DINA: Nature's Case For Democracy

by Anne Riley

Sara Wallace has fallen into a coma. Her doctors are flummoxed. Her family is devastated. But Sara? She finds herself immersed in mysterious conversation with an invisible being who’s clearly not from around here. Dina has a voice like a whisper and butchers every single English axiom without fail. But Dina ‘s message is deadly serious. Humans are steadily moving toward extinction, Dina said in no uncertain terms. Humanity, so full of promise as a new and utterly unique type of lifeform on this Earth, has begun acting against the wellbeing of the planet and all its inhabitants. It is such an emergency that Dina’s clan has decided to intervene. And they picked Sara to be the messenger to the world. She should be flattered, but. . . seriously? They chose her, not because she is brilliant or accomplished, but because she has an overactive bullshit meter. So, Sara’s proclivity to rarely believe what anyone says has put her in a position where people need to believe her. . . or face extinction? What could go wrong? Dina started with the universe, explained how life formed, and how living entities use competition, collaboration, and coordination to survive in a zillion different ways in a zillion different niches across the planet. It all flowed smoothly until humans arrived. Humans work exactly the same way every other living thing does, but they twisted those survival mechanisms out of shape by adding their own special secret sauce to the mix. Humans developed their own superpower that enables them to survive. That superpower is choice. Using choice and their ability to think, humans created their own ecosystem based on ideas. Dina called it the Ideasphere. By transforming ideas into different shapes and products, humans were able to change not just their lives, but over time, their entire environment. Choice makes humans far more unpredictable than their non-human siblings. That’s how everything has gone haywire. Humans have been living in their self-created ecosystem without really understanding that they have created a new ecosystem at all. Without the context of their history, but with the ability to think and choose anyway, humans have made mistake after mistake, and bad choice after bad choice. Well, humans have made good choices, too, of course, but Dina didn’t spend much time on those. Dina was focused on a different message. Dina insisted that humans can and should learn the survival lessons from the creatures that have successfully survived for billions of years.

Genres: Nonfiction

421 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 27, 2024

About the author

Anne Riley is a thinker and writer. She is the author of three books.

Elusive - Journey to Happiness
Published 2/2013.
10th Anniversary Edition published 12/23

AERIE - A romantic suspense story
Published 2/2014

DINA - Nature's Case For Democracy
AVAILABLE NOW!

Reviews

[Jonathan Finch · Rating 5 out of 5]

PhD or Novel? Alliterative Overload or Hilarious Device? I Just Can’t Fathom This Bottomless Trove of Ideas (Infuriatingly False Dialoggied Alliteration, Too!)
This is an extremely learned tract which I found tiresome and irritating, but it should not be ignored because it analyses how Homo sapiens can continue….eeer, to be! It does not vary in plot and its deep ideas are much better suited to many, many post-graduate theses!!! The author makes her comatose character repeat alliterative phrases for yonks and this literary device is overdone and does not make for literature but it does make for irritation. Alliterative overload is not pleasant and does not lighten the burden of extreme plot-tedium.
I understand the “novel” tells the story of human beings and one of its super-heroes is DNA (aka the “character” DINA) but the thought forces itself upon the tired mind that just possibly in 200 years’ time, that hero will be superseded by another permanently temporary hero – or heroine (that is, if catastrophe does not curtail our history).
So, for me, “DINA” is not a novel but guess what? I can’t “downstar” it because it is so obviously the work of a multifaceted and brilliant scientific mind. It has to be studied and key concepts like the ecosystem, the ideasphere and the idealsphere must be understood and memorised. Its premise is that humans are gifted with brains, ideas, and we need to save ourselves and our planet by thinking well. Given my own irrational reaction to this “novel”, just possibly emotions will not help us – or me – survive what is ahead.
Five stars.
However, if you enjoy fiction, this book should be avoided. It also questions the essence of fiction and entertainment given it criticises ignorance, escapism, frivolity and laissez-faire “no-think” plus lousy emotional reactions like my own – me looking for fiction and having to get immersed in gyreful dialectics, and other formidable thought-processes. It wants to save the world which unfortunately it cannot do, given the world is forever flocking, flaking and forgetting plus bearing anew overwhelmed infants with no time to do it – to know “DINA”.
Alas!
I recall another novel, much more fictional, which prophesied doom because of the laws of thermodynamics, the second in particular. “DINA” is more optimistic but given it comes straight out of America, what of all those countries where economic disparity and lack of education overwhelm the populaces? America has a mix but cannot be compared to south-east Asia, Africa and south America. DINA’s voice is just not loud enough to be heard.

[R Moltzon]

DNF