News From The Clouds
Robert Llewellyn's latest novel now funding.
3 January, 2014
You can't keep a good speculative-fiction trilogy down - and while Robert Llewellyn's latest book, News From The Squares, has been flying into the hands of readers in recent months, the man himself hasn't slowed down, and is already hard at work on the final part of the Gavin Meckler trilogy, which will be titled News From The Clouds.
As Robert explains on the now-customary Unbound funding page, Clouds will round off the trilogy by shifting focus somewhat from the optimistic alternate futures of the first two books:
In News from the Clouds, the third and final book of Gavin's adventures, he experiences first hand a far more challenging environment than he has ever experienced.
Gavin is faced with a planet that is ravaged by storms, seared by winds and scorched by an unforgiving sun. While the driving force behind the News Trilogy has always been to try and imagine a world where things are better than the present day, it is becoming every more apparent that our current activities are going to bring about long-term changes for our descendants.
Gavin is not faced with megacities or garden states - more with gouged earth and people living on the edge. But they are living, adapting; they are coping with all the extremes the ravaged planet is throwing at them. When he emerges from the mysterious cloud that shifts him through time, he doesn't land on the ground: he is landed by baffling technology onto a floating city - a cloud city.
This is a world where the human race has two options: to live and work in enormous protected culverts that are reinforced to withstand the ravages of the weather, or float above the torment in delicate, lighter-than-air structures moving with the wind.
He soon learns this is not an 'us and them' arrangement where the downtrodden are forced to struggle on the surface while the minority elite float above them in abject luxury, it is a highly organised social system where everyone experiences both lives.
The technology of the Cloud people is far more advanced than in either of the other two stories and it becomes clear to Gavin that not only do they understand how he ended up slipping through time, but they also understand how to help him get back home.
Will he finally be able to return to Kingham in 2011? Will the world he left still be there? Will he be able to maintain his marriage to Beth, and continue his work as a mining engineer?
All these questions and many more will be faced as the final book is created.
As with the previous books in the series, News From The Clouds will only be written and published if there are enough pre-orders to successfully hit its funding target. You can help it achieve this goal by simply pre-ordering an eBook copy or first edition hardback, or if you've got deeper pockets post-Christmas you can get yourself a range of exciting extra rewards, including an invitation to lunch with Robert, or to have him take you on a tour of the Eden Project.
And all backers, at whatever level, get their names printed in the book, so either way Robert will know you've helped contribute. Which is rather nice, isn't it?
Find out more and read an exclusive extract at the News From The Clouds page at Unbound.
Share this page:
