Blog – Lights In The Sky

Weimar redux

By C Stevens | 7th March 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

I have recently been re-reading Alex Ross’s brilliant historical evocation of twentieth century music, The Rest is Noise, originally published in 2007, and (as ever, it seems!) appear to have come back to this book at precisely the right time. I’m not the only one to have been struck by the parallels between our present age and the nineteen thirties, but Ross’s account (in Chapter 6, The City of Nets) of the rise and fall of the German Weimar Republic, reminds us that Weimar’s fall, as surely as night follows day, led to the Nazi coup d’etat in 1933 and set inter-war Europe irrevocably on the path to renewed confict.

I actually wrote this blog two weeks ago, but held off on posting it (mainly because I wanted write something less political and more positive), little realising that the Russian demagogue, Vladimir Putin, was about to launch an unprovoked attack on neighbouring Ukraine, presumably with the aim of somehow recreating the Soviet Union. That a ruthless dictator should now be on the march in Eastern Europe makes the Weimar analogy scarily real, so now I’m glad I delayed, even though this meant not blogging at all in February, as my original post has now rather been overtaken by events.

Most of the articles I read in the run up to writing the original draft a fortnight ago, evoked thirties parallels, with Emmanuel Macron being cast as some kind of latter-day Neville Chamberlain, while Boris Johnson auditions (unsuccessfully, it must be said!) for the role of Winston Churchill. However I’d prefer to focus on the cultural parallels, which appear eerily-precise.

Alex Ross points out that Weimar was the first modern media-saturated urban culture, as exemplified by 1920’s Berlin, a milieu brilliantly evoked in the Kander and Ebbs musical, Cabaret. Ross asks the question, was Weimar doomed to fail? Was it inevitable that the unique synthesis of the avant-garde and popular taste, seen in the success of Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, would be crushed between the twin millstones of commercial imperatives and state-sanctioned high culture prejudices? The two more modern examples, of West Berlin during the Cold War and (briefly) New York during the seventies and eighties, seem to demonstrate that such a synthesis of high and low culture is still possible, but only in very specific circumstances.

Alex Ross also highlights the political weaknesses that made Weimar vulnerable to the far-right, once the Wall Street Crash ended the late-twenties boom which had underpinned its all too brief cultural renaissance. He contends that the moderate elements lacked a firm power base in Weimar, under constant fire from the Communist left and National Socialist right.

Moderate elements still hold power in most of what we still refer to as the West. Different governments swing slightly toward the right or left of the political spectrum in their particular country, but all cleave to a consensus. This consensus embraces support for Western political and military alliances, differing brands of free-market economics, limited action on climate change, and a liberal attitude on most social issues.

The opposition (on both sides) is more diffuse; the right, while divided into a multitude of factions, is generally against internationalism in all its forms (including military alliances), denies climate change and rejects any measures to ameliorate it, and while professing to love the notion of individual freedom, is dismissive of democracy and human rights, and manifests an alarming admiration for foreign dictators.

What I’m calling ‘the left’ is even more amorphous, including everything from revolutionary socialists and radical greens, through various groupings defined by modern identity politics. I explored this in a previous blog, coining the term Pluralistic Absolutism to describe the exclusive and hard line approach of many of these groups. The point is that the far right would be prepared to sink their differences if a suitably charismatic leader came along (another Trump or someone even worse), while the left would never unite, as it failed to do in the 1930’s.

In one sense this is a good thing, as the moderate centre doesn’t really have to worry about its left flank and can concentrate its fire on the radical right. How successful they are at this will largely depend on how bad things get over the next few years

At the moment the jury’s still out…

The Author March 2022

Be careful what you wish for

By C Stevens | 4th January 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

Lights in the Sky began as a series anticipating an environmental catastrophe known as ‘The Collapse’, which leads to a general breakdown of science, civil society and nation states, resulting in the reduction of Earth’s human population to roughly one third of what it is today. I pushed my environmental catastrophe back to the beginning of the twenty second century (something which looks naively optimistic from our standpoint in 2022), I also invented a grand project, the Alpha Mission which is able to send a Probe to our nearest neighbour in interstellar space, the Alpha Centauri system. Conveniently, (for this is fiction, after all) the Probe finds the perfect Earth-like planet in orbit around Alpha Centauri A, one of the three stars that make up the system, effects a landfall and uses its autonomic resources to build a base. The artificial intelligence which controls the Mission is then able to bring its human colonists into existence.

Now before you accuse me of bandwagon jumping, I wrote the original short story that opens the series (then called Light-out) somewhere between the end of 2012 and beginning of 2013. I know this because I submitted the first draft of the story (without success) to Analog Science Fact and Fiction magazine on 20th April 2013. Many of the themes and concerns explored in the subsequent series of novels were not well known outside of SF circles, nor were they part of general public discourse at this point in our history. Few, for example, had heard of Elon Musk or SpaceX, that came later.

The Lights in the Sky series now stretches to seven completed novels, number eight (now retitled, hopefully for the last time, The Robot’s Progress) is nearing completion, and number nine (currently called Earthrise) is already underway.

I didn’t get everything right; for example, I didn’t anticipate a worldwide pandemic striking the planet in 2019/20; and, as mentioned previously, I have my breakdown of civilisation occurring at the beginning of the next century, when the middle of this one is now looking favourite. I was also unaware of the impact our rapidly diminishing groundwater reserves will have on the capacity of the world to feed its current population, let alone what is predicted.

But by and large, I think I did pretty well…

The notion that we should be seriously seeking a lifeboat for humanity in the form of a colony on a habitable world elsewhere, while a commonplace in SF circles, was not yet part of the zeitgeist. My version of the future sees a vast shadowy international body (the Alpha Project), funded by various governments, doing the heavy lifting, mainly because I had not anticipated the rise of commercial space exploration funded by billionaires.

I also shifted the location of our species’ lifeboat much further out. My technological solutions for getting my probe and its precious cargo to Alpha Centauri are not examples of ‘imaginary science’ in the tradition of Star Trek, but projections of existing technologies. Again, few people outside of research laboratories or the hard-core SF readership were talking about light sails as a means of crossing the interstellar gulf, now it has become a commonplace.

All of the above is extremely gratifying, as one of the usual motivations for writing in the genre is to engage in prediction. But I would also hasten to point out that this series is far more than an exercise in futurology, as story, character development, and philosophical discourse are at least as important, if not more so.

But don’t take my word for it; the first completed novel in the series, A Children’s Crusade, is published on this website, along with extracts from later novels in the series.

So why the caveat?

Well, I don’t really want to be right about these things. Anticipating a future where billions of people will die well before their time is not a comfortable thought, and as this once remote possibility looms ever larger, the old saw ‘be careful what you wish for’, starts to appear uncomfortably apposite.

The Author January 2022

Dramatic Irony

By C Stevens | 11th December 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

The project launch of the James Webb Space Telescope comes weighted with irony. That such an immensely-expensive, but also immensely-powerful, scientific resource should be launched at this moment in our history serves to illustrate how close we have come to greatness and how near we are to extinction. JWST promises to look further than ever, both back in time and out into space, and will presumably provide much new valuable data, and maybe even answers to age-old questions.

However this scientific insight, which represents the pinnacle of our achievements as a species, looks likely to come too late to be anything other than a footnote to human history, serving as an epitaph for the scientific age that few, if any, will be left to appreciate.

You may accuse me of alarmism, and I would counter that this is an occupational hazard for any science fiction writer, especially in times like these. But I would also argue that the threats to our collective survival are legion and apparently increasing by the day. COVID 19 refuses to go quietly, avian flu makes a comeback, and COP26 appears more like a ‘cop-out’ with every passing day. Add these to the long-standing issues of sea level rise, continued decimation of the biosphere, and the increasing incidence of severe weather events, together with the largely-ignored threat posed by our rapid depletion of irreplaceable groundwater reserves, then I’d say we’ve got a problem.

In the Lights in the sky series of novels I push the general collapse of human civilisation back to the end of this century. But now it appears that I am being rather too optimistic, as the chances of our culture lasting past the middle of the century are looking increasingly remote.

In the light of this, the James Webb Space Telescope programme looks quixotic in the extreme and the telescope seems likely to join Hubble, Voyager and all the rest, as silent monuments to our collective folly, forever adrift in the blackness of space.

Maybe one day a space-faring civilisation will venture this way and encounter the remnants of our technological endeavours, starting first with radio transmissions, then microwave telecasts, before encountering the Voyager probes steadily tracking their way across interstellar space. Perhaps they will decipher the Golden Disc and reflect on our naive optimism and cultural hubris, before moving on to more profitable avenues of exploration. Or maybe they will delve into the heart of our system, meeting JWST at the second Lagrange point, before observing the ragtag bands of primitive hominids fighting for survival on the blasted remains of the marginally-habitable third planet.

If these putative starfarers possess any capacity for irony, perhaps they will reflect on their own tendency for hubris and give thanks that their own civilisation was never subject to the full weight of retributive justice.

The Author December 2021

Anxious Times

By C Stevens | 12th November 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

The worrying times we live in have elicited an artistic response from yours truly. After a gap of several years, I’ve finally written a completely new song from scratch. Appropriately enough, it’s entitled Anxious Times, and I include a sample of the lyrics below,

Men fighting on the forecourts/Stuff’s missing from the shelves

And everybody hides behind their closed doors

They’re all thinking about themselves

Yeah, they’re all thinking about themselves

I’m biased, but I think that this short extract indicates it’s an effective piece of reportage, a response to what, at the time, looked like a developing and worrying crisis. Since then we’ve slipped back into low-intensity crisis mode; the supermarket shelves still have big gaps, but at least we can fill-up our gas-guzzling automobiles. The song (based on a Major 7th riff I wrote for an existing song, but decided it was so good that I built a completely new song from it) is essentially a litany of modern age anxieties, both personal and general.

Essentially nothing has changed; COP26 produced some useful but rather limited agreements between the major polluting nations, but will they be implemented? The rich nations still refuse to bite the bullet, maintaining we can have our ‘green cake’ and eat it. That making everyone drive electric cars will be enough to combat global warming, and that we can still have endless growth providing it’s green growth.

The truth of the matter is that any form of private automobile is a luxury we can no longer afford, and we must now switch en masse to walking, cycling and public transport, with our towns and cities being repurposed to accommodate this with smaller, local (and hopefully independent!) shops. The return of the high street, anyone?

The fallacy of endless economic growth also needs to be acknowledged, along with endless population growth. Our biosphere will just not sustain it, and the next crisis is going to be a shortage of fresh water, all over the world.

The other elephant in the conference room, that the delegates were careful to tiptoe around, is (of course) the role of the super-rich in all of this. The problem is that the various tech billionaires are individually richer than many of the small countries that their indolence and obscene extravagance threaten to inundate.

One can only hope that the likes of Musk and Bezos make good on their threat to leave Earth altogether and do move to Mars. Given the much lower gravity on the Red Planet, this is inevitably a one-way trip, even assuming they even make it there in the first place.

And I say good riddance, because without the drain on Earth’s resources resulting from their appalling wealth, the rest of us little people can concentrate on saving our Planet!

In the refuge provided by the fictional world of Lights in the Sky, Klara the robot has joined with a tribe of indigenes called the Yanomami. They are on a quest together, seeking the fabled Comunidades Livres, a place also foretold in Yanomama mythology. Currently they are journeying along Rio Tapauá through the Green Heart of Amazonas, far away from the dangers of the Portuguese world.

But Klara knows that the Europeans stand between them and their goal.

The Author November 2021

Reset

By C Stevens | 1st October 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

As I’ve said before in this blog, we live in worrying times. Previous entries have addressed other recent threats to our well-being; principally populist rulers, unaccountable billionaires and the organisations they run, including their corrosive and equally unaccountable social media platforms; but these all pale into insignificance beside the clear and present danger, which has come sharply into focus in the current news cycle. The existential threat posed by the collapse of the biosphere will mean the end of human civilisation and cannot be mitigated by technological fixes despite all self-serving claims to the contrary. The likes of Boris Johnson waffle on about ‘Green Capitalism’ as an acceptable version which would allow for continued economic growth. But as a number of commentators have pointed out, any economic growth is in the end unsustainable, and the only way out of the coming catastrophe is to drastically reduce the size of the world economy and with it the size of the world’s population.

When very rich people start buying up land in geographically-isolated places such as New Zealand, and tech billionaires draw up serious plans to colonise Mars as a back-up planet to Earth, then it’s time for everybody to worry.

However most people don’t have the options of the super-rich, and the number of sufficiently-isolated islands with the resources to support a significant population is necessarily finite. Those wealthy people wishing to seek this kind of asylum will need to act quickly, as the drawbridges are likely to be lifted very soon. You can probably think of the quarantines imposed recently by the likes of Australia and New Zealand as a sort of dry run for what they will be forced to do again later. And in the end it may be to no avail, as the populous and militarily-powerful nations at most risk of collapse are unlikely to just sit on their hands when things get desperate. Ecological collapses in the past have always led to warfare and violence, just ask the Easter Islanders!

At some point in the near future, a one-way trip into indentured servitude on Mars is going to look like a very attractive proposition, and millions will be applying.

Ironies abound in our current predicament; that we should have reached this point when pure science has enabled us to gain a frighteningly-sophisticated understanding of the Cosmos and our place in it, is merely the most poignant. But it’s not pure science which is the villain here, it’s the application of that science in technology, and the Abrahamic social and economic doctrines pursued by all urbanized societies which have brought us here.

And the reset part?

This is not a new phenomenon for our planet; mass extinctions are par for the course, although the active complicity of a sentient race in the process is (as far as we are aware) a new variant.

In the end the planet doesn’t care, it has a built-in self-correction mechanism. If things move too far in one direction it acts (blindly one assumes) to correct the imbalances that have built up within the system. All that pesky carbon will eventually be safely locked up again and the climate will return to something less inimical to higher forms of life. But in the meantime (and we’re talking millions of years here), evolution will be reset, starting again with the few hardy and adaptable species able to survive both the collapse and the testing times that follow, and it will be their descendants who eventually inherit the Earth.

Whether any of these creatures will achieve sentience is, of course, unknowable.

And if you’ve wondered why we’ve never been contacted by a technologically-advanced species from another star system…

The Author October 2021

Pluralistic Absolutism and Adversarial Hyperbole

By C Stevens | 25th August 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

A new (and in Western liberal democracies, at least) dominant philosophy has emerged in these most worrying of times, which I have given the name pluralistic absolutism. Now I did Google this, and nobody seems to have used this precise term before. It is however a new spin on an old notion, that of cultural absolutism; the notion that the values of your nation, region, ethnic group, religious persuasion, social class, or ideological belief system (delete as appropriate) are paramount and cannot be challenged. Like much in contemporary culture, this notion has mutated and been transformed by the influence of the internet, and in particular, by social media.

Ironically, an innovation that promised to bring peoples, nations and cultures together, has had precisely the opposite effect; the online world has instead atomised society, facilitating the rise of identity politics. Societies have become far more tribal, with people finding others who share their ethnicity, gender, and sexuality (or any combination of the aforementioned) and have similar beliefs, norms and values, within cyberspace. These new virtual communities are no longer necessarily limited by national boundaries. But, rather than resulting in a more tolerant attitude towards difference, a reaction against cultural relativism has led to the opposite. A Holier than Thou attitude has become mainstreamed, as everyone noisily proclaims the difference and uniqueness of their group’s particular take on the world, and its moral superiority to every other point of view.

This worldview has many additional consequences, including a conviction (on the part of everybody, it would seem) that there is a fixed way of doing everything, from watering plants in hot weather to writing genre fiction. All of this is spread and facilitated via social media, often linked to different identity groupings, and taking its place alongside the innumerable conspiracy theories, faddism in medical treatments and diets, and all the rest of the detritus.

Every little identity group now maintains that their narrow view of the world and their particular way of doing things is right and rejects (and often condemns as evil), all competing philosophies and methodologies.

The result of this is civil paralysis and confusion, which is exploited by Populists and authoritarians, and threatens democracy and the basis of Liberal society itself, which relies on tolerance and the willingness to agree to differ.

Accompanying this is what I will term adversarial hyperbole, in itself nothing new in the pages of the popular press. However this is now aggressively colonising other areas of the media once considered immune. Hence, every pronouncement by a celebrity or public figure is now an admission rather than a comment. Mild observations about others are repurposed as ‘brutal’ or ‘crushing’ criticisms! (sidebar: when did our public vocabulary become so limited?)

Every form of public discourse now appears to be conducted in the most ludicrously adversarial terms, and one has to ask what this fashion for violent public discourse tells us about our culture and about the likely fate of our democracy.

Not wishing to be alarmist here, but the Weimar Republic comes to mind, and others have already drawn parallels between the Reichstag Fire and the storming of the US Capitol by Donald Trump’s supporters. This leads me to the conclusion that the new pluralistic absolutism is effectively a product of the Baroque phase of Western Liberal Democracy, and likely a harbinger of its imminent dissolution.

On that cheery note, ’til next time

The Author August 2021

The real enemy

By C Stevens | 17th July 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

The actual result of the Euro 2020 final on Sunday turned out to be the least of our worries; of far more concern is the ticketless thugs forcing their way into Wembley (fer Christ’s sake!) during the final of the European Soccer Championship. These ‘England supporters’ also punched stewards, terrorised legitimate ticket holders and caused damage to the stadium. Others (presumably legitimate ticket holders) booed the Italian National Anthem, while an attention-seeking reality tv star invaded the pitch.

Monday’s papers brought the news that a British Grand Prix racing driver was attacked and relieved of his £40,000 watch (a gift from his team) in a supposedly-secure stadium car park. In purely-footballing terms this and other incidents has probably put paid to any chance Britain and Ireland had of staging the 2030 FIFA World Cup, but that’s not really the issue.

Away from the stadium, the West End is trashed, England players are savagely attacked by racists on social media, drunk and stoned thugs parade around our town and city centres, threatening people for dining in Italian restaurants (or even just eating pizza!), without a police officer in sight. I personally witnessed this in Birmingham’s New Street on the day after the final.

What this tells us is that criminality and public disorder in this country is getting out of hand, and the real enemy isn’t the Italian soccer team, nor is it the European Union, it’s actually a violent and social media-organised minority who appear to be taking over our streets.

And we know where the blame for all this lies, don’t we?

The man who has cut the budget for policing, decimated youth services, attacked and undermined the judiciary, and subverted Parliament. The man whose vacillations would even alarm the protagonist in a Wood Allen movie! Hiding behind the door so recently and opportunistically plastered with England flags (those vanished pretty smartish, didn’t they? presumably as soon as the winning Italian penalty hit the back of the net!). The same gleaming black door that will soon be issuing excuses and announcing abrupt policy U-turns, as COVID 19 explodes once more and we’re all back in lockdown.

The problem with Johnson is that, on the surface, he’s plausible. Unlike his role-models around the globe, our Prime Minister is not obviously-deranged, nor is he on first name terms with genocidal dictators. Johnson says the right things (even if he doesn’t mean them), while coincidentally giving out messages of encouragement to the extremists and nutters who form much of his core support.

I referenced in the past the notion of the Antichrist as a metaphor for the various difficulties that threaten us. The problem would appear to be that rather than just the one promised in Revelations, we are beset by a multitude of them. The aforementioned genocidal dictators now being joined by a new wave of megalomaniacal billionaires from Silicon Valley, who have the gall to pretend they’re actually saving us!

All of these people share one obvious character trait with ‘the Father of Lies’, and together with their legions of supporters they constitute the real enemy…

The Author July 2021

Back to the future

By C Stevens | 30th June 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

I’m cutting it fine even by my recent standards with this month’s blog, writing it on the very last day of June. Apologies also for using a rather obvious SF film reference for the title, however it is appropriate because I’ve actually started a completely new literary project by reaching back into my past. However this doesn’t mean that Lights in the Sky has been abandoned; I’m roughly halfway through the eighth novel, and I’m enjoying writing my allegory of the Spanish Civil War, but finding the title that fits is still proving tricky.

But back to my new project; a very long time ago I spent two years living in Liverpool, not the smart tourist destination of today, but the crumbling remains of a once great port that featured levels of deprivation not seen elsewhere in the country, whose people had become the butt of national humour. I loved living in the city, even though I knew there was nothing there for me long term, and out of the experience came a song, Saturday night in another Western town, written in 1985, and the first really good song I wrote (for a long time it was the only good song!).

Looking back, the title was far too good to be wasted on a simple song, and after an inordinately long gestation period it’s finally become a story, set in ’pool at the time I was living there and featuring a protagonist who’s an amalgam of me and a friend of mine (now dearly-departed). The story is set in the world of local bands and the longing for fame and occasional brushes with success that characterise this milieu. It features (and will feature) incidents that actually happened, but being fiction, will take a turn into the might-have-beens of life. There will also be a time travel element to the story, as SF always lurks in my fictional universe, sometimes dead centre, but here more on the periphery.

At the moment, I have the basis for a good short story, or the first chapter of another long novel. It will be interesting to see how this one turns out…

The Author June 2021

Languorous times

By C Stevens | 28th May 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

Apologies for just getting in under the wire, and finally blogging just as this miserable washout of a May breathes its last.

The English Government (I say English because it doesn’t even pretend to govern in the interests of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland) increasingly comes to resemble a comic opera, possibly some hitherto-undiscovered work by Gilbert and Sullivan, Trial by Tabloid, perhaps! Or possibly Princess Carrie, maybe even The Pirates of PPE Procurement!

Other commentators have compared Johnson’s administration to a Carry on film, Carry on lying would appear to be most apposite.

The overall effect of this blizzard of misrepresentation, graft and incompetence, very much like a similar exercise on the other side of the Atlantic, has been to ensure that a weary electorate ceases to care, and will welcome any good news.

Opposition to the Tory Ascendancy is not helped by a colourless Labour leader, who always seems to have fear in his eyes when he faces the cameras, and an opposition that’s fatally divided, allowing the Conservatives to rack up huge majorities on minority votes. The time for Labour to press for proportional representation in General Elections is clearly now, but will they realise this?

I recently read an article (which I cannot now find) which argued that Languorousness, as opposed to Anxiety or outright Depression, is the default psychological state of our times. One of the online dictionaries that appeared when I searched listed sixteen different synonyms for languor, including lethargy, apathy and weariness, inertia, ennui, lassitude and listlessness. Any of these would appear appropriate descriptions of the public mood as we complete the fourteenth month of the pandemic.

My private literary universe has never appeared a more welcome refuge than now. However, in the world of Lights in the sky, divisions are emerging within the Camposetta movement, even as it consolidates its grip on most of Brazil. Splits between the hard-line Evangelical Christians that make up the majority of the movement’s foot soldiers, and the Environmentalists, Socialists, Trade Unionists and Libertarians who also opposed the Federal Government. Self-interest, graft and authoritarianism are also on the rise, leading many of the original idealists to try and get out while they still can.

The historically-aware amongst you will probably have spotted the parallels with the Spanish Civil War in my tale of a Revolution gone wrong. As has often been said, all revolutions have a tendency to eat their children.

The Author May 2021

Normal service resumed

By C Stevens | 20th April 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

After blogging twice in February I’ve now managed to miss out March 2021 entirely!

I think I’ll blame the mental fog that is supposed to be a consequence of lockdown, though in truth the limitations haven’t changed my life that much. My life is no more isolated than it was previously and uncertainty is a part of life, but hey!

As forecast back in February, I’ve become dissatisfied with the new name for novel eight of Lights in the sky, but I know if I give it time, the right title will emerge.

We have reached a crucial point in what’s currently still called Finding your place, my heroine has lost most of her friends to the vicissitudes of guerilla warfare and has realised that her place is far from secure within the changing Camposetta movement. The opportunistic and cynical leadership still expects Bolivar’s Army to take Manaus, but have not provided them with the means to do this.

I watched another Adam Curtis series recently, this one from the prehistory that is the 1990’s, Pandora’s Box apparently originated the format Curtis has mined successfully ever since, and, despite a truly terrible theme tune composed (it would seem) by members of post-punk quartet Gang of Four, it was both informative and stimulating. The last programme A is for Atom sticks in my mind as it dissects the lies, state secrecy, total disregard for safety, manipulation and general venality that lay behind the nuclear energy programme, leading with appalling inevitability to Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

Nuclear fission as a source of energy is now thoroughly discredited, but a concerted campaign to boost nuclear fusion is underway. I think it’s fair to say that the only saving grace about fusion is that it’s unlikely ever to work. This is not a flip comment, I have read extensively on the topic and technical limitations have made it impossible to achieve anything beyond milliseconds of fusion, attained at colossal expense. Even if the necessary reaction could be maintained (and contained), the necessity to use elements such as deuterium or tritium, rather than plain old hydrogen, means that (despite the claims) nuclear waste will still be produced. As with fission, the likely cost of the power (if any) finally produced continues to rise. And of course, rather like mining the Asteroid Belt and other fantasies, all that success would lead to is the continuation of our mad Abrahamic Crusade until our entire world is utterly despoiled.

Fusion is rather like mass-migration to Mars; the very worst thing that could happen would be if it were to succeed.

You may have noticed that the commanding heights of the world economy have been seized by a bunch of sociopathic billionaires. The phrase, ‘this is not really happening!’ springs to mind (thank you Tori Amos!), which is of course correct, because this is now a virtual world within a virtual economy.

And here’s me thinking that the AntiChrist had been voted out of office, but of course these people don’t actually believe in democracy because they know better! An opinion shared with oligarchs and autocrats everywhere.

And it’s just been announced that a number of English soccer clubs, some very successful, others not so much, have decided to join a new Europe-wide league with other like-minded clubs. Nothing like enlightened self-interest, huh!

Just like the tech billionaires want to get rid of annoying inconveniences like accountability and the democratically-expressed will of the people, the so-called European Super League wants to get rid of fair competition and the notion that you might actually get demoted if you’re shit!

Lovely world we live in…

The Author April 2021

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