Under the Green Dome, Under the Green Dome

An intrepid poet whose idealism exceeds his sanity joins a quixotic band of local bar flies to rescue the town's generous, kind and-only secondarily to hear him tell it-beautiful heiress, Ariel. What noble man would settle for anything less than to rescue a damsel in distress? Ariel's mother, Frieda, widowed since her husband, a scion of a Southern California ranching and real estate empire, accidentally overdosed or committed suicide leaving her finally rid of him. She is now obsessed with wresting full control of the family fortune from Ariel, its rightful heir. Earlier in her career, Frieda founded a ground-breaking social movement, its tenets embraced by Ivy League intellectuals, Hollywood glitterati, professional politicians and suburban housewives. She has since advanced her theories and is set to test them on an unsuspecting citizenry of a sleepy seaside art colony with the enthusiastic though exorbitantly expensive support of its City Council. Nothing stands in Frieda's way, least of all an unstable daughter following her father's footsteps into an early grave, if necessary. No price is too high to pay when the greater good is at stake. Thomas Jefferson warned "experience hath shown that even under the best forms of government, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny." The setting is a California coastal village in the throes of those perverted operations sped up exponentially. The consequences are catastrophic, nay, apocalyptic! George Orwell's Animal Farm and Dante's Inferno are primer for what living is like Under the Green Dome.