Book excerpt: Just what motivates a writer to write, anyway? Is it a need to expiate past experiences, an apprehension for the direction of the future, a need to slough off inner thoughts not aceptable to voice out loud? The Cathedral Mall plays out in a real-life futuristic city constructed around a mall which provides everything, including stores, clinics, restaurants and bookstores. The suburbs are called “passageways”and go from the city to the end of civilization, out where the city ends, and war begins. Sandoval and Sandra are hunted for trying to exit La Catedral Mall without making a purchase, a capital offense in a world where buying is a religión. “Buy for your future. Buying is our future.” Chants a muezzin-type crier over the sound system of the mall named La Catedral which may have been a synagogue in the past. Sandoval gets to the city limits and there sees people who try unsuccessfully to enter, where he finds he can no longer be the person he was and seeks refuge in his father’s writings which spoke of another past, another world. A meld of science fiction and social commentary. A novel for the new millennium.