Featured book – Nosedive – A Sci-Fi novel of Adventure and Aliens

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I write a lot of Sci-Fi. I find it gives full flow to the imagination and allows all possibility.

Sci-Fi is a very wide genre. It encompasses a range of styles from futuristic space stories to tales of inner space. Sometimes it even breaks into mainstream literature with authors such as Jules Verne, George Orwell or Aldous Huxley.

I had written a number of Sci-Fi books before I wrote this one. They were mainly concerned with my preoccupations with infinity and reality. I decided to take a break from that and tackle something different. This was an adventure story involving maverick asteroid miners, alien contact and two superpowers who were busy trying to establish their own interplanetary empires. I wanted it to be an action packed, fast-paced story and threw in a few examples of alien science for good measure.

It was different to my other books.

If perchance you would like to purchase one of my books you can do so from any Amazon site. The links are below:

In the UK:

My author pages:

If you wish to purchase Nosedive:

 

In the USA:

My Author Pages:

If you wish to purchase Nosedive:

 

Photography – Derbyshire England – green rolling hills, crags and castles.

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Photography – Japan – Kyoto – temples and costume

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Japan was fascinating. Such an interesting culture and polite, friendly people who went out of their way to help us. We had a great stay. I’d like to go back.

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New novel – Danny’s Story – the story.

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In 1972-74 I lived in a flat in Manor House London. It was the tail-end of the sixties. I’d previously lived in Ilford and Wood Green before heading off to hitch around the States as a prelude to going off around the world.

We came back from the States skint and moved up to London to earn some money to head off again to Africa. It didn’t quite go as planned. I ended up doing research and Liz became pregnant.

While living in the flat (no hippies, babies or pets) with Liz, we had out cat, rat and turtles living with us and then a baby.

It was a great place and a community of lots of people with stories. The garden was an amazing creation by this octogenarian bohemian genius – a psychedelic masterpiece. So much happened in the place and we found ourselves in the centre of it.

I felt there was a book in it but I did not know how to do it. Until, that is, I read Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck and it suddenly clicked.

My second problem was to write about real people. I got around that by heavily fictionalising them, altering them, playing with their back stories and creating different characters. It was a balancing act. Some came out similar and some, due to the plotting, came out very different. I would apologise to some, who I made very much more unpleasant than they were, all I can say is that the characters I created are not them. I used a lot of licence. But I did feel that I trapped a little of the feel of the house in that book and a glimpse of the reality of the madness of the place and times.

My main character is based on me but is not me. I extrapolated out, separated him off from his relationship, and played around with him. He too was a fiction.

The events were largely real, though I did play with them too.

What we have at the end is a story of a period of time that is true to its time. It is light and airy, largely made up of vignettes and stories that run together and tell the story of Danny’s stay in the house.

I could have equally called it Mr Rose’s story or even 301 Green Lanes.

I like it and I hope you will too. It will be out shortly.

A HUUUUGGGEEE Thank You to all the people who have purchased my books! Please, Please, Please – take the time to leave a review!

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Thank you so much to all those who have purchased one of my books. I really appreciate it. It is great to know that people are reading the books that I have spent so much of my life writing.

Thank you to those of you who have reported to me how much you’ve enjoyed reading them. That gives me a big boost.

I am shortly moving into a phase of marketing and promotion in order to obtain a better publishing deal and a wider readership. This is really not easy to do in the current climate. No reviewers will touch a book until it has a dozen good reviews. Very few people buy a book unless it has a series of good reviews. It is a kind of catch 22.

So please, if you have enjoyed reading my books, leave a review on Amazon. It will help me enormously.

Thank You All!!!

A celebration!!! – 2 years of blogging!!! – This is my 2501 post!! Thank You!!

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A big thank you to all my many followers. I have now been blogging for two years!! (It feels much longer!). I am so glad you find my work interesting, entertaining and thought provoking.

I have somewhere in the region of 6,600 followers – though most of them seem remarkably quiet. They span nearly every country in the world – over 160!

I still get a buzz to find I have followers in Nepal, Congo, Peru, China and Iran, as well as many others. Thank you all for following and being so loyal.

Thank you to all those who regularly comment and contribute. You make it special.

And thank you for all the thousands of likes – you give me a boost.

I know I upset you from time to time because I am outspoken and opinionated – but that is why I blog. Sorry. But if you disagree please jump in and say so. I welcome debate and opinion and do not censor anything.

I’m planning big changes ahead.  We’ll see how that pans out.

Thanks for looking at my books:

In the USA:

In the UK:

 

All the best – Opher

Featured Book – Sorting the Future – the Blurb

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This tells the story of how Opher Goodwin was selected by aliens to save the world.
The visitors from afar had scoured the universe in search of life and intelligence. They found it on a planet called Earth, where, unfortunately, the dominant life form was trying it’s best to wipe itself – and everything else – out.
The aliens set about selecting a saviour and installing him as Global President. They chose the unlikely hero Opher Goodwin.
Opher and his friends from the pub had all of the immense problems of the world on their shoulders plus the vicious opposition of the existing establishment. Against such odds – could they possibly succeed? What was it that made Opher the chosen one?

If you would like to purchase one of my books you can do so on Amazon.

In the UK this is my Author’s page:

If you are interested in purchasing Sorting the Future you can buy it here:

In the UK –

Kindle Edition
£0.00 Subscribers read for £0.00 £2.05 to buy

In the USA –

This is my Authors page:

If you are interested in purchasing Sorting the Future –

Kindle
$2.99 Read with Our Free App

Thank you for supporting Opher Goodwin.

 

Featured Book – Sorting the Future – The preface

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Foreword

This is a yarn. I like yarns. It tells the story of Opher Goodwin and a meeting with aliens. It came out of a dream I had and like to keep going back to – a dream of youth and a pristine planet.

All characters in this book are straight out of my head. The names used bear no basis to living people.

Unfortunately time only goes in one direction and goes faster and faster the older you get. When you are young you have a whole life-time to do things and put the world to right. When you are old you realise that you can no longer do the things that you once dreamed of doing and there isn’t time to change the world.

The sad thing is that the world is changing but not for the better. As a biologist I love nature. As a human being I have only lived on this planet for a fraction of a second. Yet in that short period I have seen it being systematically wrecked. I have seen creatures that once teemed in our seas and jungles being propelled to the edge of extinction, wilderness desecrated and nature in retreat as the human population soars. Darwin would cry his eyes out.

Human beings are supposedly intelligent – so why do we still have war and this level of poverty and misery? We have the technology to deal with it.

What we need is a magic wand.

I wrote this book on the Marco Polo. It is a two hulled East German ice-breaker turned into a cruise liner housing 800 individuals. I was inspired as we cruised around South America to the end of the world. That ship was a self-contained bubble of humanity closeted in its own universe. There were thought provoking lectures, time to read and write, creativity, bickering and fights. Outside of the ship reality ruled.

I looked out at the poverty and environmental destruction we encountered. I looked at the scarcity of wildlife. I wrote this book.

I was bearing Chris Moody in mind as I wrote all this. He likes tales about aliens.

We don’t have a magic wand. Maybe somewhere in the universe a bunch of aliens do have such a wand.

What I need is a new body and mind. What the planet needs is protection. It turned out that what everybody really needed was Opher Goodwin.

Meet the aliens.

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If you would like to purchase one of my books you can do so on Amazon.

In the UK this is my Author’s page:

If you are interested in purchasing Sorting the Future you can buy it here:

In the UK –

Kindle Edition
£0.00 Subscribers read for £0.00 £2.05 to buy

In the USA –

This is my Authors page:

If you are interested in purchasing Sorting the Future –

Kindle
$2.99 Read with Our Free App

Thank you for supporting Opher Goodwin.

 

Opher interviews the Author Opher Pt.2

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Q – So tell me Opher – what makes you tick?

A – I am an angry man. My anger, frustration and desperate need to put things right makes me tick. I’m a time-bomb waiting to explode; a nuclear device primed to detonate.

Q – So what have you got to be angry about? You live in a nice part of the word – admittedly the weather’s a bit naff – there’s no war, starvation or disease to contend with. You have things pretty easy. Why are you getting het up by things that don’t affect you?

A – because they do affect me! I cannot rest easy when I see rhinos, elephants and gorillas being slaughtered. I can’t rest easy when I see jungles being turned into coffee plantations. It affects me. I cannot sit back while a greedy bunch of establishment bastards line their own pockets with billions at the expense of all the poor and the whole planet. I have to shout.

Q – Why can’t you just sit back with a beer and chill out? You have no need to get yourself agitated.

A – I know. I could sit back watch all the soaps on TV, catch all the sport and comedies and forget about it all. I could watch the adverts and buy everything they want me to buy and be a good consumer. I’d have it easy.

Q – So why not?

A – Because that is what they want me to do!

Featured book – Green – The cover – a Sci-Fi novel that explores the universe within.

Posted on by Opher

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I used a painting of mine for the cover. It was a person in a prison in a cloud. They are gripping the bars and peering out. It was a little Rene Magritteish. As the original was in blue I tinted it to create a gree. Unfortunately it lost the cloud effect but I thought the image created, though different, was still quite powerful.

Here is the original artwork:

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If you would like to purchase Green you can buy it in Paperback or Kindle at Amazon.

In the UK:

Kindle Edition
£0.00 Subscribers read for £0.00 £1.99 to buy

In the USA:

Kindle
$3.50 Read with Our Free App

For my other books in the UK check out my Author page::

For other books in the USA check out my Author page:

Thank you for looking.