I got a brainstorm 5 years ago and it would not let me go. I have to write this novel to be free of it. So yes. I am now writing a book.

The working title is

The Wakeful Wanderer’s Guide to New New England and Beyond.

Marto can read the thoughts of everyone around him and they can read his thoughts as well. The people of his generation send messages not with their phones but with their minds. Their technological telepathy accelerates social interactions, eliminating the need for speech, money, property, family and travel. In the aftermath of severe climate change, 80 years from now, theirs is one of a few surviving cultures.

Raiding gangs of bikers control the dry lands of the Midwest and South. Neo-Feudal luddite families struggle to bring back a pre-technological way of life to the former United States. The interconnected tribes, populated by technologically augmented people like Marto, live a life of constant virtual interaction, where one’s worth is a calculation of one’s generosity. Theirs is a strange utopia, free from ownership, free from tradition, and defined by their online status. The Raiders and the Neo-Feudalists call them xombies.

Marto is a travel writer. He live-posts his journeys for his followers, who prefer to stay put and view the world only through their implants. Riding his unicycle from town to town, Marto becomes aware that his origins are a blank. Large parts of his memory are missing, and his past is steadily tracking him down.

The Wakeful Wanderer’s Guide to New New England & Beyond is set in a richly imagined near future, complete with dystopias and utopias in constant conflict, a newly envisioned economy of Merit, astonishing and disturbing new technologies, and the continual struggle between those who adapt to change and those who resist it. It paints a picture of a world that has been turned inside out, where people must fight to defend what it means to be genuinely human.

- Jim