Book review: News from Gardenia, By Robert Llewellyn

Positive Utopian novels – as opposed to scary, despotic dystopias – have fallen off the map at least since Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Paying homage to William Morris, but cleverly updating his ideas of a self-sufficient, post-scarcity society, the actor-writer paints a sunlit picture of a future England as a green paradise.

Low-energy "pod" space travel (Heathrow-JFK: 21 minutes) frees its citizens from the stifling parochialism of most eco-blueprints.

And Llewellyn gives a vivid, almost credible, account of the global upheavals that led to "Gardenia".