Gross Domestic Product: a novel

The nation is transformed when government teams up with big biotech and pioneers a way to convert human fat into a highly efficient fuel, thus ending our nation's energy crisis and our obesity epidemic in one fell suck. Americans grow instantly rich, selling off their excess bulk to the highest bidder. Effort is no longer required to survive.

The resulting tumult is experienced through three people, each with a distinct view of the events. Treyshawn, an intuitively gifted entrepreneur who rises up from the bottom where the obese poor are carrying around more equity than anyone else. Franny, an overweight schoolteacher who prefers her online world to reality. When education becomes obsolete and her job disappears, she's forced into the marketplace, selling off her accumulated girth to get by. And Derek, trapped inside the political/media machine. Formerly the world's heaviest man, he is recruited as the government's poster boy for "Project People Power" and suctioned down to a tenth of his size. Now, instead of being pitied as a freak, he's held up as an inspiration.

Americans seem content to meander in blithe apathy towards an uncertain future. After tens of thousands of years, humanity has finally gotten hold of the carrot at the end of evolution's stick. So now what?