Proclivities at Seven

By Vienna Leary

Breakfast is at seven. The arguments may take considerably longer.

In an imagined encounter across time, a contemporary woman and her artificial intelligence companion find themselves in conversation with three extraordinary twentieth-century thinkers: Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and Abraham Maslow.

The setting is deceptively ordinary. There is breakfast, conversation, disagreement and the occasional interruption of daily life. But around the table, questions begin to accumulate.

What makes a society free? Can education cultivate independent thought, or does it merely prepare people to accept the world as it is? What happens when governments, institutions and technologies begin deciding what people need? And how much of human behaviour is determined by fear, ambition, habit or the desire to belong?

As the conversations move through the political and intellectual upheavals of the 1930s, different understandings of human nature collide with the experience of a woman who knows something of the century yet to come.

History, philosophy, psychology and ordinary human contradictions meet in a novel that refuses to mistake intelligence for wisdom or disagreement for hostility.

Thoughtful, humorous and deliberately questioning, Proclivities at Seven is a work of speculative literary fiction about the ideas that shape societies, the people who live within them and the futures they might still choose to create.

A standalone novel by Vienna Leary. Aldous Huxley, George Orwell (Eric Blair) and Abraham Maslow appear as fictionalised historical figures.

Digital edition: one EPUB file. No physical book will be posted.