A provocative, chilling, and razor-sharp dystopia.
In Ford’s darkly satirical dystopia, a mild-mannered academic becomes the accidental chronicler of a society that has outlawed disagreement. Near-future England. The monarchy has collapsed, and the universities have seized power. The nation is ruled by bureaucrats of morality, committees that regulate compassion, censor history, and criminalize the wrong kind of kindness. Professor Jim Hubbings, a once-respected pharmacologist, is drawn into this machinery of virtue when he’s ordered to erase a scientific pioneer from his syllabus because of ancestral ties to slavery. What begins as compliance curdles into quiet horror as Hubbings watches his world reduce itself to paperwork and fear.
Ford writes with chilling restraint and dry wit. Through Hubbings’s polite despair, he exposes how ideology, once institutionalized, mutates into tyranny draped in empathy. The universities in his novel are temples of control, places where pronouns, history, and even affection are subject to approval. Outside their walls, the “Educationally Unsuitable” languish in poverty, breeding the anger that will one day fuel rebellion. When the revolt finally comes, a populist uprising that topples the old order and restores the monarchy, Ford refuses catharsis. Liberation births its mirror image, and the circle of repression closes again. His vision of England is both absurd and plausible, a place where censorship arrives not with soldiers, but with safety officers and consent forms. Bleakly funny, disturbingly intelligent, and painfully relevant, the novel makes for a cool, incisive exploration of a civilization that traded freedom for comfort and found itself afraid of its own voice. Readers seeking a smart, chilling dystopia with bite will be thrilled.
Austin Macauley Publishers
Pub date February 21, 2025
ISBN 978-1035877645
Price $3.99 (USD) Paperback, $4.50 Kindle edition
