Deservedly Forgotten Sci Fi Classic: Moon Zero Two

Hammer Film Productions are well known for their contribution to the horror genre. During the peak of their creative and financial success from the 1950s to the 1970s they were responsible for the establishment of many of themes and tropes of horror films and their influence is still apparent now.

The studio also made some much less frequent forays in Science Fiction; most notably and successfully with the Quatermass tetralogy. Such notability and success was not acheived with another their Sci Fi offerings: Moon Zero Two.

In Hammer's horror output the films usually manage to transcend the very obvious lack of budget by treating the subject matter with charm and authenticity. Moon Zero Two unfortunately fails to rise above its financial constraints. It was billed at the first Sci Fi Western featuring many familiar themes from Western films such as claim jumping, six guns, a sheriff, bar fights and a female lead called Clementine. To this unpromising concept is added amazingly bad production values and frankly bizarre casting. The visual effects were by Les Bowie who, demonstrating the infinite possibilities of redemption, went on to win an Oscar for his work on Superman in 1978.

Despite being putatively set in May 2021 the titual spacecraft, Moon Zero Two, looks almost exactly like the Apollo LEM used by Armstrong and Aldrin to land on the moon only a few months before Moon Zero Two debuted to bemused audiences in cinemas. Science Fiction fails if it does not offer imaginative speculation and, despite the fanciful rendering on the film's poster, there was no speculation here. The film's maker merely offered what people had seen in reality only a few months previously.

The protagonist of Moon Zero Two, Bill Kemp, is played with a certain rigidity by James Olson. With an eye on lucrative transatlantic revenue Hammer obviously posed the question: "Who is the cheapest American we can get?" and got Olson as their answer. Bernard Bresslaw, more traditionally known for being Sid James' permanently confused sidekick in the Carry On films, managed to squeeze in an unlikely turn as hired goon in Moon Zero Two in between Carry On Camping and Carry On Up The Jungle. The outstanding performance is, as might be expected, by Warren Mitchell who plays avaricious inter-planetary hyper-capitalist J.J. "One Hundred Percent" Hubbard. Moon Zero Two is commended to you solely on that basis.

This Is Hardcore

I was recently invited to participate in the beta program for KDP hardcover publishing. Having been blessed with special favour from "Jeff" I felt it behooved me to explore the opportunity so I decided to make a hardback version of my book Weft available.

Feel free to order your own copy of Weft here.

The process of creating a hardback cover in KDP will be very similar to those that have endured the mental torture of the paperback process. A paperback cover file will not suffice and a new .pdf document with larger dimensions must be created. Scaling up the paperback file will not work as the alignment of the spine text may no longer be correct. There is a new and different Excel template available from Amazon to assis with this.

A further complication is that author copies are not available for order and it only appears to be possible to fulfil hardback orders for delivery in the United States. However the overall product looks very good and I am happy with the result.

Special thanks to Sarah Waites at Illustrated Page Book Design for helping with this project.

Six Sides

If you're a regular viewer of The Simon Rutter Show you will remember the enormous amounts of work, frustration and self-deception that took place in the creation of the novels "Without a City Wall" and "Redeeming Blood". I covered a small portion of the details in this blog post.

Both books had very complex structures with alternating narrative arcs set many hundreds of years apart and the first book, Without a City Wall, lacked a compelling conclusion. I had the idea that solution to both of these issues was to resequence the contents of both novels into strict chronological order and combine them into one book with four distinct sections. This solves both the complexity issue, as the events in the book now occur in sequence, and the ending problem as the whole saga now resolves in bloodchilling fashion at the end of the combined work.

I don't expect huge commercial success from this; it's a very personal work on which i learned my craft as a novelist. The books that followed such as A Dying King and Weft are superior exemplars of genre fiction.

However, if you have a burning desire to read a 250,000 word meditation on interstellar colonisation, ecology, the limits of representative politics, terrorism, transhumanisn, ethics, the atomisation of identity, cybercrime, end stage capitalism and nuclear war then the new combined book, titled Six Sides, is for you.

The cover was by Sarah Waites at Illustrated Page Book Design who did an amazing job of capturing the books many themes and expansive nature.

Buy it here:

US
UK
Straya

Forgotten Sci Fi Classic: The 1994 Brittas Empire Christmas Special

The Brittas Empire is a structural and thematic link from the golden age of British sitcoms in the 70s and 80s, as typified by Dad's Army, to the post-millenial cringe comedy that followed. Gordon Brittas is the developmental median between George Mainwearing and David Brent.

After five succesful seasons the Brittas Empire was gilded with the BBC equivalent of a Roman chaplet of laurels: the Christmas Special. The well established procedure for British sitcom Christmas Specials was to take the existing characters and situations and intensify them by placing them in an extreme context. The 1994 Brittas special honoured this tradition by the unlikely artifice of having the entire staff confined within Whitbury New Town leisure centre by a epochal snowstorm of Arctic magnitude that sweeps the south of England.

However, the special also innovated by having some scenes showing the fate of the characters thirty years hence on New Year's Eve of 2019. Even though the special aired on 27th December 1994 it was actually set before the events of the first season in December 1989.

Now that 2019 has been and gone it possible to assess how well the writers and producers of the show imagined life in 2019. The fact is, that from the small amount of material available, they got it amazingly right. The Brittas Empire Christmas Special turned out to be the most accurate depiction of life in the early 21st century in any work of Sci Fi in any medium. Predictions in Sci Fi and notoriously difficult. We only have to look at how the other storied example of life 2019, Blade Runner, to appreciate how good the Brittas vision was.

Three examples of where the 1994 special got it exactly right:

Ubiquity of electric vehicles. Most of the characters drive electric cars and the one who doesn't is chided for it by his partner. One the cars is a 1st generation Panther Solo which was an excellent choice as it looked futuristic in the 90s and was obscure enough that very few people would recognise it. In a demonstration of budgetary limitations placed on the creators it has electic vehicle sounds dubbed over it but the Ford CVH 1.6 engine that was in the Solo was still belching smoke and condensate on what was obviously a very cold day.

Acceptance of LGBTQ+ Relationships in public life. One of the characters is a cabinet minister in a tory government who is openly in a same sex relationship. This would have been unthinkable in 1994 when the disgraceful shadow of Clause 28 still loomed over the tory party.

Universal availability of navigation systems. In 1994 people would navigate on long road journeys by buying a piece of software that would provide text only directions which they would then print and shuffle through on the steering wheel while doing 90mph on the M18. In 1994 special an inquiry about how long it will take to get somewhere is met with the response, "the car's computer says 45 minutes." This is an eerily good prediction of the universal presence of GPS based navigation systems.

One example where the 1994 special gets it badly wrong:

The Prime Minister in 2019 is Sebastian Coe. From the persepctive of 1994 this probably seemed like a worthy predicition as the Olympian was, at that time, a tory MP considered to have a bright future in politics. If the writers had dared to posit that The Daily Telegraph's loathsome, mendacious and unscrupulous European correspondent would the be the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom it would have been summarily rejected as a notion more ludicrous than the week long Arctic blizzard.

Cover Story

When I first published The Zhala Trilogy I had the notion that I wanted them to look austere and anachronistic. In particular I was attracted to the aesthetic sensibility of the designs Romek Marber did for Penguin paperbacks in the 1960s. To me they communicated a stylish austerity that complemented and, at the same time, partially concealed each book's subject matter. So with character art commissioned from Brent Skinner that's what I did. I made my Marber Grid template and created my covers being very much pleased with the end result. The font used on all of the cover text elements was another wilfuly bleak choice and, in a final iconoclastic, flourish I reversed the normal orientation of the spine aping the style of a Russian or French novel.

While the covers greatly appealed to me it had somehow slipped my mind that I'm not the person who's supposed to be buying these books. Something more professional and commercially compelling was required. New covers were commissioned from Sarah Waites who did an absolutely oustanding job of capturing the essence of the books. The colour sequence of the originals has been retained in modified form and the character on the cover of the final book switched to Zhala from her father.

The Map of the Monarchy

I hate fantasy books with a map in them. However, I have learned from experience, that it is an oft requested feature from the reader. So here is the map of the Monarchy.  This was painstakingly constructed during the editing of all three books to remove geographical and temporal inconsistencies.

The Zhala Trilogy

After three years of not inconsequential effort the trilogy is complete. I enjoyed almost every aspect of creating these books. One would have to as the immense amount of mainly unrenumerated work would otherwise be impossible.

The trilogy sketches a distant world in a distant future in which Zhala rules as king using the same combination of deceit, guile and caprice that she used to become the Monarchy's ruler. She is assisted and occasionally hindered by her father and the diverse group of friends that form her cabinet.

Book I : A DYING KING
Book II: SORROW'S CROWN
Book III: OUT OF DARKNESS

ADK Paperback

If you really like it you can have the rights
It can make a million for you overnight
If you must return it you can send it here
But I need a break
And I want to be a paperback writer
Paperback writer

That was a great deal of work but I am very happy with the results. The cover format is based on the Marber Grid invented by Romek Marber for his work on Penguin paperbacks in the 1960s. The artwork is by Brent Skinner.

You can and should it buy it here. When you do please remember to leave a review as that helps me more than the purchase.

A DYING KING

Like the Beatles with LSD I've decided to strike out in new directions and experiment with KDP in the hope of a breakthrough. I'm not saying it's better than Revolver but it's certainly a work of comparable artistic and cultural merit.

Buy it on Amazon.

My Man Booker Was Lost in the Post

In which there is a brief and not particularly happy update on the state of my writing projects.

Without a City Wall a.k.a. City Wall

I started writing this in Belgium in the autumn of 2007. At this time I had not yet learned what the craft of a novelist truly entailed and progress was slow. For a first book it was very ambitious as it had a split narrative structure with two separate but distantly related narrative arcs in alternating chapters. It's a Science Fiction novel that explores themes of interstellar colonisation, environmental degradation and the ceaseless urge of humans to create conflict.

By the southern hemisphere winter of 2010 the book was half finished and I was living in Australia. I still, it seemed, failed to grasp the centrality of hard work to the business of being a novelist. Over the years that followed my run rate did not improve and I finally finished it at the start of 2015.

In September 2015 I had managed, through the gift of flippancy, to acquire an agent who told me some hard and invaluable truths about the book which led to a rewrite. This much improved book was submitted to various US and UK publishers in February 2016. None of them liked it enough to loosen their famously taut purse strings and do a deal.

Redeeming Blood

I decided to build on the complexity of City Wall by doing something even more complicated. I spent most of 2015 writing another split narrative novel that would serve as simultaneous sequel and prequel to City Wall. Look at me! Look how very smart I am! Of course, the inescapable axiom that eluded me was that the sequel to a novel with no commercial viability also has no commercial viability itself. The positive aspect to the Redeeming Blood experience was that I wrote it in approximately eleven months from January to November 2015. If nothing else, I had finally realised that these things happen more quickly if one works harder.

City Wall, it has been observed, is a book about women and its companion piece, Redeeming Blood, exhibits pleasing symmetry in that it is a book about men. It also takes a giddying whirl through the topics of trans-humanism, representative politics, terrorism and first contact. I like it and its characters a great deal but, sadly, its a commercial dead end.

Six Sides

After City Wall failed to attract to a publishing deal I had the idea that it could be combined and resequenced with Redeeming Blood to form one novel that eliminated the split narrative structure and presented as one longer but more coherent work called Six Sides. I resisted the temptation for the pretentious neologism 6sides. I am in the process of doing this and the result is pleasing to me if nobody else. I have no idea what the plan for this is. 

Weft

Weft is a novel that sprang from two ideas: the titular word and my conceit that the definitive SF espionage novel had never been written and that I was the person to write it. Happily, I managed to sustain the fecundity I had exhibited in the production of Redeeming Blood and completed it withing the calendar year of 2016.

It is a much stronger and accessible than either of my first two efforts as I had learned a great deal from them. My eventual intention for Weft is to pursue a trade publishing deal as it has strong commercial appeal. Though this isn't going to happen any time soon.

A Dying King

This novel, which I wrote in manic burst of energy from January to July 2017, is my self-indulgent 50th birthday present to myself. I strongly dislike the formulaic strictures of the fantasy literature and wanted to write something that would challenge the conventions of the genre. It is the first work in a planned trilogy although I have no immediate plans to start on the second volume. I will not be seeking representation or a trade publishing deal for this book.

There you have it: 10 years, 4 books and 500,000 words summarised in one blog post.

Personnel Dossier: Khamitova, J.

Name: Yemilia "Jema" Alexandrovna Khamitova-Romanovskaya
DoB: 6th June 2156, New Novosibersk
Augments: Hwangso HXC-1000 visuals, Stage II retroviral cosmetic rejuvenation

Education: Graduate of the Alliance Naval Academy class of 2176, received the Sword of Honour for graduating at the top of her class.

Instructor's Comment: JK was not the smartest or the strongest but she was, by some distance, the most determined. She never, ever relents in anything she does.

Military Service:  Commissioned as an Ensign in the Special Activities Division of the Naval Infantry. Military occupational specialties: Close Quarters Combat (Armed), Close Quarters Combat (Unarmed), Firearms, Explosives, Trauma Medicine. Awarded Combat Service Ribbon for the counter-insurgency action at [REDACTED] and the Naval Cross for her actions during the boarding of the [REDACTED].

Commanding Officer's Comment: One of the bravest and most action focussed junior officers that I have ever served with in the Sads. She was the first person through the hull breach on the [REDACTED] when we boarded it and the last person to leave it as it was breaking up.

General Intelligence Directorate Activties: Transferred to the GID in 2179 on the specific request of the Executive Director's Chief of Staff. Now performs assignments of the highest sensitivity and importance under the direct control of the EDCoS. No ratings within the normal GID evaluatory framework are possible as all activities are executed outside the control of the Operations Section.

Losing My Shit

T. E. Lawrence once famously left the manuscript for Seven Pillars of Wisdom at Reading railway station and, despite an offer of reward and beseeching newspaper advertisments, had to rewrite it from memory.

So how do I protect myself from this manner of catastrophic loss. In the digital age it is both easier and more complex but to mitigate the risks we first have to understand what they are.

The most obvious and likely scenario that could cause a writer to lose material would be a hardware failure on their computer. The best way to protect against this is an online storage service such as Dropbox, iCloud or OneDrive. These services will automatically make an online copy of the work and if, stricken by a hardware failure, one could simply resynchronise a new device. Happily, this would also preserve your work for posterity should your house burn down with you in it.

What such a service would not protect against is some manner of encryption threat such as a ransomware attack as the local encryption would rapidly be replicated in the online copy. Anti virus will provide some but not total prophylaxis against such an attack. In order to preserve documents from a ransomware attacked there has to be a copy which air gapped, i.e. not physically connected, to the infected network.

One way to do this is by having another computer or device which is only sporadically powered on to connect and synchronise its copy of the documents. Obviously, having a seperate computer for this purpose isn't ideal for everyone so an external hard drive is only seldomly connected would also work but you'd have to manage the file copying operation for yourself.

There is also the remote chance that the documents themselves could become corrupt and unreadable across all your backups. This happens much less frequently than it did in the ancient pre-history of personal computing but I wouldn't say it's impossible that it can still happen; particularly with very large and heavily revised files like, say, a novel manuscript...

This is my practice:

• Every chapter gets its own file and sits in its own directory. This protects against file and directory corruption for a work in progress. The very most I could lose is one chapter.
• My entire body of work is synchronised online with Dropbox. This protects against hardware failure and house fires.
• Once a month I start up a virtual machine on my PC which connects to Dropbox and synchronises all the files. This protects against ransomware and other malware as the VM is usually powered off and therefore the files inside it are invisible. If malware that encrypts virtual hard disk files appear then I may switch this function to seperate physical hardware such as an Android tablet.

The Stages of Blogging

Denial - I'm going to blog every single. Penetrating insights and witty aperçus will pour out of my fingers in an endless torrent.

Anger - Fuck, I can't think of anything to write about.

Bargaining - I'll write a blog post after this next hour of YouTube.

Depression - Nobody reads the fucking thing anyway. What's the point? Hint: there is none.

Acceptance - I'll blog sporadically when I've got something to say and an interesting manner in which to say it.

I think The Rutter Continuum has arrived at the final stage.

Take Another Little Piece of My Heart Now, Baby

In vivid contrast to romantic rejection, which customarily arrives in a single crushing blow like a massive brain haemorrhage, literary rejection is more akin to having one’s muscle mass slowly consumed by flesh eating bacteria. The rejections arrive, one at time, heralded by the primitive two dimensional envelope icon of the Gmail alert. The effect of each rejection, while of minor significance in themselves, gradually accrete over time until the writer’s sense of self worth is nothing but a husk that will crumble to dust at a touch.

 The full article is on the Red Sofa NaNoWriMo blog.

Indestructible

For reasons over which we need not tarry I recently had cause to revisit the 1967 television show Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. There are several notable and interesting things about it which I shall get to shortly however the most amazing personal revelation was that, contrary to my recollection, I had never actually seen it.

Captain Scarlet, as it was ubiquitously called, was first shown in 1967 and, no doubt, repeated many times over on budget constrained British commercial television of the 60s and 70s. The theme tune, which was actually the closing theme, with its bombastic refrain of INDESTRUCTIBLE was a constant in the playground of my primary school in the mid 1970s. So I thought I was familiar with the Captain Scarlet canon. As I watched the 32 episode series I realised I was not and had never seen any of them.

To summarise, Captain Scarlet is was a Supermarionation, more commonly known as puppetry, production set in 2068 when Earth is engaged in some manner low key, shadowy war with Mars and its implacable autochthonous lifeforms: the Mysterons. The first notable observation is that the Martians, in an invention born of fiscal restraint, are depicted merely as projected circles of light. This gives a fresh and interesting take on the problem visualising alien life forms. They are also, for unknown reasons, oft given to broadcasting their nefarious intentions at the start of each episode.

The puppetry demonstrated several technical innovations over previous Supermarionation productions such as Thunderbirds. The puppets were larger and possessed of more conventional facial physiognomy compared to the Thunderbirds which had the goggle eyed look of a surprised pug. In Thunderbird and earlier shows characters walking always proved problematic as they moved as if having recently soiled themselves or suffered a grave injury to the genitals. Captain Scarlet skilfully obviates this limitation of string borne puppets by the simple expedient of never having any character walk anywhere ever. All scenes are transacted by stationary characters.

Captain Scarlet himself is a curious Christ-like figure whose resurrection from death is often a plot device. However, the most shocking thing about Captain Scarlet when viewed from these more sensitive times was the sheer scale of the violence and mayhem. Terrorism by crashing an airliner into the sea, assassination by suicide bomber and shootings too numerous to catalog were all considered perfectly acceptable early evening viewing for children in 1967.

On the whole, thoroughly recommended.

Three Full Time Jobs

That's what I've discovered writing to be. Obviously, theres no money in it so you are going to need a normal day job so that you can buy Gummy Bears and toilet paper. So that's the first job.

If you give the slightest fuck about the output then writing books is a job in itself. Not just the work of actually creating the book, but there is also the very considerable burden of proof-reading, consistency checking, research and general editing. That's the second job.

The third and final job is securing representation, writing proposals and marketing yourself and your work. It's immediately and transparently obvious to the most casual observer that publishers expect authors to arrive with an audience already attached and engaged. Why would they expend time and money marketing a book when the author can do it in between writing another book and bouts of Gummy Bear induced diarrhea?

Explorer to Prisoner in One Step

It's my observation that starting a new book can be a heady and liberating experince. The blanks pages stretch like an unexplored country on a map. Except, it's better than that as I can form the terrain according to my taste and will.

That's how I felt when I started work on Weft. My previous book, Redeeming Blood, was a tightly confined work as it was a sequel to Without a City Wall. I still very much enjoyed writing Redeeming Blood but its narrative and chronology was tightly constrained by what had gone before.

Weft, by constrast, was a completely different experience in its initial stages. As it shared no characters or events with my previous two books I was utterly unshackled and could do whatever pleased me.  What did surprise me was just how soon that book would start to form its own boundaries that had to be respected if the narrative arc were to be consistent and logical.

By the end of chapter 4, which would be about 20% of the way through the book if all goes to plan, my latitude to maneuver was already limited by the patterns of behaviour I had already established for my major characters.

So the moral of the story is: enjoy the liberty that the start of a new book affords because it doesn't last.

Starbound Interview with Lucinda Margaret K.

Transcript of an interview with the Gliese colonisation mission primary Pilot/Navigator from the United Nations Space Agency internal information channel Starbound on 1st August 2106.

Interviewer: Lucy, thank you very much for agreeing to join us on Starbound. We're very excited to have you here.

Lucy: Well, thank you very much. It's both an honour and a privilege.

Interviewer: Tell us a little about your background and family. Where were you born and how did you come to be an UNSA officer.

Lucy: I was born in Eurabian state of Northumbria in 2081. My father was a judge and a man of very fixed ideas regarding his childrens' scholastic prowess. All three of my brothers are borderline retarded and were therefore a profound disappointment to him in that regard. They all ended up in the army, obviously, but I went to boarding school were it transpired I had a modest talent for mathematics. Honestly, all three of them really are quite stupid. Can I say hello to them?

Interviewer: Er, that's great... And how did your UNSA career start?

Lucy: When I was 14, so that would have been 2095, my school recommended that I attempt the UNSA selection board. I did the preliminary aptitude and psychometric tests then I travelled to the UNSA Academy in Baikonur for the simulations and socialisation evaluations.

Interviewer: And you were accepted?

Lucy: Not immediately. I was rejected on the basis that I didn't respond in a positive manner to authority and would not take direction or follow process. So I thought that was that. However, a few months later they were having trouble getting candidates who could hack the requirements of the Pilot/Navigator track so they went to the bottom of the rejects pile and there I was.

Interviewer: How long did you spend at Baikonur?

Lucy: About five years, then I moved to flight training at the facility on Deimos. About four years ago I was assigned to the first Gliese flight as Pilot/Navigator.

Interviewer: What will the duties of the Pilot/Navigator be on the flight?

Lucy: I will do the orbital maneuvering of the colonisation ship, the Integral, at departure and arrival. I'll manage the reorientation of the ship from the accelerative to decelerative phases and execute the atmospheric entry and landing of the cargo containers. Finally, I'll fly the landers to the surface.

Interviewer: That all sounds very challenging. You must have moments of doubt and fear?

Lucy: No, I don't. This is a dangerous business and if I ever entertained doubts or fears I would have been killed ten times over by now.

Interviewer: Thank you very much, Lucy, for a fascinating discussion.

Lucy: Thank you.

Interviewer: Make sure you join us next time for an interview with Doctor Rafferty, the Integral's Flight Surgeon.

Lucy: You don't want to do that. She swears like a fucking docker.

Two Toes

Two Toes had got his the name the day the bunyip came out of the lake. It had heaved its ugly, steaming bulk from the dark brown waters and waddled over to Two Toes' favorite gum tree to rub its scaly hide against the trunk dislodging great skeins of bark. This was, in Two Toes' considered opinion, a diabolical infraction of the way of the world. 

He swooped, screaming, out of the gumtree, which was shaking violently under with the ministrations of the bunyip. Two Toes wasn't the biggest, strongest, quickest or cleverest galah in the forest but he was the bravest and most determined. Bravery and determination count for a lot in a fight with a bunyip. So Two Toes and the bunyip went at it in the sun dappled mud under the gum tree by the lake. They fought in a storm of feathers and drops of green bunyip blood. After a few extremely violent minutes the bunyip slunk back into the water lacking an eye. Two Toes had lost a toe from his right foot to the bunyip's snapping, serrated teeth reducing that foot's number of toes to the eponymous two. They both knew that the matter had been settled in favour of Two Toes and the bunyip never returned to the tree.

Two Toes was sat in the tree that was now indisputably his on the day the ghosts and their metal beasts came into the forest. His cousin White Wing, who was the dirtiest and foulest beaked galah in the forest, came flapping in to the tree.

“They’re ripping it all to shit, mate!” White Wing screamed while pointing one of his grimy wings to the cloud of dust and debris that was enveloping the forest on the Western shore of the lake.

“Who is?” Asked Two Toes.

“Ghosts and metal beasts!” White Wing’s shrieks reached an even more feverish tenor and he hopped from foot to foot on the branch in agitation.

“I’m going to take a look.” Two Toes exploded into the warm morning air with a crack of his wings. He’d heard tales of the ghosts and metal beasts from the sly and inquisitive magpies of the forest. They had been eating the forest up the coast for many years and it seemed they had finally made it to the forest around Two Toes’ lake.

He flew toward the dark brown cloud and roaring noises of the metal beasts. Settling on a branch next to the new clearing he watched the metal beasts spewing acrid black smoke as they ripped up and ate the trees. The ghosts who were smaller than the beasts scurried among and tended to them. Two Toes could not discern which was master and which was slave.

He was surprised when he was joined on his perch overlooking the devastation by a large and battle scarred magpie. Broken Beak was the leader of the magpies who held the forest on the western side of the lake as their undisputed fiefdom. Two Toes had some bitter and violent territorial disputes with Broken Break but they had now reached an accommodation based on guarded and mutual respect.

“I know what’s happening.” Broken Beak spoke in the usual magpie manner that left the audience in no doubt as to who held all the secrets in the forest. “The ghosts and the metal beasts are going to build a giant nest. I even know what it’s going to be called.”

“What?” Two Toes asked.

Broken Beak rubbed his chipped beak on one of his wings groom his feathers before he replied.

“Joondalup.”

Lem and the Library

My home town in England had a public library. It was built in 1903 at a time when the British Empire bestrode the world like a coal powered brass and iron colossus of mercantilism. It was a fine red brick building with a typically late Victorian Neo-Gothic rejection of symmetry. Inside it was magnificently appointed with mahogany shelves and balustrades that had doubtless been felled by hand in a steaming forest on the Bay of Bengal.

The interior of the library had a gallery that looked down into a central atrium. Such a thing would be unthinkable now, I assume, as the polyester clad underclass would regularly hurl each to their deaths from it. The library’s contemporary replacement is a concrete, steel and glass confection that was obviously constructed to the lowest possible cost and with the least possible amount of architectural imagination. From the pavement it resembles an abandoned car dealership of one the less prestigious brands.

It was in the original library that I discovered the works of Stanisław Lem. Lem was a Polish science fiction writer who was actively writing and publishing from the 1950s to 1980s. He never shirked from a deep investigation into philosophical and futurological matters yet remained eminently readable. In the English translations, at least. I am regrettably unable to comment of the accessibility of the original Polish.

Lem’s work was so profound and sagacious that Philip K. Dick theorised that the books had to be the combined effort of an expert panel of Polish scientists, philosophers and writers. Although Dick was, at the time, feeling antipathetical toward Poland as a result of some disagreement over royalties on his Polish sales.

The first Lem book that I discovered and the one that I would commend to new readers is Return from the Stars. It tells the story of an astronaut who returns from a voyage spanning centuries to discover that population of Earth have voluntarily submitted themselves to pacification in order to build a tranquil utopia. Not only is this book a penetrating meditation on what it means to be human and the nature of identity but it has also proved to be extremely prescient about the nature of technological development. Even though it was published in 1961 it predicts with eerie accuracy the ubiquity of electronic publication and distribution that is only just being realised now. Access to media, such as books and newspapers, is depicted as being instantly accessible by a tablet device known as an ‘Opton’. 

Stanisław Lem died four years before the launch of the iPad.