ON is a novel which I began in 2009, completing it late in 2013. In June 2014, it was accepted by Hague Publishing.

Despite being listed as a work of science fiction, I have tried to keep the science part to an absolute minimum. In any society, the vast bulk of it’s technology is taken for granted by its natives. Just as people today don’t feel compelled to launch into a lengthy exposition on the benefits of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing every time they whip out their smartphone to post a selfie, I can’t see how future citizens would behave any differently. My solution to this has been, where possible, to give any future technology a descriptive brandname and leave it at that.

The novel takes place in OneWorld, a possible parallel or future earth which is home to 23 billion humans. I wanted to draw together some of the most important technological and social developments I see occurring in our current world, and project them into the book. One important development is that, in OneWorld, humans no longer enjoy the role of dominant species, having signed an emancipation treaty with the ‘rooins’, an advanced race of biomechanical creatures who have evolved from early robots. Human and rooin now share an uneasy coexistence, with all the social frictions one could imagine proceeding from such a situation.

I also wanted to explore the inexorable erosion of the concept of ‘the commons’. It was once taken for granted that certain things existed for the common benefit. Nowadays public land, public healthcare, public education, public utilities and so on are all disappearing. But in OneWorld, absolutely everything has become a commercial enterprise: police forces, law courts, even governments, all compete for business within a wholly privatised system. Murder, rape and torture are merely extra items on your insurance policy. Even things like air, water, the measurement of time, and our very history have all fallen under corporate ownership. In such a world of fluid values, it should come as no surprise that something as basic as scientific fact has been replaced by ‘consumer information’.

At the beginning, we find the novel’s cynical anti-hero, Youren Cartouche, writing an ad campaign for ‘One Network’ – soon abbreviated to ON. This technology has been developed by CoolGlobalGiant (I had fun with that name), the largest corporation on the planet, and it promises to link the brains of everyone into a vast human network. But Youren becomes increasingly alarmed when the early adopters start behaving strangely. Youren is now reluctantly drawn into an investigation of the new technology, although nothing can prepare him for the truth behind ON. By the time the sub-atomic dust has settled…

To learn more about the novel ON, go to the ON information page.