synopsis:

'Automatic Living' begins in 2003 with a teacher, Mr Marx,shooting himself in front of his class. Seventeen years later, Daniel Manion, once in Mr Marx's class, is himself a teacher, at East Tyneside Comprehensive. In 2020 the world around Daniel is growing increasingly automated and controlled. The local asylum is involved in a programme to brainwash the masses through drugs and indoctrination, whilst the media manipulates so that humans are no longer able to function on an emotional level. Ongoing drudgery, the progressively demeaning effects of the mass media and the drugs he's taking to try and cope are all slowly but inevitably reducing Daniel to the state of "automatic living" - existing to consume (in the economic sense) rather than living to enjoy.

Overlooking it all is the New Right Party government, carefully controlling the spin. The action follows Daniel Manion as he organises a revolution, drawing together underground organisations for direct action. But its success is threatened by Daniel's drug abuse and mounting problems. Meanwhile, inhabitants of the planet Inuthua are observing Earth through androids they have sent down, many of which have a mission. Some collect information, some broadcast back to Inuthua, some want to save the Earth, some are killers.

The novel is a web of conspiracies, partly satirizing the late twentieth century's preoccupation with them, partly indulging them to expose how governments lie as the media manipulates. The theme of an imminent apocalypse is used to ridicule mankind's exaggerated sense of its own importance.

All characters have their own agendas, but all seem to be manipulated by some higher force, and none can be trusted. A paranoid atmosphere permeates the novel with its sense that everyone is controlled by a higher force, that everyone is being watched by some CCTV camera whilst all the while the bleeps of barcodes and the bleeps of queues organise lives.

Daniel's drug abuse heightens the darkly comic elements as he visits Club Independent in Tyneside to score and meets a variety of weird characters, bringing out themes of reality and fantasy.

on this book:

The novel mixes political science-fiction with thriller elements. It does not use the tired cliche of a dystopian future with dictatorial government but rather the future world in 'Automatic Living' is one that we can recognise. It is a bridge between what we are now and what we might become if our evolution continues on its present path. Technology allows those with power to abuse privacy whilst governments put a subtle spin on events to convince people that everything is okay.

Automatic Living contains truths about the world we live in, about how governments lie and ordinary are fooled. Real news stories are woven into the plot, stories which those in power don't want widely known. They help to show how the Earth is being destroyed by capitalism and environmental damage.