News from Gardenia is the first book in Robert Llewellyn's semi-utopian "News from" trilogy. It follows an early 21st Century engineer called Gavin who, whilst flying to a meeting, gets sucked through an anomoly near Didcot Power station and ends up landing in 200 years into the future. The future Robert details for Gavin and us is one where the UK population has crashed, the economy has folded, climate change effects have made large scale changes and yet people are happy to work in community gardens. It shows that happiness is not necessarily associated with exchanging bits of paper or lumps of metal with numbers on them, but that people could potentially live by sharing.

In some ways what Robert has written is a sci-fi book about what some people in the "green" environmental movement and Transition Towns groups would like to see us move towards. What the book neatly skips over (though does describe as part of Gavin's missed history) is the turmoil that would need to be gone through to get from where we are now to where the Gardenians are in the book. The population crash is what makes the agrarian society he describes possible, and that's usually a topic that eco-warriors shy away from discussing. When you've only got a population in the UK of a million or two, then subsistence gardening does become a more believable option.

However not everything is rosy and utopian. Gavin's engineering skills are in demand by Gardenians who seem to have lost the ability to understand and repair their remaining advanced technology, despite having documentation to hand. There are also areas of the world that still hold out the old style economies and in those areas trade, business, religion and cities are still very much alive.

This book is an interesting take on a near future sci-fi. Its a relatively short read and at times I found I wanted to shake the Gavin character to get him to find out more about the society he was in and the technology they used. Despite being a well educated engineer with access to a ubiquitous information system he seems to be remarkably poor at quick back ground research!

I've a feeling that the book could have been two or three times as long easily, to allow a more in depth development of characters and settings. This is a shame as it would have been good to see how things like conflict and disagreement were handled in Gardenia... I just don't buy the idea that everyone loves everyone else nearly all the time. If they did, we'd still have loads of hippy communes from the 1960s thriving today. ( )

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.

Sadly, I have to say that I did not think this book was very good. It's a utopian novel, and suffered from the same problems that all utopian novels seem to me to have: nothing actually happens beyond "character goes to utopia, residents of utopia explain things about their society and history". At least in Herland there's some conflict, but seriously nothing happens in this book at all. I also thought that the setting was wrong - it's supposed to be about 200 years in the future, 150 years after society collapsed, and everyone in the UK is mixed race (Anglo-Indian-looking, I believe), living long lives in perfect health, and living in self-sufficient communal housing, but no one knows how any of the technology they rely on actually works. Also the whole country is covered in forest. I don't feel like enough time had passed for such changes to have occurred, and it bothered me. Well, I know that this utopia is really Bobby's hippy eco-geek dream world (except with no scientists or engineers?) and that is fine by me, but if you're trying to present something as being a realistic vision of the future it would be better if it were actually realistic.

Additionally, this book really needed to be looked at by an editor. It's supposed to be written in an informal, chatty first-person style, but the number of comma splices and the stilted dialogue started to wear on me pretty quickly. There are also several misspellings of the "sight/site" variety. ( )