Yes! – You can purchase it in Hardback, Paperback, eBook or Audio! How great is that!!
What do you think of the cover? I used AI to put a photo of me in and it transformed me into that handsome dude (not the one on the left! Silly – I’m the one on the right!). As I have woven myself into the story it seemed appropriate.
This Sci-fi novel is rooted in today. A fast-flowing story of social commentary, intrigue and tall tales.
Trump and Musk seem to be cooking up a scheme to divide up the world. They are siding with all the tyrants and despots. Their wet dream seems to be some fascist take-over of the whole globe.
Goodbye equality, tolerance and freedom. Hello Authoritarian rule and a clampdown on liberties! Hello second-class citizens (women, trans, gays and people of colour).
Looks like Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale is becoming reality!
I wrote this book fourteen years ago when I retired from teaching. It’s been burbling away achieving some glowing reviews but unfortunately didn’t change education across the world! We continue to fail to see the wonder of education as a transforming force. Young minds can be expanded and the world can be improved. Education should be enlightening, wondrous, exciting and fun. All too often it is robotic, stifling and plain boring.
I wanted to do it right!
(I noticed on Amazon that the price for the book had gone up ridiculously. I price my books so that they give me £1 profit. Amazon had put their costs up and that impacted. I’ve addressed that. In the next few days the price should more than half).
So here is an extract from the introduction:
A passion for Education – The story of a Headteacher
. Education is all things to all men/women. To politicians it is a way of maintaining social order, reinforcing class or enabling mobility and addressing the economic needs of the country. To many it is purely about careers while to others it is about expanding minds, opening horizons and creating wonder. I’m very much in the wonder and awe camp. I am also of the repairing damaged kids persuasion. All my students were equally important and equally valuable. I hope I succeeded in making some of their lives better. That’s what I set out to do. Their chosen career and economic value was secondary to their self-esteem and happiness.
Before starting this I checked on ‘Rate my Teacher’, a scurrilous website that has given a voice to some rather dubious individuals, but one which reflects how some others see you. It offers a modicum of objectivity. It was a little unsettling to see oneself described as an obese penguin from the CIA but on the other side there was also the recognition of the care and respect. It showed a career that was not entirely wasted.
I worked in Education for thirty six years and prior to that I was largely a victim of it for twenty plus years. My experience of schooling gave me the impetus to get involved and change it. My disgust at the education minister and the Tory attempt to belittle all the achievements of recent decades and drag education back to the appalling 1950s is my main reason for writing this. Children should be valued as human beings and not seen as mere economic units for the employment market. Education that is not developing all aspects of human empathy, and creativity as well as expanding minds is wrong. Most leading fascists have been highly educated – after a fashion. It was their empathy, compassion and warmth of spirit that was allowed to atrophy. Any education system that fosters elitism and the smug arrogance that stems from it should be resisted by all caring people. A system that ignores the promotion of human feeling and sound moral and ethical values in order to focus on exam league tables and economic performance is flawed. The society created would be cold and bitter.
I have fought against that limited view of education all my life.
We have Trump and Farage on the horizon – peddling division, fear and hatred. They’ll be scapegoating immigrants.
We have women in Islamic states being denied education and a voice, locked in the prisons of burqas.
We have Neolithic sharia law.
In the states they are trying to put women back in their boxes – denying them reproductive rights, even questioning whether they should have careers or the vote. And women are voting for it.
We have the world tottering on the edge of a environmental catastrophe and people up in arms over silly issues.
We have starvation, drought, floods, hurricanes and forest fires.
We have a media run by billionaires that is incredibly biased and a social media that feeds conspiracy and pushes extreme right-wing agendas.
We have an insanely gullible, uneducated public.
We have politicians in the hands of billionaires robbing the poor to give to the wealthy and using the poor and immigrants as scapegoats.
So, here we are on the brink of a new year. I make some resolutions:
I will continue to support social justice;
I will continue to fight for nature;
I will continue to oppose religious persecution;
I will continue to oppose war;
I will continue to oppose an unfair system created by uncaring billionaires for the good of billionaires!
Just think – if those billionaires all got together and pooled their resources they could end poverty, create a happy world and put an end to climate change! What a wonderful world that could be!
(instead I guess it’ll be another year of robbing us to pay for rocket playthings, yachts, penthouses, cars and unbelievable opulence.)
I’m Woke!! It’s the same people in charge! The same ones who set up their empires to colonise and rob the world so they could live in their mansions and palaces with their carriages and servants while we ordinary folk lived in slums and starved in their factories!
Nothing is won without a fight!
So HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! At least we have something to get our teeth into!
Is it possible that a government, for political reasons, or to remove surplus, unwanted population, might have a virus engineered in order to wipe out the ones it does not want?
I reckon so.
Is it possible to manufacture a deadly virus and put a vaccination programme in place for those you want to survive?
I think it is.
My Sci-fi novel tells the story of an horrific attempt with devastating consequences and unexpected outcomes.
Sorry. I’ve been out of action for a while. Off dealing with family probs and also writing. In the past few weeks I have written the first draft of a new Sci-fi novel. You might have seen the start of it with the trapdoor. It snowballed. The trouble is that it’s a lot too short. I completed it today but this first draft is only 43,000 words (90 pages). I need to add at least thirty thousand words and that’s quite an ask.
I’ve called it Ghenghis Smith (After the Roy Harper album and poem).
I’ll have to sit on it, do and rewrite and see if I can find a way of fleshing it out a little (a lot!). Any volunteers for a read? Maybe you’d have some idea of what I can do??
The other event of the day was to record a podcast with Pooja. Thanks for the opportunity Pooj. Really enjoyed it – (sorry I talked too much!)
What we have done to the world over these last few hundred years is criminal. Without regard to the destruction or the agony of the creatures caught up in it we have devastated the environment.
Things have got to change.
Animal population numbers are decimated. Many face extinction. The wilderness is being destroyed.
Nowhere is safe.
Thank heavens some people are prepared to fight for a better future.
In Scenario 1 the population continued to grow eating up space, wilderness and destroying all naturally living creatures. Technology dealt with the problems of food, water, energy, weather and even oxygen in the atmosphere. We lived in huge urban developments and the world is devoid of wild-life and natural areas.
Scenario 2.
The premise:
a. We realise the impact of our actions on the environment and limit our numbers, conserve the wilderness and wild-life, stop our habitat destruction and pollution.
b. We lay aside 50% of the planet for wilderness and wild-life. We do not allow roads, hunters or development in these areas.
We are extremely good at solving problems. We can easily create a sustainable future where wilderness and wild-life has a place.
The result:
a. We introduce contraception, education and family planning on a global scale and successfully reduce our population.
b. We use technology to produce better transport, housing, energy production, and food.
c. We do not have urban sprawl, deforestation, overfishing, or other unsustainable exploitation of the environment.
d. We raise the standards of life for all people globally so that there is no longer war, conflict or poverty. There are social services, pensions and sick pay enabling people to live without requiring large numbers of children to support them through hard times.
e. We produce technology that is not polluting and is sustainable. We have ample energy (probably through nuclear fusion and solar) and our farming methods are not cruel or ineffective. We can produce ample good food to support the population without encroaching on the wilderness areas.
f. The forests are conserved. Fishing is sustainable. The weather and global warming is controlled.
g. 50% of the world is teeming with wild-life that we can marvel at. The air, water and soil are not contaminated with carcinogens. We globally control the weather and global warming. Everything regarding conservation and pollution is controlled and enforced globally.
I know which of the two possible future scenarios I would prefer to live in.
