Oikeiosis
Book One of ANAKYKLOSIS
A failing component should not connect three women across Europe. But it does.
Europe, 2050. The systems still work. Trains run, water flows, governments meet, power grids balance, and communities continue with ordinary life. But decades of heat, ecological pressure, ageing infrastructure and tighter margins have made one thing increasingly clear: no system is as independent as it appears.
On the southern Iberian coast, Astara keeps a water system running by seeing dependencies before they become failures.
In the Alps, Salven measures the narrowing space between what people need from the landscape and what the landscape can continue to give.
In a German university town, Valden works with communities facing a different kind of scarcity: housing, trust, legitimacy, and the question of who should bear the cost when there is not enough for everyone.
They have different expertise, different instincts, and no reason to become indispensable to one another.
Then a small mechanical failure sends Astara looking beyond the usual supply chains.
One favour becomes another. A repair becomes a shared standard. A contact becomes a relationship. And, almost without anyone deciding to create it, an informal network begins to form.
It works.
That is when the harder questions begin.
Because successful cooperation creates expectations. Expectations create obligations. Standards decide who can participate. Membership creates promises. Expertise acquires authority. And the structures capable of protecting people are also capable of deciding whose needs come first.
When scarcity finally forces the network to choose what and whom it can protect, Astara, Salven and Valden must confront a problem no single discipline can solve:
How do you depend on other people without giving them too much power over you?
OIKEIOSIS is a literary speculative novel about friendship, expertise, ecology, infrastructure and the ancient human problem hidden inside modern systems: how strangers become responsible for one another.
It is a novel in ANAKYKLOSIS, a series about the patterns that return when societies are forced to decide what they owe one another.
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
