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ANIMAL FARM 2 RUSSIAN SEQUEL

George Orwell’s satire about farm animals who revolt, is updated by Martin Knox in his novel Animals Farm 2, about farm animals on a tropical island, reminiscent of Cuba, under Soviet control. The farm has a series of totalitarian leaders, all pigs, contemporaries of their Soviet and Russian counterparts. After the Revolution, pigs exploit the other animals terribly. 

On the island, the animals’ work mining coal is stopped by climate alarm. The animals study climate science and discover false appearances of a climate ‘spectacle’.

The story plays out superpower geopolitics from the Cold War, the Bay of Pigs invasion and Perestroika, up to modern times, with Russian empire rebuilding and capitalist profiteering by the major powers.

Available on Amazon.  Reviews on martinknox.com

FROM INDIVIDUALISM TO COLLECTIVISM AND BACK

This novel story of Chance’s personal journey commences in his 20s, when he suffers within the corporate morass of a job where competition is constrained by wokeism. Failing to conform, he quits the capitalist treadmill and goes back to university for a PhD to investigate risk-taking behaviour.  He meets Megan, a champion athlete, who is researching motivation in employment-seekers. 

Together they become absorbed in Heidegger’s phenomenology, which enables Megan to self-coach to success with elite performances.  But the ‘Spectacle’, described by Debord (1967) takes control in many fields, including sport, with competition transformed into profit-making and to gain political control by the nanny state. Chance and Megan resist, opposing mandatory vaccination during the Covid pandemic and ending with non-violent civil disobedience. Their examples advertise individualism based on the thinking of some famous philosophers.

The novel Turkeys Not Bees is available on Amazon. Reviews are at martinknox.com

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