Author · Millennial Press
Dewar Yearns
Near-future fiction about work and dignity, set in the Ontario suburbs and towns where most people live.
About the Work
About the work
Dewar Yearns writes about the moment a system gets better at your life than you are, and what that does to the person standing in the gap.
The books are set in Ontario as most people live it: strip malls and bungalows, six-lane arterials and lake towns. The plaza parking lot where the real conversations happen, and the basement apartment where the rent goes up while the job goes quiet.
The recurring subject is automation and the dignity of work, though the antagonist is never a robot. It's an optimization. A scheduler, an appraisal, a tutor, a pricing engine: systems that improve your life by removing your part in it, working exactly as designed.
Yearns writes short. These are novels you can finish in an evening, with dark comedy that helps people survive the truth without looking straight at it. The lineage is Vonnegut's Player Piano, moved to the M1 postal code. The register is deadpan, warm and specific, and never cruel to the people it's about.
Dewar Yearns is a pen name.
In Print
The Catalogue
Book One of The Service Area
Fair Enough
A man builds an AI that saves his business and hollows out his neighbourhood.
Howard Heirs fixes furnaces for a living in Scarborough, Ontario. Then the System he built to save the family business starts making everyone around him redundant. Set in a near-future Toronto, in the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano.
The Series
The Service Area
Six standalone, loosely related near-future Ontario novels about work, dignity, and what happens to people when the systems around them get better at their lives than they are. Each comes from a different corner of the province and a different kind of work. You can start anywhere.
The List
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