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Category: Science Fiction

Be careful what you wish for

Be careful what you wish for

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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

Dramatic Irony

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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

Anxious Times

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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

Having your mind made up for you

Having your mind made up for you

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I don’t normally blog twice in any one month, but this time my hand has been forced. Reading the Guardian online yesterday I noticed that a novelist I have read (and have a certain regard for) Kazuo Ishiguro, has a new book out. All well and good, but the problem lies in the title, as his new book is called Klara and the Sun. I read the article and noted that, sure enough, Klara is some kind of robot!

Now at this point I need to point out that my Klara is a character originally introduced in my fourth Lights in the sky novel, The leftover girl, which makes her roughly five years old. While it’s entirely possible that Mr Ishiguro was already writing his recently-published novel five years ago, the chances are that I got there first. I originally took the name ‘Klara’ from another science fiction novel, Gateway, by the late Fred Pohl. In this novel Klara is the protagonist’s dead lover, and (if my memory serves me correctly) serves a similar narrative function to Kris Kelvin’s dead wife in Stanislaw Lem’s best known work, Solaris.

However, I’m unknown and unpublished, Kazuo Ishiguro is internationally famous, so I’m going to have to change the title of the eighth Lights in the sky novel. This is fine as Klara was only a placeholder until something better came along. So, I’ve decided that the novel will now be called Finding your place. Needless to say, this title is also currently provisional. What I won’t change is the name of my character.

The chances of this coincidence ever coming to Mr Ishiguro’s attention are remote, but if they do, I’m quite ready to defend myself against any charges of plagiarism. I would point out that I have been writing about self-aware vaguely-humanoid robots in the Lights in the sky series for roughly eight years now (I submitted the short story that kicked off the series to Analog SF magazine in April 2013, in fact). 

It would also be a source of amusement to me that anyone would ever compare us as novelists, as we couldn’t be more different. I have read one of Ishiguro’s novels (The Remains of the Day, which I enjoyed), I started Never let me go but got bored halfway through. Mr Ishiguro comes across to me as a miniaturist, with the action of his books seeming to take place mainly in airless rooms, while mine range through time and space. We both may have postmodern elements in our work, but make use of vastly-different source materials for very different purposes.

Nevertheless, I have the man to thank for finally forcing me to make a decision…

The Author  February 2021  

Modern unicorns part one: Martian Colonisation

Modern unicorns part one: Martian Colonisation

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Have you noticed how the Tech Billionaires (aka the Robber Barons de nos jours) have adopted some of the presentational strategies of the New Right Populists? Specifically, they overpromise, an example being SpaceX’s recent assertion that they will have a Martian colony (or at least the groundwork for such a thing) in place by 2024! 

Further examination of other less hi-profile pronouncements reveals that the true timetable is sometime in the 2030’s, but the high-profile announcement has done its job by creating a buzz around the whole endeavour, attracting the attention of  tabloid and social media, and making said Tech Billionaire look potent and sexy. 

We may well be closer to having the technical capability for sending this kind of probe to Mars, however I did read that the sheer mass of the thing means that getting into orbit, and off to the Red Planet with the necessary velocity, is currently not possible.

Furthermore, the real problems come later: achieving re-entry for such a large vehicle (even though we’re only talking about a lander) through the virtually non-existent Martian atmosphere will be Hellishly-difficult. Remember, at least half of Martian landings of unmanned vehicles have been unsuccessful, we only recall the successes. Splattering a probe across the Martian landscape may be unfortunate if it’s unmanned, but if it contains 4-6 brave astro/cosmonauts, the fallout will be much more serious. 

But the first challenging issue will be getting those 4-6 brave astronauts there alive and in any fit condition to do useful work. It takes (with current technology) six months to get to Mars, that’s six months in microgravity which is really harmful to human physiology, six months confined in a space no bigger than a long-wheelbase Ford Transit van, exposed to potentially deadly radiation (not just solar flares which are a low probability risk, but cosmic rays which are ever present!). 

It’s estimated that the astronauts will receive 70% of their safe lifetime dosage just getting to Mars, not to mention all the other health problems they will arrive in Martian orbit with, and then they’ve got re-entry to face!

I recently read this online article with an accompanying promotional video about an award-winning design for a Martian city, cunningly cut into the walls of a suitable cliff, so that the human (and animal) inhabitants, and the various trees and shrubs, have access to Martian daylight, while being protected by the rock above them from all that nasty U/V radiation and pesky cosmic rays.

The settlement looked very swish, but the article glossed-over the whole issue of who’s going to construct it. Now in my SF saga, Lights in the sky, the Alpha Probe has all those convenient self-aware humanoid robots to do the heavy lifting, and Alpha 5 is a considerably less hostile analogue of the Red Planet. But building this putative Martian city will require the early colonists to leave the sanctuary of the subarean caverns and be out on the Martian surface. Now the Martian surface is a very hostile environment; the atmosphere is tenuous at best, contains no oxygen (and virtually no water vapour), the place is cold, and the thin atmosphere and lack of a magnetic field means anything (or anybody) out there is bombarded by harmful radiation. So human operators, directing and operating the digging and construction equipment, will be at considerable risk and only able to work for short periods of time.

As I read through the article, I clocked some of the small print. The people living in this city of the future would be obliged to pay 300,000 Euros for a one-way ticket to Mars, and would then need to give 60-80% of their time (during their waking hours, presumably) working for the colony.

I thought about it and I realised there’s a word for this, and a colonial precedent; it’s called indentured servitude, and it was used by the British in Jamaica and Virginia to recruit a workforce for their sugar and tobacco plantations. It worked like this; get a load of destitute people from England, Ireland, Scotland or Wales (not hard to find in seventeenth century Britain) and pack them off to the West Indies or to Virginia on twenty year contracts. Historical sidebar: this practice is the reason there are Welsh-speaking people in Jamaica to this day.

But this model, while initially effective, only really worked in the short term. Two things did for it:

  1. much of the enormous profit made from sugar and tobacco was reinvested back in Britain, and the resultant industrial revolution provided enough work for the landless and destitute former peasants, who no longer had to risk twenty years in a mosquito-ridden Hellhole to avoid starvation.
  2. word had got back from the New World about how bad conditions actually were, and how surviving five years was good going, while seeing out all twenty of your indenture highly unlikely.

The next was entirely predictable in its awfulness; replace the reluctant indentured servant with African slaves who had no choice. I wonder who the Tech Billionaires will turn to when their supply of willing colonists dries up?

The Author   January 2021

Art overtaken by events

Art overtaken by events

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Apologies for not blogging at all during the month of October, hopefully this entry will make up for that.
I’m imagining a conversation with the taciturn proprietor or sales assistant at the nearby corner shop (I can never work out which he is), not that we have conversations, as such. He’s asking me what I think of lockdown/life nowadays/the US Election (delete as appropriate), and I say that I don’t think things will ever go back to what we regarded as normal before the pandemic. I go on to offer the following opinion,
“…in a funny way, it’s actually a privilege to be living in such an epoch-making period in human history, but you’ve always got to bear in mind that the Chinese had an old (and possibly apocryphal!) curse, ‘…may you live in interesting times!’”
The shop assistant or proprietor doesn’t react to this, but outside the four walls of his rather down-at-heel emporium those ‘interesting times’ grind on relentlessly…
I’ve recently been re-reading In other Worlds by the redoubtable Margaret Atwood and I was struck by how prescient her views on the future direction of civilisation were. Taken from the point of view of 2011, Ms Atwood seems to have predicted 2020 with a scary degree of accuracy.
In my fictional universe, we are coming to the end of the seventh novel in the Lights in the sky series. I’m actually writing the last chapter (chapter twenty four in this particular book!), but as with all last chapters there is a lot to do, character arcs to complete, loose ends to tie up etc etc, so it’s taking a time to finish.
There are other reasons for this dilatoriness; it’s always horrible to let go of a particular story, and I know that before the end of …when you wish upon a star, I will need to do beastly things to characters I’ve grown to love. But that’s the nature of fiction writing.
And it’s not the end of the series; volume eight is already under way, and there will be at least one more short story after that…
I recently came across an x and y axis representation of literary genres, whereby the x axis moves between naturalism at the top and expressionism below, and the y axis between the mimetic on the left, over to the fantastic. This results in four classification quadrants, labelled as follows: top left Realist, top right Speculative, bottom left Stylized, bottom right Fabulist.
The compiler had helpfully produced two versions of the diagram, locating various literary subgenres in each quadrant in the first, and various authors in the second, and I amused myself by locating my own writing within this design, based on my influences and my artistic and ideological leanings. Following these, I would place myself close to the intersection of the x and y axes, within the Fabulist quadrant; this quadrant also contains magical realism, fairy tales and postmodernism, and even a cursory reading of the novels within Lights in the sky demonstrates the debt I owe to all of these. My attachment to the gothic takes me close to the x axis, and the near future, SF and high fantasy elements ensure my work’s proximity to the y axis and the Speculative quadrant.
All of which goes to demonstrate that I steer well clear of Realism as defined by nineteenth century writers and critics. This was always going to be the case given my attachment to Romanticism and my use of speculative and fantastic elements, but does not mean my writing lacks realism.
In recent years, the cultural analysis inherent in nineteenth century notions of ‘realism’ has been rather overtaken by events, as what was previously seen as ‘speculative’, ‘fantastic’, and ‘belonging to the realm of science fiction’ has remorselessly forced its way into our lives and become the mainstream.
So, welcome to your own personal disaster movie/gothic fantasy/near future SF miniseries (delete as appropriate) and despite what the man in the corner shop may think, the times are definitely ‘interesting’ and we have no choice but to live through them.
The Author November 2020

Letting the Jinn out of the bottle

Letting the Jinn out of the bottle

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Something blindingly-obvious occurred to me this morning, something that had never occurred to me previously, but once thought of, could not be subsequently unthought. My insight was that tech, and by this I mean the goods and services purveyed by the billionaires in Silicon Valley, is our culture’s equivalent of the Jinn in Arabian folklore.
The Jinn is capable of great benevolence and possesses miraculous powers, as befits a supernatural entity. But its benevolence comes with a price tag attached. Our relationship with modern ICT would seem a perfect analogue to the wonders formerly promised by the Jinn once released from its bottle, with the difference that your smart device actually delivers to anyone with a phone contract or a broadband connexion. With none of that inconvenient rooting around in dark and dusty caves looking for magical oil lamps.
The wonders performed by modern ICT would (and did) appear wondrous to my parents’ generation, who lived in a world where news came from printed media, two television channels and three radio networks, the banks closed at three (so if you ran out of cash, tough!), telecommunications were strictly voice-only from fixed locations, and researching almost anything usually required a visit to the local library (which also tended to close early!).
I was born and grew to adulthood in this world, and things didn’t really begin to change significantly in practical terms until the beginning of the nineties (although cash machines/ATMs had become available from the mid-seventies, and video gaming had become popular), with the notion of cyberspace confined to science fiction novels. Then, the personal computer, the mobile phone, and the internet all came along in short order, to revolutionise the way we do almost everything.
I find it difficult to think back to a world where you can’t answer almost any question in seconds, where you don’t have instantaneous electronic communication with all your friends, where you can’t remotely map and view almost any location on Earth, or listen to virtually any piece of music at any hour of the day or night.
However, I do remember how frustrating, how slow, and how boring it all was. So I am grateful for Google Documents, email, SMS, Wikipedia, YouTube, Google Maps and all the million and one applications that make life today so much easier.
But nothing ever comes for free…
In exchange for the convenience of all these lovely (and apparently free!) tools and applications, we give (unless we are very savvy) the tech giants unlimited access to our personal data, which they obviously want to exploit commercially by targeting appropriate advertising based on what they (or their algorithms) know about us. There is nothing intrinsically wrong in this, if it means that we are alerted to products and services which we are likely to want to buy, although these algorithms would seem somewhat unsophisticated in their predictions, if personal experience is anything to go by, but hey! Maybe I’m just contrary.
However, If this data falls into the wrong hands, it can be used by criminal enterprises half a world away, adding a whole new level of anxiety, as cyber crime can potentially strike us from anywhere on the globe.
However the most insidious consequences of letting the Jinn of artificial intelligence out of the bottle are less obvious, but actually pose the most serious threats to our society. I refer, of course, to the impact of social media.
People who have been following this blog will know what’s coming next…
The unintended consequences of the spread of social media have included; the destabilising of conventional media and the undermining of journalistic ethics and good practice; the creation of ‘echo chambers’ whereby large numbers of people rely entirely on partial media for their news and current affairs, and are never exposed to any content that challenges their prejudices and preconceptions; the wholesale spreading of falsehoods and insane conspiracy theories; and finally, the creation of forums that enable and facilitate people with dangerous and anti-social views to meet and act in concert.
Did I leave anything out?
The overall effect has been the promotion of extreme views and the destabilising of democracy, which, for all its faults, remains the fairest, most humane and most efficient form of government yet devised.
But it’s not just random nutters we have to contend with…
Much more worrying is the clear evidence that the fabulously rich and privileged elite who run the tech giants have actively been promoting an agenda of ‘disruption’ designed to bring about a series of economic, social and political changes that they believe will benefit themselves and their corporations, to the detriment of virtually everybody else. I was recently both intrigued by the BBC series Secrets of Silicon Valley, which documented this, and appalled by the sanctimony and arrogance of many of the people leading these companies, who appeared to have bought into their own PR, and had adopted the view that their selfish actions are somehow morally justified.
Do no harm, anyone?
In the short term, the upshot of all of the above has been to put us all at the mercy of the various dangerous populists who have come to power in key countries around the world.
Returning to my opening analogy, my inevitable conclusion is that getting the Jinn back in the bottle is a lot harder than freeing it in the first place, and the consequences of summoning this spirit and making use of its miraculous powers, may now have become unstoppable.
The Author June 2020

The strange death of Liberal Democracy

The strange death of Liberal Democracy

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It occurs to me that there are a couple of possible criticisms of the Lights in the sky series, if we consider it purely as futurology. The most pertinent currently, is the lack of any evidence of (or reference to) infectious disease during the breakdown of civilisation to which (in the novels) I give the name ‘The Collapse’. I talk about fire and flood, I reference civil war, species extinction and resource depletion, and I describe mass migration, the breakdown of law and order and war between States. I also depict whole countries being lost to the waves, and I do say (or rather Marta Camacho does in the sixth novel, Maya) that the human population of the Earth drops to a third of pre-Collapse levels. But nowhere do I mention the role pandemics play in this process. Nor do I specifically mention famine.
I’m not alone in this, at least as far as disease is concerned. Neil Gaiman, in his television adaptation of the Good Omens (the novel he wrote with the late Terry Pratchett) has bumped Pestilence from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and replaced him with Pollution, a more ‘up-to-date’ Horsewoman. Recent events should now be persuading him of the error of his ways.
My abiding impression viewing this series was that even though it was set in 2018, it now appears to be part of the more distant past. In fact, a lot of contemporary culture is beginning to look distinctly like it’s on borrowed time. It all has a fin de siecle feel about it twenty years too late), with everyone desperately trying to have their fun, make their point, push their interest group, consume to the nth degree, before it all gets too late. Before our globalised world economy and related global culture start to come apart at the seams as nation states retreat behind their borders, trading blocs break up, political alliances fracture.
The pressures bringing this change about are many and various. Some are progressive, some are reactionary, but all speak to a truth that our current way of doing things is unsustainable. We cannot (physically at any rate) be citizens of the world for much longer, the environmental costs of the mass transport of people around the world are becoming too high. The idea that your food should be grown on the far side of the globe and your clothes made there also, is now palpably absurd. There is (I think) a curious sort of unanimity across political divides, with people who loathe, despise and refuse to debate with each other reaching startling similar conclusions by completely different routes.
The populist right appears to dismiss the notion that an environmental crisis is upon us. However, if you examine much of the content of right-leaning social media and the reactionary populist press, so much of the talk is about looming catastrophe, expressed in terms of out of control weather, imminent asteroid strikes, super volcanoes erupting etc etc. To me this all has the appearance of metaphor, a bizarre process of transference whereby the truth they all know in their hearts but dare not admit (i.e. that our civilisation is headed for a fall) cannot be completely suppressed and comes out in an attachment to fringe catastrophe theories.
Opposing shades of political opinion appear to be moving inexorably towards the notion of smaller political units and a less integrated global economy, with the liberal democracy that promoted globalisation in danger of being sidelined somewhere in the middle.
I mentioned that there were two possible criticisms; the second relates to timescale, as I have my Collapse happening near the end of the century, far enough away in time to not be immediately threatening. As I concluded earlier in this blog, I am (in the great tradition of English science fiction) basically writing a ‘cosy’ catastrophe.
However, it looks like Armageddon isn’t prepared to wait, and, unlike the world of Lights in the sky, there doesn’t appear to be a benign deus ex-machina waiting in the wings to save us…

The Author March 2020

Life imitating art

Life imitating art

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The fourth episode of Neil Gaiman’s television adaptation of the novel he wrote with the late Terry Pratchett, Good Omens. is appropriate, if hardly welcome, given that Good Omens is about the events leading up to the End of Days. It’s important to point out that not having seen the remainder of the series, nor read the book, I have no idea of the fictional outcome.
The form that Armageddon would take is only to be guessed at, but given that we face a whole suite of potential threats; everything from runaway climate change, pandemics, potential asteroids strikes, to the re-awakening of dormant super volcanoes (plus the old standby of nuclear annihilation), there would appear to be a lot of potential candidates.
Gaiman and Pratchett’s decision to replace one of Four Horseman, Pestilence, with Pollution, now comes across as complacent in current circumstances, an unnecessary nod to currently fashionable preoccupations, and lacking apocalyptic poetry of the original. There is also an element of Hubris, infectious diseases never really go away, they bide their time, waiting for an opportunity. The ease of travel in our interconnected world provides them with the opportunity to spread with frightening rapidity, and any form of social breakdown weakens the capacity of a population to resist.
Now, it’s important to point out that (unsurprisingly) I do not believe in the literal truth of the Bible. However, I do regard it as an important work of literature which can be seen as a series of metaphors and parables.
Whether metaphor in this case is a form of prophecy, I leave it for you to decide…
The Author February 2020

Last train to Woking

Last train to Woking

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I have just completed watching War of the Worlds on television and I must say I’m somewhat disappointed. Having endured the cheesy 1953 movie, and the gargantuan Tom Cruise remake, I had hoped the BBC series would cleave more closely to the original novel. First signs were encouraging; the drama was actually set in England (in the original Home Counties and Metropolitan locations, in fact), and (roughly) in the right historical period.
However the cracks soon began to show…
The series makes use of CGI that manages both to be unconvincing and gargantuan (rather like the 2005 film), the action sequences contrived to be considerably less gripping than those in Wells’ novel (fer Christ’s sake!), and the scriptwriter made unnecessary and counterproductive changes to the plot, including introducing a new female lead played by someone previously best known for starring in Downton Abbey.
I could go on, pointing out that Wells’ references a huge variety of means of transport in the book, but everyone in this reimagining appears to either walk or ride on horseback, but what would be the point.
The point I really want to make is that in this new version the BBC seems to be pandering to modern identity politics, as it did with the most recent series of Dr Who. But the organisation would appear to be conflicted, because at the same time, its news division spends an awful lot of its time pandering to the arch-enemies of ‘wokeness’ (i.e. the Brexiteers, Farage, Johnson and the rest of that mendacious crew). Quite why, I can’t imagine! Does the Corporation seriously think it’s going to be rewarded for this craven servility? Farage is already calling for the end of the license fee in his party’s manifesto, and I wonder how long it will survive under a Johnson-led administration.
For once I actually agree with Nigel, although (I would imagine) for different reasons…
The license fee is a regressive tax; you pay the same whether you’re Richard Branson or a lone parent on Universal Credit in rented accommodation, also, the BBC has been operating (effectively) as a commercial broadcaster for most of my lifetime, and I think this subsidy of a private corporation should be withdrawn.
Instead, real public broadcasting following the American model should be funded from general taxation. By this means Radio’s 3, 4, 6 etc, plus regional broadcasting and BBC 4 could be saved while the BBC fulfils its destiny as the new NBC (or not).
But at the end of the day, the problem with identity politics is that it divides us. Divides us in the face of the super-rich (and their populist lackeys), divides us so we cannot muster a coherent response to climate change and all the other environmental threats that we face.
There’s an old proverb applied to political activism, ‘…you either all hang together or you all hang separately’, and with regards to the BBC, it may well turn out that the last train to Woking, will be seen in the future as a dying fall in its futile attempts to straddle various uncomfortable political and cultural fences.
Toodle-oo
The Author December 2019