A Series from Millennial Press
The Service Area
Six standalone 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.
By Dewar Yearns · Millennial Press
The Idea
Same world's logic. A different corner of Ontario, and a different kind of work, in every book.
These are loosely related vignettes of a province a few years from now — never downtown condos, never Silicon Valley. Strip malls and bungalows, arterials and lake towns. Ontario as most people actually live it. Each book asks some version of the same quiet question, and answers it from a different doorway: a furnace shop, a care worker's route, a school, a marina, a basement apartment three generations deep.
The antagonist is never a robot. It's an optimization — a system working exactly as designed, slowly subtracting a person from their own life. The books are short on purpose, the chapters shorter, the endings landing soft and heavy at once. This is the novel you can finish in an evening, and the imprint's promise is that you'll want to.
There's no series bible to obey and no timeline to track. What binds them is voice, place, and theme — a reader who loved one will recognize the next on sight. So start anywhere. There are light echoes for completists — a familiar-sounding service platform, a payment that rhymes with another book's, a plaza that might be the same plaza — but nothing you need to have read first.
Available now
Book One
Fair Enough
A furnace-repair man builds an AI that saves his business and hollows out his neighbourhood.
Coming next
Book Two
The Scarborough Line
A service-business owner automates his own crew out of work, one efficiency at a time.
The Service Area
Fifteen
Minutes
Dewar Yearns
Coming
Coming
Book Three
Fifteen Minutes
A personal support worker whose AI scheduler cuts her days into fifteen-minute billable units — and has no line item for her own mother.
The Service Area
Principal
Residence
Dewar Yearns
Coming
Coming
Book Four
Principal Residence
Three generations in one Scarborough bungalow nobody can afford to leave — worth $1.4 million, and no one under its roof could buy it.
The Service Area
Differentiated
Learning
Dewar Yearns
Coming
Coming
Book Five
Differentiated Learning
A veteran teacher against AI tutors that are genuinely good — in a system with no line item for the one adult who isn't optimizing the kids.
The Service Area
Open
Water
Dewar Yearns
Coming
Coming
Book Six
Open Water
A lake-town store owner against the platform that's quietly turning her town into inventory, one closing date at a time.
The Author
Dewar Yearns is a pen name, and faceless by design. No author photo, no biography to perform — just the books, in one specific voice: deadpan, warm, exact, quietly devastating. The dark humour is a way of coping, never a way of keeping the reader at arm's length.
Millennial Press is a small Canadian imprint publishing short, literary, near-future fiction about the country as it actually is — the strip malls and the bungalows and the people who keep them running.
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