Book launch / Solar Time dispatch 001
A Glaswegian field report from the timeline where Scotland swerved the worst of Cyber Time and built something stranger, kinder, and harder to sell back to us.
Final manuscript, buy links, and torrent hash are placeholders until the book file is locked.
Choose your doorway
Pick the pressure point that feels closest. The book will show you one thread, then the knot it belongs to.
01 / Power
Start with sortition: ordinary people chosen by lot, given the support and time to do real public work.
Sortition, they called it. Appointing by random draw.
From The Solarpunk Society / canonical text offset 36090
02 / Home
Follow the book into a world where shelter is a place to live and move from, rather than a casino chip for someone else.
Houses became homes again and landlordism was no longer a profit driven game.
From The Solarpunk Society / canonical text offset 100319
03 / Freedom
Explore the political imagination behind a public share of common wealth: enough security to make choice meaningful.
The true shareholders of this planet are us, everyone, every animal and plant. By the simple act of being alive, we are investors in this reality.
From The Solarpunk Society / canonical text offset 150725
04 / Possibility
Step into the book’s unruly proposition: make things, share them, organise with your neighbours and leave doom as a spectator sport.
Apocalypse porn is boring now. We’ve seen every version. Try blooming instead.
From The Solarpunk Society / canonical text offset 489075
Choose your path
The clean market-value route once the final ePub/PDF is locked.
PrintBookvault placeholder for the physical copy.
Ko-fiFor readers who want to fund free copies, servers, tools, and community work.
TorrentNo shame gate. The free route is part of the politics.
What is this thing?
Gingerbeard wakes up in our actual present with memories from Solar Time: an alternative Scotland where the 2014 Yes vote cracked history open and people stopped mistaking misery for realism.
The book moves between comic testimony, political imagination, and practical provocation: citizen dividends, sortition, consensus halls, food sovereignty, local-first tools, rewilded cities, and the stubborn belief that the world is not done yet.
A book with mud on its boots
A political freedom is useless without economic freedom to match.
That is the engine beneath the jokes, the time travel and the swearing: a better world has to be practical enough to repair, share and argue about.
Choose your timeline
One path turns Glasgow into a subscription service with bad lighting. The other gives people the means to look after each other.
Sample chapters
01 / UP vs DOON A standalone political compass for readers who feel the old labels have gone rotten.
02 / Citizen's Dividend A practical economic doorway into Solar Time: money as a floor under imagination.
03 / Rewilded cities A grounded, visual, action-facing sample for people who want proof they can touch.
A dispatch from the author
This is the first real moving voice on the site: an approved short from the launch archive. More author films, readings, and captions will build out this room as the final campaign takes shape.
The signal room
Not a feed. Three proper dispatches: one about looking after each other, one about taking democracy back, and one about bees refusing admin.
A storm, a roof, a blocked road: the first infrastructure that matters is people who know how to show up.
A short, sharp doorway into sortition, shared power and the book’s argument against a permanent political class.
A daft little question with a serious undercurrent: the living world does not need permission to be generous.
Proudly not sold on Amazon
This isn’t about sales. It’s about signals. Direct sales, pay-what-you-can access, print partners, community sharing, and torrents keep the work closer to the people it was written for. Bezos can find another castle to haunt.