This is the sequel to God’s Bolt. Helen Southcote, the sole survivor of a stricken Earth, is alone on the Space Station. This is the tale of her journey through space and time towards Tau Sagittarii, 122 light years away. This is also the story of the aliens who live in the system around Tau Sagittarii and their reaction to the destruction of Earth. After dealing with the rigours of isolation, mental illness and hopelessness there is the hope of awakening. Then there are the questions about the purpose of life, altruism and the nature of consciousness all in the course of an epic adventure.
I have never felt so utterly alone. A raging storm of nausea was gnawing at my belly as I began my routine morning broadcast – except that there was nothing normal about this one.
‘Good morning everybody,’ I said cheerily, putting on my best smile. ‘This is Helen Southcote beaming down to you from the United Nations International Space Station.’
I was totally unsure of the wisdom of continuing these tridee broadcasts, particularly on such an auspicious day as this. Who on earth was tuned in? Surely they’d all be in a panic, desperately seeking safety for themselves and their loved ones. Nobody would be at all interested in any platitudes from me. But the powers that be, in the form of mission controller Brad Noone, had assured me that it was necessary. The psychologists thought that it might help to continue with normality and reduce panic. Who was I to argue? They’d provided me with a script. I suppressed my anger and upset. Put aside my personal feelings about what had happened to my friends. The show had to go on. I was doing it for the kids, I kept reminding myself – it was for the kids.
‘The earth sure looks beautiful spread out there below me.’ I showed them images of the planet below me with its green seas and swirling white clouds.
With a lot of trepidation, which I hoped did not show too much, I turned my attention to the subject that was foremost in everybody’s minds. ‘Preparations are well underway to deal with the remaining threat from Chang’s comet,’ I assured them. ‘Missiles are poised to destroy the largest incoming rocks but President Khun Mae Srisuk has urged everyone to either seek sanctuary in the prescribed shelters or to evacuate to designated regions of safety. There are bound to be some meteorites that will cause some collateral damage. Better to be safe than sorry.’
I offered them one of my best smiles. The cheery tones sounded so phoney to me.
‘This promises to be one of the most spectacular shows you’ll ever see,’ I promised them. Be reassuring I’d been instructed – be upbeat. Lie. Even the most optimistic reports were predicting widespread damage across the United States, Canada and into Russia. The earth was going to be bombarded with the biggest deluge of rocks in recent history. Chang’s comet was a monster and even broken up as it was, presented a real danger to the survival of the planet. They just had to hope that this time the scientists had got it right and every single major threat would be neutralised. It was a big ask. They had not managed such a brilliant job up to now. This last ditch effort was to target all the remaining large rocks and pulverise them in the upper atmosphere so that the remains would burn up on entry. If all went to plan it was certain to be the most amazing display. The worry was that if a single one of those chunks of rock was missed……………….……….. well that didn’t bear thinking about. ‘Make sure you watch from safety!’ I chastised them. There were always some thrill seekers who sought to put themselves in danger. ‘As for me, well I’ve got the best seat in the house, a real grandstand view. UNISS will be in exactly the right place to record the whole sequence of events and you can bet that I’ll be relaying it to you live as it happens!’
I then proceeded to give them a dull and boring update on the various experiments taking place, the weather, solar activity and conditions in space. Normality. That’s what I’d been instructed to do.
‘This is Helen Southcote signing off until tomorrow. Be safe! See you soon’
The politics and satire continues as our humans are set free from control and find themselves in a very different world. While the aliens continue to argue about the future of pornography and the sentience of human beings, life for the unshackled humans is becoming very grim. In the tridee film-making studio everything is fraught. The populist Director General, with her advisers, is being devious. The Minister for Arts is stoned out of her mind. A campaign to give humans rights is being fought. Will the humans find themselves controlled and back in the sex movie, or will they be free?
The System is made up of thousands of planets housing trillions of people in tiny doms arranged in tiers. The people are fed drugs to keep them happy and are plugged into immersive tridee.
The Consortium are a group of wealthy capitalists who live above the metropolis in floating mansions.The name of the game is expansion and profit.
The Qships cross quantum space in search of planets to either colonise or plunder for resources in order to maintain the system.
Quantum Fever is a disease that affects people who jump the weird reaches of quantum space. Was Tahsin Roeg suffering from Quantum Fever or were the Consortium seeking to control her?
Pornography Wars takes political satire and social comment (with a liberal dash of humour) into a new dimension. Sex is the essence of everything. Is human history contrived by aliens? Are we in a film set for an alien pornographic soap opera? Is all human culture nothing more than an alien psych-master’s program? What happens when the aliens argue over the future of pornography on their tridee sets? What is going to happen to the future of human beings?
This is the sequel to God’s Bolt. Helen Southcote, the sole survivor of a stricken Earth, is alone on the Space Station.
This is the tale of her journey through space and time towards Tau Sagittarii, 122 light years away.This is also the story of the aliens who live in the system around Tau Sagittarii and their reaction to the destruction of Earth.
After dealing with the rigours of isolation, mental illness and hopelessness there is the hope of awakening.
Then there are the questions about the purpose of life, altruism and the nature of consciousness all in the course of an epic adventure.
Elspin is born without a nervous system; a brain with no connection to the world. She is locked within her dreams. She should have withered into nothing but against all the odds she prospered.
Politicians and Business-people are at each others throats.
The world is in crisis. The Greens are split into factions. Passions are explosive.
They find a way of contacting Elspin. What happens when universes clash?
It’s the sixties – the three thousand one hundred and sixties. The Federation is in conflict with the Confederation. The Troman war rages. There is a civil rights issue with the Androvians. Youth all across the galaxy are in revolt. Rock Music, on an intergalactic scale, is the medium of the rebellion Zargos Ecstasy and the Terminal Brain Grope are providing the impetus for the rebellion. Zargos, a larger than life character based on Bob Dylan, Hendrix, Jagger, Jim Morrison and Bowie, struts the stage, putting his poems to music and rousing the spacefreaks to seek social justice.
If you lived through the sixties you’ll recognise it all.
Helen Southcote is looking for a purpose to life through her Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence work on the United Nations Space Station when she watches the Earth destroyed by an asteroid. What can she do next?
How important is consciousness? How rare is it in the universe? It is incredibly rare but not many people here on Earth seem to care about that. But the Gordian’s do – they value it – they seek it out and look to protect it. They have an institute funded by their government that is geared to the conservation of endangered alien sentient beings. Unfortunately a new Gordian leader has come along who believes in austerity. He is threatening to close the institute. Humans are sentient and have a modicum of intelligence. They can hardly be termed endangered though. There are 4000 billion of them. But they are incredibly interesting. They have sex. They also have politics and religion. They pretend to be clever and civilised but they are nowhere near as clever and civilised as they think they are. Most Gordian’s are intrigued by humans. They find sex astounding and humans cute. Being cute and having sex might just be their saving graces.