DT:  The working title is: “Datesville: Out of the Land of Bondage!” And as to Why a dystopia?: Several years ago I had a dystopian dream, probably because the financial and political climate here in the US, I had noticed, was moving in that direction. I knew from my study of American history that economic depressions, such as the “Great Depression” of the 1930s, were cyclical—our nation has endured several severe depressions over our history and we are likely to face another such event in the future, perhaps near future. Also, regarding the Great Depression, some historians have suggested that without the onset of US evolvement in WWII, it would have lasted many more years than it did. It lasted a decade even with the apparent intervention of the great war.

What I imagined was a depression that lasted much longer—perhaps forty, fifty years or more. What would that be like? I asked myself. One answer to that question could be: severe deflation (meaning lack of money supply), equally severe unemployment, homelessness on a gigantic scale, and extreme poverty, suffered by perhaps 30 or 40% of our population, and a government without resources to address the problem in any meaningful way.

So that is the setting of the novel. Our story follows one man’s experience as he slips into unemployment and homelessness and comes face to face with the reality that he, until that moment, has managed to escape. Yes, so that’s the gist of the story.