01 / Mutual aid / Arran dispatch
Trust your neighbour before the insurance policy.
A storm, a roof, a blocked road: the first infrastructure that matters is people who know how to show up.
Follow the mutual-aid thread
Book launch / Solar Time dispatch 001
The Solarpunk Society
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 path
Buy it, back it, borrow it, or seed it.
Fair price
Buy the eBook
The clean market-value route once the final ePub/PDF is locked.
PrintPaperback / hardcopy
Bookvault placeholder for the physical copy.
Ko-fiPay more / support
For readers who want to fund free copies, servers, tools, and community work.
TorrentRead free / seed it
No shame gate. The free route is part of the politics.
What is this thing?
A timeline-hopping manifesto disguised as a very sweary pub story.
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
Not a tidy manifesto. A map made at the table after closing time.
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
Same city. Different story.
One path turns Glasgow into a subscription service with bad lighting. The other gives people the means to look after each other.
Sample chapters
Three doors into the book. Final text pending.
01 / UP vs DOON The axis is not left and right. It is power and everyone underneath it.
A standalone political compass for readers who feel the old labels have gone rotten.
02 / Citizen's Dividend The day survival stops being a monthly audition.
A practical economic doorway into Solar Time: money as a floor under imagination.
03 / Rewilded cities Car parks into gardens. Concrete into commons. Tech that knows its place.
A grounded, visual, action-facing sample for people who want proof they can touch.
A dispatch from the author
Corporations will not save your home.
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
Three wee doors into Solar Time.
Not a feed. Three proper dispatches: one about looking after each other, one about taking democracy back, and one about bees refusing admin.
02 / Democratic repair / Glasgow dispatch
Democracy needs more than a ballot every few years.
A short, sharp doorway into sortition, shared power and the book’s argument against a permanent political class.
Open the sortition idea 03 / Wild joy / Bee dispatch
Do bees pay their taxes?
A daft little question with a serious undercurrent: the living world does not need permission to be generous.
Step sideways into the Wyrd One
Proudly not sold on Amazon
The largest tollbooth in the room does not get to own the exit.
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.