The Wakeful Wanderer's Guide to New New England & Beyond - 2nd Edition by Jim Infantino (Hardcover)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><p>A captivating picture of a climate-changed future viewed from two starkly different cultural perspectives, The Wakeful Wanderer's Guide to New New England & Beyond follows the paths of a runaway aristocrat, a Luddite tyrant, a spy seeking retribution, and a wandering historian unicycling north along the crumbling Boston Post Road.</p><p><br></p><p>Marto Boxter is an optimistic journalist with a head full of implants. When we meet him, he is planning a ride into the interconnected tribes of the Northeast from his town of Reverside-on-Hudson. He plans to document his ride by posting his thoughts in real-time to his post-human followers. Before he can leave on his tour however, a runaway named Helen arrives with secret information that throws Marto's placid world into turmoil.</p><p>Helen is from a Traditionalist family in Pittsburgh opposed to the Interconnected. They see Marto's culture as lawless, godless, and fundamentally inhuman. Helen has left that world, looking for a better sense of belonging with the people her family considers "xombies."</p><p>Meanwhile, Barnabas Yoniver IV, the leader of a Luddite town to the south launches a plot to disrupt the life of all upgraded humans and bring them back to the traditional economy of markets and governments. Aware of Yoniver's plans, rival Luddite families scheme to prevent Barnabas from grabbing too much power for himself.</p><p><br></p><p>This darkly humorous reflection of our changing world is an exploration of what it means to be human as our relationships with technology become increasingly intimate.</p><p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br><p>"Like Marge Piercy and Margaret Atwood, Jim shows us an exciting and absorbing future world that is neither zombie-land nor un-relatable utopia. I'm a busy person, but I could not put his book down." - Dar Williams</p><p><br></p><p>"I love how your book lets me see the world so beautifully / differently. It's a powerful altered state. Freeways look so archaic! I'm also enjoying the way you gift wrap things so we can discover them. I love the subtle way you planted the sound of the song: The Age of Aquarius -within the name of the hotel. And here on page 44, I love the way you call Marto's travels a book tour. In this future, the tour isn't just for promoting a book, it's for creating it. So if writing books is a real time event, then I look around the airport right now, and I see all these little tablets flashing the history of our moment as it is being written. What a lovely reframe. No matter where you go, your next coffee will of course be free because I am boosting your merit." - David Wilcox</p><p><br></p>"Some genuinely new ideas on society in an absorbing & amusing sci-fi context<p>Before we even crack the book, let's talk about the title.</p><p>The bible of humorous sci-fi also of course contains the word Guide in it. But whereas Douglas Adams takes on the whole galaxy (repeatedly making the point of how insignificant our own blue planet is in the big picture), Jim Infantino's focus is narrower: the U.S., specifically New England, specifically <em>New</em> New England, in the not-too-distant future, when society is reorganizing after global warming and other catastrophes have undercut our current power structures. And like that other Guide, this one has a book-within-a-book, which the main character Marto composes and shares chapter by chapter during his <em>Candide</em>-like travels (in many ways, the best part of Infantino's novel).</p><p>The news is not all bad. Large parts of the surviving population have come together in agrarian-based sustainable communities, where transactions are based on merit rather than money. Merit is accrued via having followers and approval on social media, now internalized by implants, making speech itself obsolete. And technology has advanced so that most of the actual labor is done by tiny dedicated robots, thus avoiding the fatal flaw of past communal experiments, where everybody wants to stay up late and argue philosophy, but no one wants to get up at dawn to plant the corn. This social experiment, though, is under attack - the landed families of the past want their power and status back, and, beyond feuding with each other, want to crush and absorb the interconnected communities as slave labor.</p><p>Much of the plot involves these balance-of-power chess moves, with each side spying on the other (and Marto himself discovering his own compromised history along the way), and there's a climactic battle and aftermath as the new world sorts itself out. But, for my money, the reason to read the book is because it poses the question, does our society <em>have </em>to be this way, where every transaction has a dollar value, and, if not, how else could it work? Like the best sci-fi, <em>The Wakeful Wanderer's Guide</em> offers some genuinely new ideas to our ancient and ongoing human conversation." - Terry Kitchen</p><p><br></p><br>
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