Retrotopia

by John Michael Greer

FORWARD TO THE PAST The year is 2065. Decades ago, the United States of America fell apart after four brutal years of civil war, and the fragments coalesced into new nations divided by economic and political rivalries. Most of the post-US America is wracked by poverty and civil strife, with high-tech skyscrapers rising above crowded, starving slums—but one of the new nations, the Lakeland Republic of the upper Midwest, has gone its own way, isolated from the rest by closed frontiers and trade embargoes. Now Peter Carr, an emissary from the newly elected administration in the Atlantic Republic, boards a train to cross the recently reopened border into Lakeland territory on a mission that could decide the fate of his nation. Ahead of him lies a cascade of experiences that will challenge his most basic assumptions about economics, politics, and the direction history is moving. Alone among the post-USA republics of North America, the Lakeland Republic has achieved prosperity and internal peace, and it’s done so by modeling its future… …on the past.

Genres: Fiction, Dystopia, Science Fiction, Alternate History

254 pages, Paperback

First published December 5, 2016

About the author

John Michael Greer is an author of over thirty books and the blogger behind The Archdruid Report. He served as Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America. His work addresses a range of subjects, including climate change, peak oil, the future of industrial society, and the occult. He also writes science fiction and fantasy. He lives in Rhode Island with his wife.

Reviews

[Harris · Rating 2 out of 5]

[2.5]

John Michael Greer is quite a prolific author, writing reams of material dealing with such diverse topics as the occult, technology, ecology, and Lovecraftian fiction. He is most well known, though, for his essays on peak oil and the coming collapse of industrial civilization throughout the world. Greer is convinced that the current level of technological and societal advancement and growth we currently enjoy is doomed, not merely from climate change but also from a mere dearth of resources. Even more, he seems to revel in discussing all of the ways that sustaining our standard of living is impossible.

So, when considering his latest novel, a depiction of a North American post-US state some four decades in the future after a second American Civil War, one must keep this in mind. First published as a series of articles on his blog, Retrotopia is a novel with a distinct didactic purpose, specifically Greer’s idea of how a future society could organize to maintain sustainability. He definitely has an axe to grind, a point to make, a lesson to impart, and any world building, character development, or verisimilitude in Retrotopia is secondary to these concerns. For the most part, these elements are basic, cliched, and uninspiring, but the ideas of the world are, at their best, thought provoking.

Not unlike Thomas More’s original Utopia, Retrotopia is a frame narrative following Peter Carr, a diplomatic envoy from the Atlantic Republic (the former states of New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland) to the Lakeland Republic (the Upper Midwest) soon after the latter reopened its borders after decades of self imposed isolationism. Peter records his thoughts and feelings as he encounters the way of life of the Lakelanders and comes to accept them as superior to the rapidly failing industrial wasteland he calls home. Along the way he buys a nifty suit, meets the president, and finds love, all while being shamelessly lectured to by everyone he meets. It is obvious that any characters exist only as vehicles to deliver exposition to our bland narrator, who himself is there only as a conduit to guide the readers through the world. Someone always shows up just in time to fill him in on the Lakeland banking or healthcare system, how its counties are organized into zones based on how much infrastructural taxes they wish to support, or why the other nations are doomed.

The future presented, at least in the Lakeland Republic, is a pretty optimistic vision with a lot of appealing elements; a society organized on sustainable and democratic lines, repurposing old technologies and preserving progressive social values. With it’s extensive public transit, libraries, and small independent shops, it seems to be a pretty nice place, especially as the radio and newspapers diligently report how the outside world continues to fall apart. Texas and the obligatory Confederate States have gone to war for petroleum while the world’s satellite system begins a spiraling collapse. Greer uses these themes deal with some very interesting, important ideas about consumption, the environment, and what is meant by “progress,” ideas which kept me reading.

However, like any utopia, Greer focuses on the positive aspects of his society and downplays any negative sides to its idealized world. Aside from the descriptions of innovative new uses for older and neglected technologies like masers, sustainable farming, or handwriting, there is a lot of griping about ugly contemporary art and architecture. In fact, the main lesson seems to be not simply that older ways of doing things can be adapted to the changing conditions of a new future, but that things were just better in the past aesthetically. Things were simpler and people had better taste. Like, take away the internet and people will all just be better behaved and smarter, right? Thus, everyone dresses in overcoats and hats like it’s the 1920s, or maybe in some kind of 1850s bonnets and hoop skirts. Everyone only reads classic literature forgotten by the outside world and goes to the opera.

This raises my biggest problem with the world presented by Greer. At times, it feels more like a bunch of cosplayers rather than a living, breathing society as citizens smugly and condescendingly correct our narrator on his silly technological assumptions. Of course, everyone is just a mouthpiece for the opinions of the author. Peter himself, for instance, manages to throw quite a bit of a shade at contemporary composer Philip Glass for a guy who apparently had never heard of Robert Louis Stevenson or the Beatles. The argument is that, like technology, the rule of “diminishing returns” applies to culture as well, thus in music and literature the best works of art have already been made and everything new is just a nice homage to the best of the old, or an ugly and dissonant original no one wants. It’s unclear if the Lakeland Republic publishes any original work or has developed any weird new fads or subcultures or if they simply are content to stick with rehashing the good old days. Why bother when all the good stuff is already done, right? Ironic coming from an author who publishes so much.

Because of this, the people of the Lakeland Republic just don’t feel alive. There was just enough food for thought in the novel regarding topics of sustainability and how a society could reorganize itself in the face of looming shortfalls and environmental changes, but as a fictional work, it’s just not that compelling and leaves more questions than answers.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 4 out of 5]

What will the future look like? Not much like our stupid present, certainly, but complaining about the present is easy, while offering a coherent positive vision of the future is hard—especially given the degradation of our present. Yes, the Age of Ideology is over, though its zombie corpse may stumble through the brambles of reality for a few more years, until someone shoots it in the head. But what will replace it will be an organic thing, its exact form hard to predict. In Retrotopia, John Michael Greer narrates an optimistic vision of a renewed America, or part of America. It’s fiction, but it inspires a variety of thoughts, among them a topic of great importance to both Greer and me: is technological progress the enemy of tomorrow’s human flourishing, or its ground?

Greer is one of those figures who is difficult to place politically, whom the ruling classes would call “fringe,” but who has a significant following among those across the political spectrum who like to think for themselves. He focuses on nature and the environment, and is a supposed archdruid, a practitioner of astrology and other aspects of the occult, so he might appear to fit on the Left. But as far as human society goes, he tries to be reality based, and that means his actual policy prescriptions often fit better on the post-liberal Right. Similar figures include James Howard Kunstler and Paul Kingsnorth. All of them are very pessimistic about the technological and industrial future, seeing collapse as inevitable, and preparation for that collapse essential.

It is 2065. The “Retrotopia” of the title is the Lakeland Republic, one of several successor states formed from the old United States, destroyed in the Second Civil War of 2029–2033. Lakeland consists of eight former states in the Midwest, roughly centered around Chicago (though Chicago itself is a “free city”). The book takes place in what was Ohio, and is framed as the journey through Lakeland by a diplomatic representative of the Atlantic Republic (more or less Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, and Maryland), upon the re-establishment of relations between the two countries after three decades of separation. Unlike the other successor countries, Lakeland has been largely cut off from the larger outside world for those decades, and little is known about it, other than that it is mostly self-sufficient and avoids modern technology. The book follows the diplomat as he travels from Pittsburgh, in the Atlantic Republic, to Toledo, Lakeland’s capital, and points around.

The world outside Lakeland is sketched as a worse version of today’s America, with current economic trends extended forward. Everyone has to work like Sisyphus to eke out a miserable living, except for the rich. Healthcare and decent housing are unaffordable for most. An enhanced internet, the metanet, along with heavy police and military presence, pacifies the masses. The Second Civil War destroyed huge sections of infrastructure, which, despite constant borrowing and subsequent debt crises, have not been rebuilt in anything like their original form—except for the gleaming modernist palaces of the ruling classes. (The Second Civil War is somewhat vague; its trigger was ruling class refusal to take responsibility for infant deaths caused by a strain of GMO corn, but who fought whom and why is pretty opaque.) Economic specifics are lacking, but they involve cycles of borrowing and near-collapse, dependence on foreign countries (notably Brazil and China), and a hope that technology will break this cycle and allow a new age of innovation and growth. No identifiable aspects of today’s woketard Left appear, however; maybe they disappeared in the war, or more likely that aspect of today is just not Greer’s focus.

The outside world, meaning at least some of the other successor states, has, for decades, attempted to destroy Lakeland, both through direct invasion and by attempts at “regime change” through actions short of war, such as embargo. All such attempts have been defeated. The cause of these attempts is that Lakeland refuses to accept loans that would be used to force it to maintain ties to, and politico-economic subservience to, the modern world, meaning the lords of international power, mostly monetary power. (No, this is not code for “Jews.”) Lakeland prevails by having no technology that can be disrupted and by ensuring a nation able to be fully in arms, along with sabotage of its enemies where necessary. This isn’t all that realistic, since in reality the outside world in this book has enough problems to deal with to make putting resources into overthrowing a landlocked bastion of autarky worthwhile, but let’s roll with it.

To maintain autarky, and for practical and philosophical reasons we will turn to in a minute, Lakeland rejects public funding of any technology past 1940, and imposes cultural strictures discouraging much private use of such technology. Even 1940s technology is not necessarily the standard; each county chooses to implement public infrastructure in one of five technological tiers, going back to 1820. The more retro, the lower the taxes. Family farming is apparently the main activity for the population, usually with horses and oxen (petroleum is nearly non-existent and the few motor vehicles run on heavily-taxed biodiesel). Towns and cities have been rebuilt in solid 1940s style; they are powered by modest amounts of central electricity, generated by manure, supplemented by point-source hot-water solar and wind. There is no internet, much less metanet, and no satellite access (portrayed as ubiquitously critical to the outside world’s functioning). Business is conducted at a 1940s level, as is all physical culture. Clothes are throwbacks—made of high quality, long-lasting materials, rather than the disposable “bioplastic” found in the outside world. Economically, Lakeland is somewhere on the continuum to distributism—the Grange is back in action, concentrations of wealth with disproportionate power are forbidden, and associations and other intermediary institutions are ubiquitous. Subsidiarity, rather than concentration, is the rule; banks are individual and tied to the community, for example. Automation is rejected as costing a society more than it provides, if properly accounted.

This is all an attempt to reify a major focus of Greer, what he calls “deliberate technological regression.” His idea is that we should not assume newer is better; we should instead “mine” the past for good ideas that are no longer extant, or were never adopted, and resurrect them, because they are cheaper and, in the long run, better than modern alternatives, which are pushed by those who rely on selling us unneeded items with planned obsolescence. No doubt he is a fan of David Sax’s The Revenge of Analog.

It’s all very retro—except that Greer’s retrotopia explicitly rejects any kind of older social structures or core cultural practices. Everything in those realms is a left-libertarian’s ideal 2020s America. The sexes are interchangeable; racial, ethnic, and cultural mixing and harmony are complete; gay marriage is treated as normal and commonplace; children are irrelevant; and drugs are fine, though they barely get mentioned. (And in an original if bizarre twist, atheists have well-attended churches with Sunday services where Mark Twain and Bertrand Russell are offered as readings.) I doubt very much a society where men wear porkpie hats and ride streetcars because they make better sense than later offerings is going to throw rice, the symbol of fertility, at two homosexual men getting “married,” but okay, whatever. This reflexive obeisance to the gods of the present day, this refusal to countenance that returning to older social mores is both possible and necessary, is a common flaw in modern fiction writers who loathe the modern world. Greer’s treatment here bears a lot of resemblance to Kurt Schlichter’s portrayal of what I call “Agnostic Pragmatic Libertarianism” in his books. No doubt Greer would respond that he recommends mining the past, not returning wholly to the past, and that some things in the modern world are advances. That’s not a satisfying answer; if the modern world is uniformly awful relative to 1940, it requires robust blinders to pretend that none of the decline is due to changes in culture, especially when those changes were imposed on us, wholly inorganically. It would be far more logical to conclude that rolling back some or all of those changes is essential.

But let’s let Greer have his story. Yes, this is didactic fiction, message fiction. Still, it’s quite well done, and there is a long history of this sort of thing as a thought experiment, from Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward to the present day. The hook on which Greer hangs everything he says is that technological progress is a dangerous chimera beyond a certain point, which he pegs as that technology extant around 1940. In his analysis, the actual costs of any further progress exceed the benefits, and “progress is the enemy of prosperity,” for three reasons. First, he claims that technological progress as a whole is subject to the law of diminishing returns, so society will go backwards the harder it tries to go forwards. Second, he points to resource exhaustion—of oil most of all, but also of lithium, rare earths, whatever materials are crucial to maintaining an advanced technological society but of which supplies are limited. Third, like Joseph Tainter (whom he does not cite), he claims that ever-increasing complexity necessarily of itself leads to collapse at some point.

Of these three claims, the first two are more or less disprovable. As to diminishing returns, strictly speaking, Greer’s claim can’t be true, since the law of diminishing returns simply says that output will decrease past a certain point if all but one input is held constant and that one input increased. Technology by definition can be used to increase output by bettering inputs, rather than simply increasing quantities of present inputs. Greer’s claim is less technical, however—he analogizes the supposed process to art, claiming that any given art form eventually is perfected, such that it cannot be bettered, although it can be executed well—he uses jazz and classical music as examples, and by implication, when he shows the architecture of Lakeland, to architecture as well. At some point, innovations are “noise,” and “have fewer benefits and worse downsides than the things they replace.” These claims are obviously true, and although the simplistic answer is that culture is always changing, and part of a vibrant culture is new artistic elements, we are certainly in our decadent phase, not a vibrant phase. And maybe in high culture there is simply nothing truly new that is better than what has already been done; like sharks, evolved to perfection such that their form is static, maybe there is no new thing possible. My response is that mankind then has to put its creative energies into something else. We may have reached the age of decadence, but I don’t rule out that a new, vibrant society could come up with new exemplars of truly great high culture, that will only be evident long from now.

But culture is not technology. Admittedly, some technology may be fully developed. When I was watching How It’s Made, a television program that simply presents the manufacture of different items, with some of my children the other day, it featured the making of a geared unicycle hub. What was most interesting is that the gears were cut with two machines, which looked shiny and new—but were made in the 1940s and 1930s respectively. I wonder if such machines are even available now—I doubt it. I’d put money that the only modern option to cut gears is a fantastically expensive computerized CNC machine. We can, however, easily identify broad areas where technology is not fully developed. The key resource of all is energy, and we can all imagine better energy sources. True, unlike Saint Anselm’s proof of God, that we can imagine it does not make it true, or possible, but if cheap fusion were developed, for example, it would destroy any claim that technology was subject to diminishing returns; it would reset the system (and reset, as Tainter identifies, many problems tied to complexity). Cheap energy would solve the Atlantic Republic’s economic problems, certainly.

So while the suggestion has a facile appeal, it’s not actually coherent to claim that technology as a whole is subject to diminishing returns. Tellingly, Greer does not offer a mechanism for this to be true; he states his claim as a self-evident truism. But there is no historical example of technological progress bringing low a civilization through diminishing returns—that is, through more value being put into technology than is returned. No doubt social media is a net negative, but it’s not some law of diminishing returns that makes this so, but that social media is corrosive and stupid, so putting resources into it is like buying a hammer with which to hit yourself in the face. Yes, I complain, and often, that the technology we were promised hasn’t arrived, but the problems we have now aren’t the result of technology. Nor are they just structural and economic; again, they’re much more cultural and spiritual, and today’s technology evidences those problems, not diminishing returns.

As to resource exhaustion, on which Greer is also very focused, on a spreadsheet basis it seems compelling. But this concern, as with claims that overpopulation is a problem, ignores the creative ability of mankind. In the terms Charles Mann uses in his outstanding The Wizard and the Prophet, Greer is a prophet, one who does not believe that the wizards will find a solution to new human problems, self-generated or not. However, one hundred percent of the time, so far, the prophets have been wrong and the wizards right. That may change, but past performance is at least some indication of future results. Thus, if we got cheap fusion, we could mine asteroids for any resources we wanted. It doesn’t have to be that (cheap fusion is a big “if”), but many advances are possible, and if history is any guide, likely. Yes, we won’t do that on our current insane societal path, but again, that’s not for the reasons Greer identifies.

Thus, the central pillar of Greer’s predictions is that . . . [Review completes as first comment.]

[Fred Rose · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's an interesting premise and the rare dystopian book that is optimistic. While the premise is interesting in that going back and bringing back ideas that were not so resource-intensive and make the world great again is somewhat intriguing, the execution is just so over-the-top at points that it loses credibility. There's no question that the basic idea of what are you are optimizing for raises some interesting questions and for that reason alone could be a reason I use it in a class. But making every single thing from the past looks so much better (like really barbershop quartets?) does a disservice. Healthcare for example isn't even mentioned. Do you want to go back to the health care of the 40s if you have cancer or heart disease? Issues around race and inequality are also not mentioned. Immigration isn't really talked about either, if all these states around it are doing poorly why wouldn't everybody move there?

[Allen McDonnell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Post Fossil Fuel Future

A fun and fast read about where America could find itself fifty years from now when the fossil fuels we depend on today may be is short supply, both from depletion and global warming taxes. I have read both the first draft and this final version, and while I disagree with some of the authors beliefs, stating them is necessary to make the story logically consistent with the society it portrays.

[Elan Garfias]

Solarpunk meets the Amish. Greer finally takes the opportunity to sketch out his own utopia, replete with organic farming and shortwave radio galore. The plot and characters are mostly secondary, as they serve mostly to get the exposition across, but it's an interesting, and rather more hopeful, change of pace from most of his collapse-centered fiction. There's something about a satellite getting knocked out of orbit and a resource war happening in the South, but of course that's not such a bad thing if your society doesn't use satellites. Of course, not many people would place their utopia, or even their novel, in a place like Toledo, Ohio. Yet that's one of this book's strengths, highlighting the virtues of simplicity. Against the backdrop of a civil war which destroyed every last bit of infrastructure, the various fragments of left of the US have each gone their own way toward development, with most placing their faith in heavy extractivist economies, higher and higher tech, and IMF loans. However, the Great Lakes region (Lakeland, as it's known in the book) chooses a different tack, eschewing fossil fuels and rebuilding itself on and agrarian, and depending on the county, industrial, basis. The narrator, ostensibly on a diplomatic mission, serves as a useful vehicle to shuttle the reader around the different facets of Lakeland life, meeting with tradesmen, doctors, professors, soldiers, industrialists, etc. Toledo in this universe does in fact have electricity, just not much. There are streetcars, jazz clubs, and factories, just no TV (radio needs far less power, however). As described in some of his other works, such an economy taxes heavily for pollution and incentivizes employment over automation.This also serves as a nice vehicle for the author's more philosophical views on Progress to come out. For example, technological progress relies on ever-refining "technological suites" yielding diminishing returns. His bone to pick is mainly with fossil fuels, which create an unsustainable web of further tech liable to collapse should the bottom fall out 😬 . I'm reminded of the chip sector, which is only possible because of cheap fuel and externalized costs, not to mention the slaves at the very end of that supply chain. Intriguingly, he also takes this diminishing returns principle into the cultural realm, invoking the contrast between the glorious age of classical opera vs forgettable twentieth-century opera as well as "cool" classical jazz standards vs modern jazz
that no one seems to care about. Interesting ideas abound in this book, but the biggest takeaways were 1) bioreactors to make fertilizer and fuel out of sewage sludge!! and 2) promising technologies from the past that were abandoned in favor of cheap fossil fuels getting a second chance in an era of genuine energy efficiency.

[Andrew Langford · Rating 5 out of 5]

I come back to this book again and again as I find the story uplifting both in terms of imagining the technicalities of an ancient/future whilst also calling on the capacity of us humans to reconnect with our (loving, rational) mutuality as a primary (spiritual?) orientation towards all life.

The transformation of the thinking of the leading character, Peter Carr, is instructive and hopeful. Carr is open enough to work at coming to terms with the falsity of his original worldview (slavish obedience to the death cult of 'progress'). After some painful reflection the falsity of his worldview becomes obvious - he can't square the circle of the madness of the imperialistic modernity that is continuing to drive his own community towards further conflict and extinction and he sees the validity of the thoughtful retreat from modernity and 'progress' evident in various options found in the Lakeland Republic.

I like the love story embedded in the story too as it points out the critical dynamic of also retreating from the increasingly authoritarian (hate-based) cultures that are the inevitable outcome of continuing down the inherently separating, divisive version of modernism we are currently trapped in.

Retrotopia (by John Michael Greer) is my occasional treat and route out of despair.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating future spectulation wrapped in weak fiction.
John Michael Greer is one of the most important voices of our time; his analysis of the current planetary crisis is brilliant, prophetic, and indispensable. That said, fiction is not his strong suit. This speculative novel contains many interesting ideas about how a libertarian-leaning decentralized postcarbon eco-culture might develop, and it's well worth the read on that account. If you expect a well-crafted story with three-dimensional characters, well - look elsewhere. Much like Ernest Callenbach's 1975 "Ecotopia", the weak fiction is just a pretext for the much more satisfying vision of a possible future.

[Ann & · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thought provoking.

[Jason Stacy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read!

This book caught me from the first page: it was entertaining, and offered a very plausible description of an alternative US.

[Joseph Young · Rating 1 out of 5]

The writing style of this book is not terrible; it is fairly easy to read. However, it is so preachy! This book seems to describe more of an 'ideal' society, through the lens of a typical fairly intelligent American, encountering it for the first time. However, I can't count the number of times I thought, "This guy's a f**** idiot!" How can he not think up basic counter-points to many of the dictates outlined in this society?

It's not that the author doesn't have a handle on many of the problems with society. Some of the 'solutions' are good ones, ones that we already have but do not implement. However, whole criticisms of this type of society are missed, the most obvious to me being a high avoidable death rate in Tier 1 counties, and assumption in the overall good of ALL people, which I don't think real society allows for. The military defense also seemed ridiculous.

The characters are but useful tools to show of this society, with little personality. They could be basically interchanged with any other.

The idea that Lakeland would keep the most useful laws and institutions, but not the most useful technology seemed absurd and stupid. The author does not properly distinguish between the increases in productivity vs the diversion of capital, and repeatedly conflates good and bad 'progress.' As a result, any investments in developing technologies are seen as wasteful subsidies, as opposed to national interest.

The feeling that all good art came from the past is another one of those annoying feelings that has never been true, and seen through the self-filtering lens of notability after time. There are not quite irrational but ignorant fears scattered throughout, whether they be on automation, China, GMOs, space travel, etc.

I really tried to meet this book where it was. The Atlantic Republic's education system definitely needs an overhaul. It feels too reactionary, blinding it from a more complex truth.

[Kenneth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another of John Michael Greer's fiction books that is trying to teach us something. In general I find these kinds of things manipulative. Lord knows that fiction has been selling us things for years that make no sense. One sided narrative is a hell of a salesman. But having gotten used to John's style of fiction I find myself enjoying it. This book falls into the 'more-about-the-ideas-than-the-characters' category. Twilight's Last Gleaming did as well. Hall of the Homeless Gods and Star's Reach were much more story oriented, his Haliverse leans even more into story while still being a 'teaching' moment.

[Kevin Pilsbury · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone Should Read This

Maybe the way forward is to look back to the lessons of the past.
Ever wondered why the world of your childhood seemed better than the world as it is now? Maybe it's just rose tinted glasses.... Or maybe it truly was better both qualitatively and quantitively.
Read Retrotopia and see that there maybe an alternative to modern life, and it lies in our memories of how things used to be!

[Henry C. Brooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting and Challenging vision of the future

In an ironic fashion, John Michael Greer illuminates both our past, present and potential future with a thought provoking book that equals Brave New World, Atlas Shrugged and On Walden Pond in its philosophical breadth. Shower, JMC's Retrotopia is easier to both read and understand at the big world level. One book that should be discussed in schools.

[Zev Paiss · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent Vision of a Positive Future

Greer has written what I believe is one of the very few positive and realistic visions of our future. As a longtime fan of Ecotopia in 1975 I loved the parallels as well as the going forward by going back perspective. Five stars and much thanks.

[Joseph Torregrossa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Social "Pattern Language" Also a great how-to book.

Excellent. Shows examples of how alt technology and proper governmental stewardship could turn the world around. Hopefully it won't take a Civil War. Like the use of a antagonist light turned into a reluctant protagonist.

[Michael O'Hara · Rating 4 out of 5]

A simple vision of a possible future for our country, a kind of updated version of Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward". Mr. Greer's other works should be consulted for more substantive advice on ecology and economics.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this fascinating... not the standard dystopian horror .... but a look at how a future US, post civil-war, of independent 'areas' might operate with limited resources, etc. Highly recommended.

[Kara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very enjoyable utopian read. Gives you a lot to think about.

[Ichabald Twaddlebone · Rating 4 out of 5]

As is typical of Greer, the writing is mediocre but the ideas are genius. As always, I'd highly recommend him.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some original ideas that might help solve the problems of medernity. Fun easy reading.

[Joe · Rating 2 out of 5]

This would be good as an RPG

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great idea and it’s rare to find original thought. I could have done without the LGBT agenda and the story could have finished the arch but I liked it.

[David B. Wildgoose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thought-provoking

Not just a story, rather a manifesto for a better future for all of us. Our technology should be human-scaled and human-focused.

Highly recommended.

[Logan Streondj · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book on how can re organise society for a post progress or post growth model that works via narrative fiction.

[Dirk Stansbury · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is barely a novel, it's more a propaganda pamphlet for a model of governance that doesn't exist....yet. This is truly speculative fiction, written in Greer's unmistakable voice

[Ginny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots to think about here. The premise of the United States broken into semi-warring factions after a second world war isn't super unique, but the author used it as a way to explore the idea that progress is no longer synonymous with prosperity and growth. The main character rolls into Lakeland Republic in his bioplastic suit and is disgusted by the overall lack of technology. Suffice to say, he changes his tune by the end of his stay. The five-tier county system here is pretty damn sweet and something I could see actually working in rural areas.

Loved this quote:
No, I thought, there's no way to tell in advance what's behind the cloud that hides the future, but maybe -- just maybe--I can make a difference.