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.
7.2.2016
If you would like to read one of my Sci-fi books in either paperback or digital I have provided a few links below:
My best Sci-fi books in the USA:
Ebola in the Garden of Eden
Green
Starturn – Intergalactic Rockstar
Sorting The Future
My best Sci-fi books in the UK:
Ebola In The Garden Of Eden.
Sorting The Future
Green
Starturn – Intergalactic Rockstar