The Glass Mandate

The premise

Neuropolis has engineered a public life of carefully managed calm. Emotion can be measured and graded, while memory has become a licensed activity. The apparent order depends on making the inner lives of citizens legible to a civic system.

Marra Sorel exists inside that system as both participant and anomaly. Her resistance draws attention to the cost of a society that can turn recollection, meaning and private feeling into administrated commodities.

Themes to explore

• Memory and power: who may preserve, access or control the past.
• Engineered consent: the difference between outward calm and meaningful freedom.
• The commodified self: an inner life reorganised as a service to be priced and sold.

What to expect

A dystopian novel with dark humour and an interest in the language and mechanisms of control. Its imagined institutions connect questions of technology and bureaucracy with the vulnerability of private experience.