Science fiction – Alan Brunstrom, Author Site

Prisoners of Our Own Design

Number Six promised so much: why did he fail to deliver?

Having just watched every episode of The Prisoner for the first time since 1968, I can’t escape asking an obvious question; and it’s not, “Who is Number One?” but, “Why do so many great TV series fall at the final hurdle?”

Patrick McGoohan’s iconic Cold War thriller is the ultimate example of building an audience’s expectations to fever pitch, only to dash them at the end like a missed penalty in a cup final; but it is far from being alone. Westworld is a recent case in point, missing the ball entirely in season three.

To be fair, The Prisoner was a very ambitious project. The premise was brilliant (a secret village dedicated to imprisoning and breaking those from both sides who know too much). It posed intriguing riddles over 17 episodes, drawing us in with the promise of answers. Mixing in the latest developments in surveillance and brain washing was clever but less challenging than simultaneously posing fundamental questions about individualism versus conformity. Making it also work as a surrealist plunge into our deepest psyche was a real stretch; and bringing it all together at the end, in a way that answered the riddles it had posed, was evidently too tall an order even for a near-genius like McGoohan.

Sadly, he over-steered on the surrealism so hard that he missed the goal, notoriously failing to deliver an ending that was satisfying not just in the surrealist realm but also in the real world. We have a word for that: it’s called a copout. Back in 1968, the public were enraged because he broke the implicit contract he had with them, to deliver an ending that justified the emotional and intellectual capital they had invested in trying to solve the riddle.

This doesn’t mean that you have to explain everything. Sometimes it’s better to leave the mystery unsolved. Think of Picnic at Hanging Rock. Generations of fans have gone nuts trying to work out what happened, which is a perfect result for the author. But you see, she did actually know the answer. She had not only a surrealist solution that (in my opinion) is a load of bollocks, but also a complete, real-world solution (you can Google them both). As with any good Whodunnit, the solution existed and informed the whole story, with the clues left there for the reader to find, if they looked hard enough.

McGoohan didn’t do this. He admitted as much to Lew Grade, the then head of the production company, which is one of the reasons they cut the series short.

In the case of Westworld, the issue is more basic: the writers lost sight of what the series was about. They wandered off into a confused futuristic action movie that was all image and no substance. They should have focused on the key issues that Michael Crichton raised in the original book. What makes us human? How is a human different from an AI? How would natural and artificial humans relate if they were equal? And if AI advances beyond us, what would that relationship become? I so hope that Series 4 gets back on track.

Back in The Village, I feel the need to answer the questions that were left unsatisfied back in ’68. I’m doing this just for me, so if you like it that’s great and if you don’t, I don’t really care; but by all means let me know.

Question 1: where is The Village? It’s not in the UK but in either southern Portugal, the coast of Andalusia, or Morocco. This is made clear when The Prisoner flies over it in the episode “Many Happy Returns”; and by the route they take back to London after they escape. They drop off “The Youth” on the A20 in Kent, which is the main route to London from the Channel Ports, which they must have come through after driving back across Spain and France.

Question 2: Who is Number One? I don’t mean in the surrealist realm, where it’s The Prisoner himself, but in the real world. In my version, it’s literally a number: a telephone number. Or more precisely, the operator of a bank of telephones, who passes on directives from the agencies that control the village.

Question 3: Who runs The Village? To understand this, we have to go back to its origins, which are hinted at by the writers’ inspirations. In particular, a luxury estate in Scotland where senior Nazi officers were held during WW2. It was riddled with listening devices, so that key information could be extracted from their unguarded conversations.

The POW camp that became The Village was located in one of three places that were geopolitically ideal for the purpose. At this time both Portugal and Spain were neutral countries, whose fascist regimes were tolerated by the Allies, whilst Morocco was semi-independent but under their arms-length control.

As WW2 ended and the Cold War began, the facility is retained to hold and debrief people from all backgrounds who have important information and are considered a security risk. Only a handful of people in British Intelligence know about it, plus a few in the host country. It is supported by a black budget, disguised as a convalescence facility for those with psychological disorders.

Information gleaned from the residents is found to be valuable not only to British Intelligence but also to both their allies and foes. Horse trading of information and even agents starts to take place. The Village becomes a useful place to send, debrief and assess agents who have been exchanged.

At some point around 1950, the Head of the British intelligence services dies suddenly, without having briefed a successor. The senior surviving officer who knows about The Village realises that only a handful of others share the secret, most of them his subordinates. He passes it off to the new chief as a low-level facility and begins to secure off-the-books expansion of its budget.

With its management unfettered, The Village starts to trade far more widely in information; and to offer “retirement” and interrogation services to foreign agencies. As revenues increase, so do the number of players participating. Many from behind the Iron Curtain are suborned by corruption and they conceal what is really going on from their superiors, just as the British have done. It is a European affair: no hint of American participation ever surfaces in the series.

When any lawful intelligence operative becomes suspicious, they are kidnapped and incarcerated in The Village. By the 1960s (the era of Philby, Burgess and Maclean), nearly half of the senior British intelligence staff are involved; yet they have to be careful within HQ in London because the man at the top and several of their senior colleagues are not party to the game.

At this point, The Prisoner is brought to The Village and interrogated by a succession of managers known as Number Two, drawn from the various national agencies that, knowingly or not, have agents who participate in funding, supplying and running the operation.

Question 4: What happens after The Prisoner escapes? Well, that’s where the mystery continues, into a new series that I do hope will be made, some day.

What of my original question: why do so many great TV series disappoint at the end? Sometimes the producers are simply in too much of a rush, which is mostly down to finance. Sometimes it’s a loss of nerve, like the footballer who misses the last penalty in the cup final. Occasionally, as with Game of Thrones, it’s because new writers lack the talent of the originator. But most often, as with The Prisoner, it’s the result of promising a solution to an intriguing riddle, without actually having one. For those of us who plunge into writing stories without having worked out the ending, that should provide a salutary lesson.

After the Event: first page of a new novel

INTRODUCTION

All human beings are ultimately alone; but some are more alone than others.

Was that what saved me? The tendency to distance myself from others and figure things out for myself: is that why I was Enlightened so painlessly, when millions perished or suffered torment in futile resistance?

Or was it what Jenny used to call my Mr Spock tendency, that excessive rationality and lack of emotion, which put logic ahead of feeling?

I like to think it was neither. I tell myself that it was because the desire to connect, which is such a driver in all of us, was so desperately strong in me that it made me open to the virus, in a way that I never could be to other people.

The irony of that still makes me smile. The idea that the inner conflict between my desire to connect and my inability to do so might actually have given the virus a boost, fills me with a sort of joyous vindication, like watching England beat a better team in the World Cup.

It’s as if I jumped clean off the autism spectrum and landed as the best-adjusted person on the planet.

Of course, my joy is qualified by the knowledge that there are only a third as many people on the planet now as there were before I made the jump. Evolution can be cruel; and Enlightenment came at a cost.

They had to go, though. There was no other way. We can see that clearly now.

I realise that I need to revise my opening statement.

All human beings were ultimately alone; but now we’re all connected.

Yes, that’s better. It’s all so much better now.

This is the story of how it came to be.

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The above text is the draft intro to a Science Fiction novel with the working title, After the Event. I’ve spent several months trying out different styles and approaches and I think this works best: but I’d be grateful for feedback. Some background to the book can be found in my earlier posts in the Sci-Fi category, such as Before the Event; Humanity Version 2; Upgrade Yourself; and Why We Love Zombies.

Trump That

What would happen if some gun-toting Trump supporters encountered an alien? I think we know the answer: they would shoot it.

Later they might ask some questions, like, “That sure is one ugly mother, I wonder what it wanted?” But they’d shoot it first, to be on the safe side and because that’s how they see things.

Why is that? Why is half of humanity so afraid of anything different or “other”? On the flip side, why would the other half so eagerly try to connect with the alien? Why would its otherness provoke fascination more than fear?

Both approaches are risky but the differences go deeper than the rational mind. If you listen to Trump supporters, there is a superficial logic (“they stole the election, we’d won and then all these mystery votes appeared”): but their deep convictions can’t be shaken with facts or rational argument.

Trump’s appeal is based on understanding something that is anathema to rationalists. Most people want to be told that what they feel and believe is right. People want validation of what they really think, deep down. That’s why religion triumphs despite its absurdities. That’s why the religious right support Trump. He shouts out what they believe: and he tells them it’s OK to believe it.

The typical Trump voter, or their equivalent elsewhere, is sick and tired of being told that most of what they feel is wrong. Sick of being labelled racist, sexist, narrow minded, ignorant, prejudiced, obese, irresponsible, stupid.

Trump tells them that they are great. He tells them that they are right to think and feel what they do. He validates them, he empowers them, he makes them feel good about themselves. Make America Great Again really means Make Yourself Feel Great Again. That’s why he doesn’t have to deliver: he already has.

The educated elites just don’t get it. Centrist parties are failing everywhere as a result. They despise half the electorate and it shows.

So how do we make people embrace the alien instead of shooting it? For the purposes of my new novel, the challenge is to figure out what would happen to someone with a closed and fearful mindset, if infected with an alien virus that stimulates rational thought and empathy. Would the conversion be painful or pain-free? Would it drive them mad, or give them a glorious epiphany?

Previously I’d assumed that some would kill at the first signs of infection, rather than face the need to change. Yet why so negative? Religion succeeds by holding out the prospect of redemption, even whilst acknowledging human failings. We need to give people back both the right to forgive themselves and a belief in their ability to improve.

There is something aspirational at the heart of Trump’s message, however cynical he was in creating it. The lesson is that we must learn to love humanity for what it is, warts and all: and if we want to progress, we must hold up a mirror that shows us how great we can be, if only we have faith in ourselves.

Upgrade Yourself

Davros, inventor of the Daleks. Not all upgrades are a good idea.

If you could upgrade your brain, what would you change?

In my forthcoming novel, an alien virus infects humanity, with an effect rather like uploading a new software version to our brains. Memory and personality are retained – we are still ourselves – but some of our capabilities are upgraded. The virus is benign: but what should it improve, to optimise us?

I would not rush for higher IQ, which is a two-edged sword. Even when not socially dysfunctional, people with MENSA level IQs walk a tightrope between being thought arrogant and wearily helping others catch up. Besides, there was a good reason for humans to evolve with varied attributes. Any upgrade must preserve variety, or lose a key advantage of the human tribe.

There are of course many types (and definitions) of intelligence. Which would you boost in yourself? Empathy and social intelligence? Sporting intelligence and the rewards it brings? Artistic intelligence and the resulting creativity?

Or would it be intelligence at all? Perhaps you’d prefer to improve some other aspect of your mental capability, like memory (but would you actually want total recall?) Would you do a Solomon and choose wisdom? Even my clever aliens would find it tough to deliver that. How about greater sensory perception? In his book Life 3.0, Max Tegmark suggests that AI-enhanced brains could vastly broaden our experiences by processing data from sensors covering e.g. more of the electro-magnetic spectrum.

In fact the electronic upgrading of our brains has already begun. Elon Musk has made characteristically bold pronouncements, on using electronic implants not only to help repair brain damage but also for communicating wirelessly without speech. This raises the prospect of human interactions becoming universal, with inbuilt language translation programs.

Any development of telepathy raises profound questions about how far we want to go. I am too individualistic to willingly merge into a hive mind. But a cloud mind, perhaps… provided we can choose what to upload. My best thoughts I want to share with the world; my worst I want to delete unseen.

Yet my alien upgrades target something different. By enhancing our ability for objective self-criticism, they improve our competence and give us a higher level of self-awareness. We need this to combat the Dunning-Kruger effect, whereby people with low ability in a task think they’re doing great.

In contrast, competent people are stern critics of their own work. That’s such a key quality for a writer that I’m probably programmed to pick it out. Even more than criticism from others, it enables writers to improve: and it underpins good and bad performance in everything from driving a car to being president.

So my choice for an upgrade is self-awareness. It’s an ability that cuts across all others, preserving the variety of the human tribe in all other respects and boosting performance in most of them.

That an alien virus might do this for us is wishful thinking: but AI may get there before we do. The ultimate choice we face may be about upgrading ourselves into a hybrid form, before autonomous AI outstrips us.

If we go hybrid, how do we avoid a split between those who want to upgrade and those who don’t? In my novel, that leads to civil war. Obviously it’s analogous to what is happening right now, in the growing war between those who revel in their ignorance and those who recognise their faults and wish to improve. In the book, The New Enlightenment wins. In reality, it hangs in the balance.

What are our Chances?

Hard to calculate the probabilities, when you don’t know what dice are being rolled

Lies, Damn Lies and the Statistics of Denial

Truth is the first casualty in war: and the war against Covid-19 is no different. From the start it has been characterised by lies, misinformation and the suppression of truth; and although this has varied in degree from one place to another, the contagion of deceit has left few places uninfected.

Just before the pandemic broke, I began writing a novel about an alien virus taking over the world. It’s been educational to see that for many of our leaders, the instinctive response would be denial. Some go on to be systematically untruthful; some are selective with the truth for the best of intentions; and some cannot ever bring themselves to admit there is a problem. Each society puts a cultural stamp on its falsehoods: we can tell a lot from the different ways in which we dissemble.

The clearest trait is that totalitarian regimes announce death rates that are unbelievably low. The more authoritarian the regime, the lower the figures. They try to use that as evidence of the need for control, whilst open societies bemoan the vulnerabilities that go with freedom. This is a mistake: anyone who thinks that Russia doesn’t have a runaway epidemic, or that Iran has got things in hand, needs a cold reality bath.

The Chinese government, battered by accusations of cover-up, have recently amended their figures for the early stages of the epidemic in Wuhan. That 50% increase restores a shred of credibility; but the great unknown is the extent to which the severity of the subsequent lockdown and surveillance was effective. We can’t trust their figures, so we don’t know how well it worked.

In the UK, with no systematic testing, government and media cling to the only certainty they can find, which is the number of deaths in hospital. Although forced to admit that this is only part of the picture, they continue to downplay deaths elsewhere, stating them as 10% of the hospital totals despite evidence that 40-50% is a more likely range. This bumbling around the data reflects a British establishment who generally gave up maths so early in their school careers that they never developed a grasp of statistics.

The most open and well educated societies have either combined strong, early measures with excellent campaigns of public information, thus preventing the disease from getting a hold (e.g. New Zealand), or have challenged the whole scientific basis of lockdowns (e.g. Sweden).

To understand the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches, we first need to acknowledge that everyone is confused about what’s really going on. The epidemiologists are almost as lost as the rest of us. Why do death rates vary so wildly? How many people have been infected? Do they then gain immunity? After six months of pandemic, our ignorance still exceeds our understanding.

One mystery of Covid-19 is why its impact varies between ethnic communities. In the USA, 30% of identified cases are Afro-Americans, who form only 14% of the population. In the UK, three quarters of the healthcare workers who have died are from BAME backgrounds. The reason is unlikely to be genetic but a consequence of lifestyle, poverty, associated conditions like obesity – and the fact that they also provide roughly half of our frontline heroes.

Early on, the Chinese thought only 17% of those infected showed no symptoms. Yet when whole communities have been tested, like the crew of the USS Roosevelt, the real figure appears to be almost 60%. Iceland has tested 15% of its entire population and reckons the figure at near 50%. Incidentally, cooping people up in a confined space like an aircraft carrier demonstrates that in similar circumstances, most of us would get infected.

Testing in most developed countries is between 2% and 0.5% of the population and suggests that the total number of infections may be 50 to 70 times the number of identified cases. On this basis, over a hundred million people already have the virus, maybe a third of the population in some countries. Together, these statistics call into question several aspects of the lockdowns.

Big events cause big disasters: Italy and Spain owe most of their pain to a single football match in February. Big egos are worse: super-idiots like Trump and Bolsanaro facilitate contagion more than super-spreaders.

What policy guidance can we draw from all this? Firstly, in countries that have failed to contain the virus it’s likely that most of us are going to get infected whatever we do, so the main purpose of any policy is to manage the flow rate of cases through the health service.

Secondly, viral load is a major factor in determining whether someone lives or dies, so PPE for all frontline workers really is vital.

Thirdly, Sweden was probably right with its approach of focusing on social distancing rather than lockdown, at least once the disease was already present.

Unless Covid-19 mutates into a more deadly form, it is probably going to kill about one of us in every thousand, mostly the old and sick. Balancing this against the human and economic cost of lockdown is a tough call.

In any event we need to become more pragmatic in our policies. Crowding together in a confined space is bad; sunbathing in a park is not.

We also need to recognise that most of us have been very lucky. A flu-like pandemic was top of the risk register for decades: Covid-19 is probably the least deadly disease that could have forced us to make such huge changes.

This will not be the last pandemic. Will we learn the right lessons, before the next one? It would certainly help if we could clarify the truth of what is actually happening. Yet irrespective of the statistics, one lesson is clear. Our chances depend on how we load the dice. Minimising surplus capacity in emergency services is a false economy; but money spent on boosting our disaster preparedness is the wisest investment any politician will ever make.

China’s Great Wall of Silence

In my forthcoming novel, After the Event, different governments respond to an alien virus in very different ways. In this respect I’m finding it highly instructive to watch how the Covid-19 pandemic plays out around the world.

In the middle stages of the original epidemic, when Chinese officials briefly stopped trying to suppress the truth, there was a deluge of reportage coming out of the country. It’s not surprising that this has now reduced, given the tight lockdown, the evacuation of foreign journalists and the media’s shift of attention to the impact of the pandemic elsewhere. Yet if one scans the international media, the coverage of what is happening in China is now so limited that it is hard not to be suspicious.

The official line is that the draconian measures imposed by the government of Xi Jinping have been extraordinarily successful. According to this narrative, China has gone in the space of six weeks from having a runaway epidemic with 60,000 confirmed cases in mid-February, to reaching a plateau of 80,000 at the beginning of March and a recovery to just 1,863 active cases now, most of them caused by people coming into the country from abroad. There have really only been two stories from China in the past week: a travel ban against foreigners, to prevent a “second wave” of infections; and the lifting of some internal restrictions so that people can re-enter Wuhan and start going back to work.

Really? Even given the omnipotence of the Chinese state and its instruments of control, is it credible that a lockdown could be that successful, that quickly, in a country where tens of millions of people had been moving between regions for the New Year festival during the epidemic’s early growth period just two months earlier? If experience from Italy and Spain is anything to go by, even the most rigorous of lockdowns could not have achieved such a fast turnaround.

The countries that have managed to contain the epidemic, at least for now, did so with a comprehensive programme of testing and tracking. This was also the approach in China: but can we believe that it was achievable on the vast scale necessary there, especially in light of emerging evidence that their tests have a high error rate? Spain and Turkey have found that tens of thousands of the test kits sent to them by China are unreliable (the batch in Spain were accurate only 30% of the time). Meanwhile the Dutch authorities have recalled 600,000 Chinese face masks as being unsafe.

We should also recall that during the epidemic, the Chinese authorities ran a massive programme of censorship against anyone who tried to highlight uncomfortable facts or question the official line. Some of the bloggers involved were forcibly put into quarantine and have not been heard from since. So there is really no other lense through which to view the situation in China today, except that of the government.

Given this background, let me pose some questions about what is really going on in China. Is it possible that the death toll is far higher than the 3,318 officially cited? Could it be that the authorities have suppressed the real number, for instance by ensuring that death certificates cite other causes? (This is easy to do when most people who succumb to Covid-19 die from multiple causes, such as heart failure and pneumonia, or else die without ever being tested.) Perhaps a new outbreak reported yesterday in a region near Hubei is evidence that new infections are still occurring at a higher rate than has been admitted? And is it conceivable that the ban on foreigners has been instituted not just to prevent new infections being brought in, but also to stop the rest of the world from discovering the true situation?

The Chinese communist party can only justify its grip on power if it is seen to be solving the country’s problems and leading its people to a better quality of life. Failure to overcome the Coronavirus epidemic, or a prolonged economic downturn, both hold more terrors for Xi Jinping and his minions than they do for western democracies. In a democracy, even the people who hold power don’t regard losing it as the end of the world. But for members of the Chinese regime, failure could be fatal.

No doubt they will use every trick in the book to manipulate the truth and strengthen their grip, just as they did after the Tiananmen Square massacre. Covid-19, however, personally touches a far larger proportion of the country’s 1.4 billion people. If the recovery being presented by China is a matter of smoke and mirrors, it will be interesting to see how long they can keep up the illusion.

In my novel After the Event, the alien infection is seen by many as beneficial: and efforts to stop it rebound on those who try. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing depends on your initial mindset and whether or not you’ve been infected. You’ll have to wait for the book to be finished to find out just where that leads.

Humanity, Version 2

Marc Quinn’s sculpture, “Planet”, in Singapore

Watching the reruns of Westworld has confirmed my opinion that it’s the most intelligent television series ever made. The questions it poses, about the nature of sentient life and the point at which machine and human intelligence become indistinguishable, have been considered many times before. The best examples are probably Blade Runner and Alex Garland’s equally brilliant Ex Machina. Both morally and practically, those questions are complex and fascinating (rather like Westworld): but what lights my fire is not so much how we might one day treat androids, as the implications for our own evolution.

My limited understanding of the evolution of species leads me to believe that it mostly happens in relatively sudden bursts, with slower and more incremental changes in between. Those bursts probably have external causes (e.g. changes in the environment) rather than just the random mutations that drive a lot of the lesser advances.

In Westworld, the minds of the artificial humans start to develop independently of any human intervention. The original cause is a mix of meddling by their creators and some unforeseen malfunctions but their progress becomes self-driven. I’m not sure that this possibility has ever before been presented as such a dynamic evolutionary process. These are not really androids but a hybrid species whose minds, entirely human in origin, evolve quickly through the interplay between their own logic and some natural processes that are beyond their or anyone else’s control.

Bearing in mind that these Westworld “hosts” are reflections of us, this raises some really interesting questions about how our own human intelligence will evolve as a result of interacting with and attempting to manage artificial intelligences that are rapidly becoming greater than our own.

If ever there was a likely external cause for mankind’s next evolutionary leap, surely this is it. Will we merge with AI to create true hybrids (something that is already starting to happen)? Will we compete with AI, stimulating our own mental abilities in an effort to keep pace with the genie that we have let out of the bottle? Above all, will we come to understand the parts of our thinking that are free will, versus those that are pre-programmed, bio-chemical processes? This is the essence of the struggle that the Westworld characters go through and it lies at the core of our own existential questioning.

I can’t wait to see what the inspired script writers Nolan and Joy make of these issues in Season 3. They wound up the last season by having some key Westworld characters escape into the outside world, so they’re pretty much bound to address them. Meanwhile I’m working on related issues in my new novel, After the Event, where an alien intelligence is infecting humanity rather like a virus, upgrading us despite our best efforts to stay dumb and primitive. It’s spooky but convenient that COVID-19 is happening at the same time, providing a real-world model of how humanity tries frantically to contain the uncontrollable.

In giving birth to AI, we have done more than to create the next great leap forward in science and technology. We have produced a baby Titan that may well evolve into the next version of humanity. I can’t help thinking that it will have to be a big improvement on Homo Sapiens v1.0, if we are to survive.

Before the Event

Ariane rocket at the Cite de l’espace in Toulouse: although it’s impressive, getting there is by far the least interesting part of space exploration. The most interesting issues arise from what you bring back.

Much to my surprise I find myself writing a science fiction novel. This was not what I’d planned and in fact, given that I was in the middle of reworking my second novel and developing a third, it’s bloody inconvenient. But there’s worse. Much worse.

Despite having worked in the space industry for 35 years, I’ve never been much interested in science fiction, nor had a high opinion of it as a literary form. It always struck me that although the ideas were often strong, the quality of the writing and characterisation was generally mediocre: so I stopped reading it.

Consequently, when the idea for a sci-fi book struck me, I didn’t know if it was original. It seemed unlikely, because there’s few things so rare as a genuinely new idea; but I needed to know if it had already been done thoroughly and well. So I used the generous parting gift from my ESA colleagues to buy every sci-fi classic and anthology I could lay my hands on and then gave myself a crash course on the past 70 years of the genre.

What I discovered was something that I probably knew all along, without ever having articulated it to myself. As the editors of one anthology put it, science fiction is “the most important genre produced by our post-industrial age, as its authors invite us to examine exaggerated or altered versions of the realities we have invented, so we might look at these afresh” (Science Fiction for Survival, Valley Press, 2019). To put it another way, the best sci-fi is not really about science and it uses fiction only for convenience. It’s about philosophy, religion and society; and especially about how technological advances drive their evolution.

It turns out that I was right about the genre being stronger in ideas than in other literary qualities: although some sci-fi authors are masters of their art and craft, the genre’s relative weakness in these areas has always led it to be regarded as a poor relation by pretentiously intellectual critics. (Brian Aldiss pointed out that he had four histories of French literature on his shelves and not one of them even mentioned Jules Verne.)

The ideas, though, are far above most of those that can be found in any other genre, as is the imagination and vision of where humanity is going. Nowhere else are the critical factors that will determine our fate so well considered. What passes for “literary fiction” has become a graveyard of self-absorption, whilst science fiction, whether in print or on screen, remains in every sense vital.

As it happens, the idea that sprang into my mind late last year seems not to have been much explored by others, though many have circumnavigated it, rather like those early seafarers who sailed right around Australia without ever chancing upon it, or daring to probe very far into the interior if they did.

My working title is “After the Event”. I thought about calling it “Aftermath” but that’s already in use by others. If the writing goes well, I may post a teaser here when it’s close to publication; and perhaps I’ll discuss some of the sub-themes as I develop them. In the meantime, I still have a pile of science fiction books to read and I’m pretty sure that what I find in their pages will make some profound changes to what I have in mind. For the first time in a long time, I am excited by what I’m writing and have only a rough map of where it will take me.