Another of his grisly reports on Syria, the carnage shown in living color, when I thought of writing a completely different kind of novel. Not the real lives of real people, as I always do, but the futuristic lives of unknown ones. A dystopian novel set a hundred years from now, when to control the kind of slaughter seen on Anderson Cooper there will be but one nation.  A worldwide authority ruling everything, baseball games, cricket, visits to a museum, the grocery store. Twenty-four hour monitoring of every type of human behavior. A good portion of the population, when not sleeping their assigned six hours, will work in departments of Surveillance, Security, and Judicial Services, a lot of the latter of a summary nature. Religions will be consolidated. Instead of humanistic gods from various parts of the world, there will be one: God of Everything and Everybody, known by the acronym GEE. Churches, mosques, and synagogues, those not leveled, will serve as recycling centers for obsolete electronics, which in a hundred years will be a weekly delivery. Sunday will be like other days, worldwide texting, video viewing, posting, and of course, shopping. Small rocket-speed air carriers will deliver. Our dome huts will have little openings in the top for receipt of the latest, a lot of them devices of various kinds. Each faster than anything we can imagine. What we can’t communicate with is GEE, still a problem a hundred years from now, but we’ll be too busy communicating with others to notice.

fiction writer, has a wife, a published novel, a second on the way