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Is this what our future looks like?
The surveillance society, climate change, global financial crises, the end of oil, incurable diseases, all these and more are threats that constantly make news headlines. So where do we go from here?
Following Annie’s strange death, her partner is forced to think about what he has allowed to happen to his life, his community and his country. His diary, kept during the year of The Change, reveals how the example Annie left him, and the mission of his young sister Sophie, drive him to escape the life of a bureaucratic cipher and work with the Movement in its fight to bring back a free and fair way of life.
In this gripping novel, underpinned by wide research, award-winning author Philip Temple tells a tale of life at mid-century and reveals what the future may hold if we ignore the threats that face us and carry on with ‘business as usual’.
The surveillance society, climate change, global financial crises, the end of oil, incurable diseases, all these and more are threats that constantly make news headlines. So where do we go from here?
Following Annie’s strange death, her partner is forced to think about what he has allowed to happen to his life, his community and his country. His diary, kept during the year of The Change, reveals how the example Annie left him, and the mission of his young sister Sophie, drive him to escape the life of a bureaucratic cipher and work with the Movement in its fight to bring back a free and fair way of life.
In this gripping novel, underpinned by wide research, award-winning author Philip Temple tells a tale of life at mid-century and reveals what the future may hold if we ignore the threats that face us and carry on with ‘business as usual’.
272 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2014
2 people are currently reading
15 people want to read
About the author
Philip Temple
65 books6 followersPhilip Temple is a multi prize-winning New Zealand author of fiction, non-fiction and children's books. His latest book is the adventure novel 'The Mantis' which explores why people risk all to be the first to reach the summit of an unclimbed mountain. Another new novel is due mid-year. He is also currently researching for a major biography of NZ author Maurice Shadbolt.
Philip was born in Yorkshire and educated in London but emigrated to New Zealand at the age of 18, becoming an explorer, mountaineer and outdoor educator. With Heinrich Harrer, of 'Seven Years in Tibet' fame, he made the first ascent of the Carstensz Pyramide in West Papua, one of the seven summits of the seven continents, and later sailed to sub-Antarctic Heard Island with the legendary H.W. ‘Bill’ Tilman to make the first ascent of Big Ben.
Philip's first books reflected this adventurous career and 'The World At Their Feet' won a Wattie Award in 1970. After a period as features editor for the New Zealand Listener, he became a full time professional author in 1972. Since that time he has published about 40 books of all kinds and countless articles and reviews.
In the fiction field, his nine novels include the best-selling 'Beak of the Moon', an anthropomorphic exploration of the mountain world seen through the eyes of the mountain parrot, kea. This, and its successor 'Dark of the Moon', are rated as unique in New Zealand literature. In more recent times, his Berlin-based novels 'To Each His Own' and' I Am Always With You' controversially tackle issues around German guilt and historical experience.
Philip’s non-fiction range is wide, from books about exploration and the outdoors to New Zealand history and electoral reform (MMP). His book about the Wakefield family and the early British settlement of New Zealand, 'A Sort of Conscience', was NZ Biography of the Year in 2003, and won the Ernest Scott History Prize from the University of Melbourne. Philip’s award-winning children’s books, in collaboration with wildlife artist Chris Gaskin, are unique to the genre.
Over the years, Philip has been awarded several fellowships, including the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship (1979), the Robert Burns Fellowship (1980), the 1996 NZ National Library Fellowship, a Berliner Künstlerprogramm stipendium in 1987 and the 2003 Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers Residency. In 2005, he was invested as an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) for Services to Literature and given a Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement. Following examination of his work, Philip was granted the higher degree of Doctor of Literature (LittD) by the University of Otago in 2007.
Philip Temple lives in Dunedin with his wife, poet and novelist, Diane Brown.
Philip was born in Yorkshire and educated in London but emigrated to New Zealand at the age of 18, becoming an explorer, mountaineer and outdoor educator. With Heinrich Harrer, of 'Seven Years in Tibet' fame, he made the first ascent of the Carstensz Pyramide in West Papua, one of the seven summits of the seven continents, and later sailed to sub-Antarctic Heard Island with the legendary H.W. ‘Bill’ Tilman to make the first ascent of Big Ben.
Philip's first books reflected this adventurous career and 'The World At Their Feet' won a Wattie Award in 1970. After a period as features editor for the New Zealand Listener, he became a full time professional author in 1972. Since that time he has published about 40 books of all kinds and countless articles and reviews.
In the fiction field, his nine novels include the best-selling 'Beak of the Moon', an anthropomorphic exploration of the mountain world seen through the eyes of the mountain parrot, kea. This, and its successor 'Dark of the Moon', are rated as unique in New Zealand literature. In more recent times, his Berlin-based novels 'To Each His Own' and' I Am Always With You' controversially tackle issues around German guilt and historical experience.
Philip’s non-fiction range is wide, from books about exploration and the outdoors to New Zealand history and electoral reform (MMP). His book about the Wakefield family and the early British settlement of New Zealand, 'A Sort of Conscience', was NZ Biography of the Year in 2003, and won the Ernest Scott History Prize from the University of Melbourne. Philip’s award-winning children’s books, in collaboration with wildlife artist Chris Gaskin, are unique to the genre.
Over the years, Philip has been awarded several fellowships, including the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship (1979), the Robert Burns Fellowship (1980), the 1996 NZ National Library Fellowship, a Berliner Künstlerprogramm stipendium in 1987 and the 2003 Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers Residency. In 2005, he was invested as an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) for Services to Literature and given a Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement. Following examination of his work, Philip was granted the higher degree of Doctor of Literature (LittD) by the University of Otago in 2007.
Philip Temple lives in Dunedin with his wife, poet and novelist, Diane Brown.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
May 1, 2020
this is a great book to read during a pandemic lockdown. although published 6 years ago, many things are eerily prescient at this time: restrictions on personal movement, checkpoints, emergency, increased surveillance. it feels like a timely warning for us all to pay attention to details and ask intelligent questions as we move through these strange times. there is one significant difference - the fictional prime minister john locke, clearly a play on john key, is thankfully not the one who is leading us through the current crisis! so i take some solace that things are not going to follow quite the same path as the plot of this novel. still, the events and characters are believeable, convincing, and engaging. the structure works well, giving space for different voices, and the movements back and forward in time are mostly fluid. everything comes together in ways that, while sometimes a bit predictable, fit cohesively into the overall story; it's clearly well-thought out. a great read.
December 30, 2014
In the light of the new GCSB law and now updated terrorism laws being pushed through Parliament this book is a timely reminder that the surveillance society portrayed in this novel is not so far away. When 1984 was written the kinds of surveillance we have now were only imagined, now they are real. The narrative is written as a series of notebooks, handwritten because of electronic monitoring and tells of the journey of John who turns from government cipher into an activist for the Movement. I found reading this novel quite chilling and it made me realise that the boundaries between what we call a civilised society and a police state are paper thin.
September 27, 2014
There should be more books set in New Zealand's future! This one was set in about 2050, with climate change having made a definite impact, and a totalitarian regime in power in New Zealand, with heaps of surveillance, civil unrest locally and wars internationally. Life is greatly restricted; the media also, so no one really knows what's going on.
The main character, John, is going along with life and getting by within the various restrictions, but has a habit of making throwaway challenging or satirical statements that get him noticed and potentially into trouble. His wife has recently died and as the novel progresses he finds out more about that.
It's hard to say too much about this novel without giving away some of the plot, but it does involve a resistance movement hiding from the authorities and their all-seeing drones. It had a feeling akin to CK Stead's Smith's Dream.
The overall concept was well done, but I didn't always believe in this futuristic world; it felt somehow unfinished or not completely rounded out. Some of the impacts of climate change were described at the beginning but then were not really mentioned much after that. The language was very well done – the Orwellian language of the totalitarian bureaucracy, and of the people.
The ending seemed too neat and coincidental. I would have liked to know more about the Maori groups mentioned who were also resisting the authorities.
But overall a book that makes you think about where our society and world is going.
The main character, John, is going along with life and getting by within the various restrictions, but has a habit of making throwaway challenging or satirical statements that get him noticed and potentially into trouble. His wife has recently died and as the novel progresses he finds out more about that.
It's hard to say too much about this novel without giving away some of the plot, but it does involve a resistance movement hiding from the authorities and their all-seeing drones. It had a feeling akin to CK Stead's Smith's Dream.
The overall concept was well done, but I didn't always believe in this futuristic world; it felt somehow unfinished or not completely rounded out. Some of the impacts of climate change were described at the beginning but then were not really mentioned much after that. The language was very well done – the Orwellian language of the totalitarian bureaucracy, and of the people.
The ending seemed too neat and coincidental. I would have liked to know more about the Maori groups mentioned who were also resisting the authorities.
But overall a book that makes you think about where our society and world is going.
December 29, 2014
I have read a lot of dystopia, including some great New Zealand dystopia by the likes of Mandy Hager. I was looking forward to a dystopia by Philip Temple but I was annoyed by it in so many ways. The language, there are few things more annoying than messing around with English in my opinion. Underlining in the text - just no! You can find another way of doing this. Diary format, it can be so good, but when it misses it is a big miss, you need to have flow in the diary format and you need a strong character who doesn't just recount the day to day, but who thinks and muses and most of all is engaging. This book has two diarists, a brother and a sister. The sister writes in a much more flowing style, the brothers passages stutter along. I know this is somewhat deliberate but at times I just wanted to give up when the brother was writing. Philip Temple is at his best when writing landscape descriptions, in fact he is just great at that and I thoroughly enjoyed the settings and the action out of the cities, but the rest made me cross that it didn't seem to have been edited significantly and despite it being a very short book, it did go on. The story itself had such great potential, I'm always up for a good Big Brother is watching book, and I know the whole GCSB surveillance issue is topical at the moment, but this book was not what I look for in dystopia. Disappointing.
December 29, 2015
Such a great and thought-provoking read, I couldn't put it down! Strong character development (including strong female characters) that really builds as you flick through the pages. Really interesting the way it was written, some people find the casual grammar/spelling annoying but that was not too distracting to me and I felt it was fitting in the setting of a journal...The ideas of the book are the more important thing anyway. I enjoyed the way there were new words for things and it was easy enough to understand what they meant, and made for a more engaging world. Really recommend this book. It is inspiring in the sense that the issues it touches on are relevant and inherently vital for us to work on urgently. People from Dunedin/south island will especially enjoy it as you have a sense of the geography.
January 14, 2015
Very good in parts. The random spelling was irritating.
I think the writer captured NewZild understatedness. Some of John's diary sections are as stilted and awkward as one would expect of an ordinary bloke who isn't used to expressing feelings, but they feel honest.
The corporatisation of state services described are a continuation of current government policy, ostensibly for our own good. The future Prime Minister is a not-parody-at-all of our current gormless PM.
I wanted to know more about this world, bleak as it was.
I think the writer captured NewZild understatedness. Some of John's diary sections are as stilted and awkward as one would expect of an ordinary bloke who isn't used to expressing feelings, but they feel honest.
The corporatisation of state services described are a continuation of current government policy, ostensibly for our own good. The future Prime Minister is a not-parody-at-all of our current gormless PM.
I wanted to know more about this world, bleak as it was.
February 3, 2015
A dystopia that is only too plausible in the future of New Zealand.
Yes, it is hard to read with the spelling, lack of punctuation, and weird grammar rules, but I think Temple did that as another prediction of what will happen to our written language. Not an easy read in any sense of that expression, but worth persevering with.
Yes, it is hard to read with the spelling, lack of punctuation, and weird grammar rules, but I think Temple did that as another prediction of what will happen to our written language. Not an easy read in any sense of that expression, but worth persevering with.
May 18, 2016
Story captures interest
Good story that captures interest and pulls one along. I wondered at first about the lack of punctuation, but soon realised this is totally appropriate to the story, and got used to it quickly.
Good story that captures interest and pulls one along. I wondered at first about the lack of punctuation, but soon realised this is totally appropriate to the story, and got used to it quickly.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews