http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KY8S4D8
The O.D. is about the threats and perils that face everyone on the planet – over-population, climate change, water shortages – and what can be done to keep them from killing us all. The action takes place ten or twenty years from now, by which point the Earth will have reached its tipping point. The burning question then, as now, is ‘How can the ills of the world be effectively treated when countries can’t agree on the simplest of things?’ The answer is to create a base of influence outside the rest of the world that is free of history, culture, and political and religious dogma, thus enabling it to devise a solution that’s impartial and non-partisan – a solution the rest of the world can accept for this very reason. The ‘science fiction’ element of the book revolves around how this base of influence is realised.
The main characters of the story are Forrest Vaalon, an octogenarian American billionaire, and Lonnie Pilot, a Cornish tutor of seven-to-twelve-year-olds. An odd, but highly effective, mix.
The O.D. is not a niche novel for environmentalists. It’s for anyone who cares about what human beings are doing to their planet and to each other and who has the awareness and the imagination to see that the road we’re treading is taking us in the opposite direction of where we need to go. The ideas put forward in The O.D. are not ‘pie in the sky’. They’re attainable and make perfect sense.