- This little sci-fi adventure ticks a lot of boxes.
- It's an intriguing, cheeky, highly imaginative and enjoyable read, seemingly offering a new vision of society and leadership built on kindness and respect. But very lightly and gently it's doing a lot more than that.
- We’re taken to a very strange world where screens dominate individual lives and social interactions, even to the extent of delivering digital food. Nature has been replaced by screen views of it. The screens are watched by the citizens of two cities: Rise and Shine. They are the only places left after the sudden deaths of the world's eight billion people. There was a natural catastrophe brought on by 'the slow grind of excess...The earth, pushed past its limits, began to eat its own.'
- These two cities are, or decide to be, ‘honourable enemies’. The authoritarian, but nice, leaders manufacture videos and fake news, and fool the citizens into celebrating war. 'Our bodies need regular fresh footage'. And for some unstated reason, clear plastic, now a dominant building block, covers everything.
- The was Old Time. Now there is New Time, whose citizens love watching battle scenes in front of their face on ‘autoscreens’. They have a human ‘right so watch war’. They all possess ‘wearables’, presumably a smart phone/home speaker combo. Unfortunately however, most leaders and citizens are all diseased, for reasons that gradually become clear.
- A small group of dissenters, or 'terrorists', who secretly grow and eat plants, are closely monitored, arrested and taken to a prison where the guards and police are polite and courteous, because that is the new social order. Bread, vegetables and animals, even fresh water, are also forbidden, as they were poisoned by the Old Time and the New Time is wary. Fenced and patrolled precincts in both cities are populated by diseased and starving people, whom the dissenters try in vain to help.
- Allington is suggesting a lot here about power and control and submissiveness. Even the capture and isolation of science and truth.
- It's a novel that will stay with you and haunt you. And a prescient one for our times.
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