O.Welles 19/8.4

In the red desert of the Very Bad Lands, a Runabout hobbles through the noon heat with a crocked ankle, a clockwork watch she is forbidden to read, and a bullet she is expected to use on herself if captured.

This is the world after the fourth shift. O.Welles 19/8.4 is a novel set in a future shaped by what happens when the fourth great transformation in human history - artificial intelligence - is not navigated wisely. It is not a dystopia in the familiar mode. There are no killer robots. No godlike singularity. No clean villains. What there is, instead, is something more recognisable and more unsettling: a fractured society where entire sections have chosen to organise and inoculate themselves around the suppression of surprise, the total control of information, and the brutal simplification of meaning and called it liberation. The Global Permanent Insurgence is fiercely proud of its declaration to forever remain One True Free. This means all vital communication is done by hand by via human messengers, who are tasked to burn their messages before capture, and then use their single issued bullet to make sure they'll never reveal the verbal-only messages carried inside their head. The novel moves between the red desert and the world that gave rise to it - following characters who are trying, in their different ways, to find meaning in a landscape where meaning has been weaponised. It is written in a language all its own: vivid, comic, savage, tender, and occasionally very strange. The title fuses two figures who haunt the book. George Orwell who understood before almost anyone that the corruption of language is the corruption of thought. And Orson Welles who in our world was once told by President Roosevelt he'd make a great politician, and who said, looking back on what could have been, that he'd made 'a helluva mistake' not doing so. In this story he took FDR's advice and between Orwell and O Welles we have a familiar and un familiar date, and a question about what might have been different. The four epigraphs: Orwell, McBride on Welles, Buckminster Fuller, Bertrand Russell are not for decoration. They are the novel's governing argument: that civilisation has faced these questions before, that the way out has always lain through cooperation rather than control, and that the choice between them is always, finally, a human one. Written by Vincent Murphy - Cognologist, strategist, and the originator of the Ludicity and Cognology frameworks for understanding AI as a civilisational shift. This is the fiction that those frameworks cannot entirely contain: the laboratory for ideas still too large, too strange, or too urgent for just the essay form. "Vincent is a naturally gifted writer with a rare and impressive social conscience." - The Orange Film Prize