Erwin Cooper

Jokerland Erwin Cooper

Fast-forward just two generations (if you are young you'll still be around): The Jolsyn and Kelcher families experience what we and our neighbors will face as the world's oil wells run dry, the planet is swept by global warming, and water shortages loom.

Janus Joslyn, born in 2017, writes his memoirs n 2087, telling how he and his family and neighbors coped. They find themselves in freeway-laced southern California (Metroland, aka Jokerland), almost totally geared to auto transport and dependent on aqueduct water.

They watch as the U. S. is split by conflicts over dwindling energy and water supplies. California is pulled apart: In the far south a Colorado River farm empire, Metroland in the middle, NorCal north of the Tehachapi mountains.

The Joslyns and the Kelchers are romantically joined. They and their neighbors survive by farming their front and back yards in the shadows of Los Angeles' high-rises.

To ward off raids by savage "Pedro Rulers" neighbors pool their weapons, turn a former shopping mall into a garrison community, "Paradise Fort." There Janus meets and marries Lydia.

The battle for Paradise Fort is bloody. Rival "nations" steal most of Southern California's water. A dictator imposes his freakish, brutal rule. He launches a water war which Metroland loses.

Thousands of Metroland families, making an epic trek north to the water in the Owens Valley, must fight a fierce battle to reach it.

The survivors colonize the valley and unite with NorCal. Their ecology-balanced settlement enters quieter, more prosperous times halfway into the twenty-first century.