusing. Theweleit’s works are detailed studies of the thought processes and fears of the men who helped inspire the Third Reich in Weimar Republic Germany.

  However, his remit was wider than just a history of twentieth-century European fascism. For me, Theweleit really got to the nub of the European male dilemma. The books were more a study of a group in society who had enjoyed unparalleled power, privilege and cultural dominance for thousands of years.Obviously I’m talking about men. To be specific, white, European men who had created and controlled the monarchy, military, legal and religious systems and national governance without let or hindrance for as long as anyone was able to remember.

  What started to emerge around the turn of the last century were philosophies and political movements that finally challenged these well-entrenched arrangements. The struggles of the first half of the twentieth century leading up to the Second World War have always been portrayed as being between ‘left’ and ‘right’ but, with the benefit of hindsight, I think it is possible to see them as being a clash between patriarchy and pluralism; between the rest of the world and white men. They saw themselves standing together against a torrent of what they perceived as unregulated licentiousness, chaos, powerful women and a blatant lack of respect for their male power.

  The fascist male is, by definition, terrified of the world, terrified of change, but most of all terrified of ‘the other’. Women, homosexuals or people of other races; yeah, terrifying. They feel themselves drowning under waves of chaos and disorder, mud, blood (always menstrual, they have a real problem with that), faeces, vomit and general human filth.

  Theweleit uses writings, pamphlets and personal diaries of the men of the Freikorps, the fledgling fascist army roaming 1920s Germany. The musings of these tragically damaged men are incredibly revealing. Their deeply ingrained misogyny is the one unifying factor; if you think some drunk bloke shouting the ‘c’ word in the pub is a misogynist, he’s got nothing on the Freikorps, baby. Their rampant hatred was conflicted and torturous for them; they all adored their mothers but feared and despised women and the power they possessed.

  Obviously their hatred and fear of homosexuals and Jews was pretty full-on, but it was the twisted pain their fear of women created which made their lives so difficult. It was easy to hate Jews, they were different; homosexuals, scary because any man could be one, but just beat them to death and then you feel more manly. But women? You loved them and hated them, you wanted to dominate them but they were clever and would tie you up in emotional knots and you needed them to have babies. Nightmare.

  Thankfully, the more violent mass male spasms represented by the Third Reich have largely dissipated in Europe, but the clue that not all is well with the supposedly beleaguered white male, I postulate, is in the preponderance of dystopian fantasy. Without question the unresolved fear men have of ‘the other’ is still very much in evidence. They spend endless years formulating ever more elaborate stories about how the world is about to collapse into the mire, to be engulfed in the filth of the other.

  The endless drumbeat of right-wing Christians in America or disgruntled white men everywhere is that society is collapsing, that the rule of law is failing, that we are being drowned by needy immigrants getting everything for free and that the family – as in the institution with a white male at the head of it – is disintegrating. Gay marriage? That’s it, it’s all over, load your guns and start killing, it’s the only answer, seems to be their knee-jerk reaction.

  These stories, be they books, movies, TV shows or, especially, video games, are based on fear and always driven by the perceived loss of power and control. Normally this can only be restored by resorting to extreme levels of violence, of being prepared to fight off the hordes. They’ve got around the simple accusations of racism or manic homophobia by painting ‘the other’ as zombies. The zombie is the virtual Jew, woman, Arab – take your pick; the zombie represents the horde.

  Then there is the fear of technology. Again, a perceived loss of power and control is, I believe, at the root of this too. Films like The Terminator and The Matrix feed from this fear, that the machines we made will take over and shaft us, extracting power from our bottoms or just crushing us under their merciless tracks. The invasion of privacy is often cited as the first step in this descent into powerlessness.

  Let’s just look at this for a moment. A train driver in India, or a factory worker in China, they have been powerless for generations. They eventually manage to get access to the world through a smartphone and the global ubiquity of the internet. Are they suffering from a sudden loss of privacy? They wouldn’t even know what you were talking about.

  Now compare those two with a couple of old white guys who use computers in the ‘developed world’. An invasion of their privacy has a whole different flavour. They are used to being powerful and in control and all this technology is taking away that power, it’s redistributing it and of course that is frightening and seems unfair.

  But if we look at the big picture in human history over the last thousand years, and here I agree with the linguist Steven Pinker, contrary to the dystopian male vision of oncoming hell, the world has generally got better, kinder and less violent. Sounds bonkers, but all the figures seem to bear out Pinker’s theory that we are living in the least dangerous, most civilised era of the human story so far, and all the signs indicate this is set to continue. Contrary to all the endless drip, drip of dystopian fiction, the world has and is continuing to get better for most people most of the time.

  Therefore I would like to suggest that News from the Squares, and indeed the first book in the trilogy
, News from Gardenia, is not utopian fiction. The world depicted in these pages is not static, a vision of a perfect society where all problems have been solved. There will always be problems, there will always be differing opinion and that is as it should be. The human story is constantly evolving. The days of dystopian or utopian visions are numbered. We are finally reaching a point where we can have a better-informed and clearer vision of which way we might want the great eclectic society we live in and the planet we live on to develop.

  1

  Rough Landing

  ‘What do you think you’re doing you silly little man?’

  That was the first thing I heard as the darkness slowly dissolved. Something was keeping my head still but I looked about as best I could. I wasn’t in any pain, if anything I felt surprisingly comfortable and relaxed. There was a woman’s face to my left, sort of peering up at me. She looked quite annoyed. I then realised she was holding my head in position with one hand, not violently, more like she was just supporting my head.

  ‘Hello,’ I said eventually. I wanted to reassure her that everything was okay and she didn’t need to get upset.

  ‘Are you hurt? Are you in pain?’ asked the woman, this time sounding a little more sympathetic.

  ‘I’m fine thank you, Susan,’ I said. I know that’s what I said but I don’t know why. Why did I call her Susan? I didn’t know her name, where did the name Susan come from and why did I say it? No idea but for some peculiar reason it amused me and I started giggling.

  I realised at that point that I was still in the Yuneec and as everything started to come into focus my slightly elated mood began to sink.

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said.

  The Yuneec was clearly in a mess. The windscreen had cracked, there was dust everywhere, wires hung out of the control panel, or rather what was left of the control panel. I could make out what might be a very badly damaged propeller beyond the cracked windscreen and then some sort of tree branch.