Carpark 14 - msdm [mobile strategies of display & mediation] publications is a house-studio-gallery founded by paula roush

News from Nowhere Lockdown (or An Epoch of Unrest) collab Carpark 14

News from Nowhere Lockdown (or An Epoch of Unrest), Carpark 14

News from Nowhere Lockdown
(or An Epoch of Unrest)

A collage-novel combining upcycled socialism and utopian science fiction
In collaboration with
Carpark magazine 14.

In the novel, the narrator, falls asleep after attending a zoom mass call of The World Transformed and awakes to find their self in a future society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. In this society there is no private property, no big cities,
no authority, no monetary system, no courts, no prisons, no gender and no class systems. This agrarian society functions simply because the people find pleasure in nature, and therefore they find pleasure in their work.

All the characters are enchanted figures in a time and place different from Boris Tory England. As Hugo, the romance character, quests for love and fellowship—and through them for a reborn self—they encounter romance archetypes in Marxist guises. Robert is both the communist educator who teaches Hugo the new world and the wise trans of queer romance.
Claudio and Josef are good comrades and the married lovers who aid Hugo in their wanderings. The feast on the table is both a voyage through society transformed by revolution and a quest for happiness.

The goal of the quest, met and found though only transiently, is Lena, the symbol of the reborn age and the bride the alien cannot win. Lena herself is a multidimensional figure: a working class woman emancipated under socialism, she is also a benign nature spirit as well as the soul in the
form of a trans-woman.

The novel offers no answers to a number of frequent objections to socialism, and underlines the belief that socialism will entail not only the abolition of private property but also of the divisions between art, life, and work.