Clementa

Book excerpt: Clementa takes place on a future Planet Earth that's unlike any other in speculative fiction. Three hundred years from now, most machines have been broken up for scrap, and the rest are museum pieces. Yet no apocalypse--no disease epidemic, asteroid collision, or nuclear conflagration--has occurred. Agriculture has been abandoned. People live by omnifostering, an advanced kind of hunting and gathering. All animals run wild. All plants grow wild. People enjoy all the literature, music, dance, drama, and art that we enjoy today, plus countless new works created in the meantime. Nations have crumbled into thousands of self-sufficient homelands, each with its own language and culture. Money has become useless. Steeped in their local cultures, most of the people in most of these homelands are as happy as they could wish. Clementa concerns a rare exception--a homeland where an oppressed element of the population awakens to its rage and fights for liberation.