Robert Llewellyn (1) (1956–)

I have several major quibbles with this book, the last of which may seem a little contradictory.

The first and most significant - the protagonist is a jerk. He reminded me of that bit in ‘The Social Network’, when Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend is breaking up with him and says, “You think women don’t like you because you’re a nerd [geek?]. But it’s actually because you’re an asshole.” I paraphrase, but you get the idea. Someone needs to say this to Gavin. When he rocked up in show more the future, I kept expecting someone to call him on his misogyny. No-one did! There was even a moment when he commented smugly that ‘gender roles’ did not appear to have changed in the past 200 years. Bafflingly, the woman he said this to somehow did not understanding what he was saying and let it pass. This struck me as a missed opportunity.

What really got up my nose, I think, is that the author tries to position Gavin as a technology-minded guy who isn’t great with people. Some vague reference is made to his having ADD. If this was supposed to imply that Gavin is on the autistic spectrum, it was done incredibly awkwardly. Moreover, he only ever seems to have social issues with women. I was reminded once again that these socially-inept-geek character tropes are only ever applied to male characters. As Gavin tells us early on, women only care about things that discussing feelings, buying nice houses, and going to farmer’s markets. I could happily have broken both this guy’s arms to express my feelings about him without the need for discussion.

Secondly, I had quite high hopes for this novel as it has an excellent starting concept. Inspired by [b:News from Nowhere|189746|News from Nowhere|William Morris|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1172550120s/189746.jpg|13352231] by William Morris, it tries to extrapolate a utopian future for the UK in 2211. As both author and protagonist observe, utopian writing is extremely rare at the moment. Instead, we have a slew of apocalyptic disaster novels, TV shows, and films, plus a healthy of crop of dystopias that often star photogenic youths. I wasn’t terribly impressed by the execution of ‘News from Gardenia’, however. For one thing, I was amazed that the protagonist never thought to ask what was happening outside the UK until he was sent abroad on a day trip. It also baffled me how incurious he seemed about the 200 years he missed, not bothering to read the book he’d been given for some time. His tedious preoccupation with Grace (who was mysteriously never given a personality) crowded out the actual utopian detail that I was hoping for. Ironically, he kept going on about his feelings when I wanted technical details!

For example, how exactly were children were brought up and educated? Did people move around a lot or settle in one place for extended periods? What was the biodiversity like? How had climate change altered the weather patterns? What were people’s attitudes to sexuality and gender? Who created the AI that apparently ran the infrastructure? Could people communicate with it? Was anyone living in space, or on the moon, or on Mars? In what ways did the so-called Book differ from the internet as we know it now? What was Africa like? Why wasn’t South America mentioned; did it still exist? Were pandas extinct? Had religion really died out everywhere but the American Midwest? What was literature like? Music? Art? What were the big research questions for scientists? Had alcohol and drugs vanished? Etc, etc, etc.

Thirdly, at only 235 pages ‘New from Gardenia’ simply wasn’t long enough. It was the only book I took on an overnight trip and I finished it before the first of three trains home even arrived. I was left with only a free-sheet to read, an ignominious predicament indeed. Apparently this is the first in a trilogy. It ends abruptly and arbitrarily on a cliffhanger, whereas with another 200 pages to make Gavin less of a jerk and explain more of the setting it may have ended up a better read. As it was, distinctly disappointing. show less

I've been a Patreon supporter of Robert's Fully Charged YouTube channel for some time, as its a great source of news and information about the electric vehicle and renewable energy scene, both in the UK and Worldwide. I was a bit skeptical when he announced they were planning to publish a paper "almanac" book though, as its a fast moving field with constant developments. Nevertheless I thought I should give him the benefit of the doubt and supported it on Unbound.

The book turned up a few show more months late (which is not bad for Unbound - I've had books I've supported turn up years late and/or completely different to the original concept) but it was a nicely made and printed hardbound book, along with access to an ebook version. Whilst the "author" is listed as Robert Llewelyn its actually a collection of lots of short articles and reviews by lots of people. They try to cover a range of questions that people might be asking about electric vehicles and/pr renewable energy such as "what are the batteries made from?", "will the grid run out of power for mass EVs?", "will going vegan improve my environmental footprint?" and "is EV smart charging useful?". Towards the second half of the book they switch to trying to do a round up off all the major electric cars available (or soon to be available).

Having read the book I'm still in two minds about it. Whilst a lot of work has obviously gone into it, I'm not sure what market it is aimed at, other than fans of the YouTube channel like me. The information it contains is interesting, but its nothing you can't get online in far more detail from a few quick Google searches. The car lists are going to age quickly, and they're mostly Robert or Jonny Smith's opinions on the ones they've seen or driven. I'd guess it might be useful for a couple of years for EV fans to have on hand to lend to friends or colleagues who are considering "going electric". There's also a few errors that have crept past the editors - things like power units getting confused which is the sort of thing you'd expect in a tabloid newspaper article but not in a book dedicated to electrification. Minor but annoying and might confuse the newbies that might be given this book. show less

It's been compared to Trading Places, but that doesn't do this book justice. Llewellyn has managed to turn what sounds like the core concept to a generic brand chicklit into an affectionate look at geekdom. Tossers, anoraks, geeks, dorks, nerds, all will be able to see how well the author's succeeded in creating an protagonist that both invites you to like him and to facepalm repeatedly.

Gresham and Eupheme, privileged half-sisters and avid socialites concoct a wager that Eupheme cannot turn show more the total tosser they see trainspotting one day into an irresistible hunk of manflesh. As Ian Ringfold finds out, there's advantages and disadvantages to getting a total makeover. On the upside, there's having sex. On the downside, who wants to be vain and superficial all their life? It's a clash of cultures and Ian has to figure out which one he wants to belong to. show less

News from Gardenia is the first book in Robert Llewellyn's semi-utopian "News from" trilogy. It follows an early 21st Century engineer called Gavin who, whilst flying to a meeting, gets sucked through an anomoly near Didcot Power station and ends up landing in 200 years into the future. The future Robert details for Gavin and us is one where the UK population has crashed, the economy has folded, climate change effects have made large scale changes and yet people are happy to work in show more community gardens. It shows that happiness is not necessarily associated with exchanging bits of paper or lumps of metal with numbers on them, but that people could potentially live by sharing.

In some ways what Robert has written is a sci-fi book about what some people in the "green" environmental movement and Transition Towns groups would like to see us move towards. What the book neatly skips over (though does describe as part of Gavin's missed history) is the turmoil that would need to be gone through to get from where we are now to where the Gardenians are in the book. The population crash is what makes the agrarian society he describes possible, and that's usually a topic that eco-warriors shy away from discussing. When you've only got a population in the UK of a million or two, then subsistence gardening does become a more believable option.

However not everything is rosy and utopian. Gavin's engineering skills are in demand by Gardenians who seem to have lost the ability to understand and repair their remaining advanced technology, despite having documentation to hand. There are also areas of the world that still hold out the old style economies and in those areas trade, business, religion and cities are still very much alive.

This book is an interesting take on a near future sci-fi. Its a relatively short read and at times I found I wanted to shake the Gavin character to get him to find out more about the society he was in and the technology they used. Despite being a well educated engineer with access to a ubiquitous information system he seems to be remarkably poor at quick back ground research!

I've a feeling that the book could have been two or three times as long easily, to allow a more in depth development of characters and settings. This is a shame as it would have been good to see how things like conflict and disagreement were handled in Gardenia... I just don't buy the idea that everyone loves everyone else nearly all the time. If they did, we'd still have loads of hippy communes from the 1960s thriving today. show less