Keep Britain Normal

It began with MRSA. A mutated bug no drug could kill. Then that mutated further...

Infection produced alarming symptoms. Soon the entire population lived in fear... No known treatment. The ill afraid to go to hospital... a death sentence.

A panic-stricken government introduced the Biological Security Act. It set up the Biological Security Agency...

Seconded from the military, their suited medics patrolled the streets responding to calls to the freephone number on all the posters and tv/internet ads...

As strange changes began to be wrought by the bugs on their victims 'Keep Britain Normal' became the mantra of all mainstream political parties....

The new profile artwork is by Felipe Cunha. Hybrids is itself hybridising into a comic. We have perfected character sketches. A teaser is coming before Christmas. Watch this space.

Doris Lessing and the Nobel Prize for Literature

Doris Lessing has at last been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Better late than never - although she has no shortage of gongs on her mantlepiece.

Many people today under 40 will never even have heard of her. This was certainly true of 20-30 year olds 15-17 years ago when our paths crossed.

I had commissioned a graphic novel from her. It's called Playing the Game and was eventually published by HarperCollins when they bought the rights to all her work. It was part of a series intended to match 'literary' authors - like Kazuo Ishiguro, Angela Carter and Ian Banks - with the best comics artists - like Lorenzo Mattotti, Dave McKean and Francois Schuitten. Sadly it was the only title published in the end.

I visited her house a number of times. She came across as a wonderfully alive person, with piercing blue eyes, and a genuine interest in everything you had to say. She really wanted to understand and would ask searching questions, listening intently to the answers.

At dinner, her adult son, who lived with her and has learning difficulties, hovered in the background, a source of guilt and responsibility for her - as well as of material for at least two of her works.

I had thought that such a giant of literature would not be concerned with mere comics, but her desire to push creative barriers knew no limits - not even comics!

Her choice of story was unusual - a fable, and one written in the form of an aria, which the artist was intended to illustrate. She wanted it to be an opera too (she'd just worked with Philip Glass on an opera) but I don't think this ever happened.

There came the task of choosing an artist. I came over with a large pile of books and we went through them. And you know what? She picked out the darkest, most heavy metal, and accomplished of the lot - Simon Bisley, who was drawing Slaine and ABC Warriors for 2000AD at the time and had a massive following, particularly among bikers, of which he was one... and a body builder.

I was surprised and pleased. So I asked Simon - who had never heard of her. He was too busy and anyway didn't like the story.

This pattern continued through all the other artists she liked and approached. The next, for example, was Duncan Fegredo, who I had 'discovered' and worked with since he was at Leeds art college, and who also draws astonishingly and with dramatic electric dynamism.

As we progressed, it became apparent that - most comics artists being working class and anarchic in sensibility - Lessing's reputation and style meant nothing to them.They all turned down this job - which some might have considered a dream job - one by one.

In the end the artist who eventually agreed was a hack, to be honest. An unexceptional and arrogant young typical Marvel artist who couldn't relate to the work either. No one liked the result, least of all me.

So what is it about Doris Lessing's work which doesn't speak to the recent young? After all, she has written many times about the quest of youth for meaning, and the difficulties of growing up in problematic surroundings.

The way I see it is that both the attraction and disadvantage of much of her work lie in its naivety. Perceptive in matters of the heart, her style and political idealism leave her at times exposed. She is at home when writing about things she has direct experience of, such as Zimbabwe, and awkward when not.

At the time when I began working on this, I was still involved in the grassroots anti-capitalist political scene in London. I was part of the collective producing Monochrome newspaper.

A couple of years earlier her book 'The Good Terrorist' had appeared. We all felt this was intended to be about people like some of us - for example Sarah Gellner, daughter of historian Ernest Gellner. So we all read it - but it did not resonate. It was not grounded in reality, we felt, and therefore was making a judgement about 'middle-class' 'revolutionaries' based not on research but on ideology. We laughed at it. What did she know?

But it's the ability to continue asking questions and experimenting that marks the true artist. Whether you arrive at the 'right' answers is not always relevant - you're bound to get it wrong sometimes. So I do believe that after a lifetime of such practice, Lessing every bit deserves her prize from Stockholm.

Hybrids has been shortlisted for award

Hybrids has been shortlisted for an award in London. School librarians in Lewisham and their students have chosen it for the second annual Lewisham Book Award.

There are 12 state secondary schools in Lewisham, in south east London. They say that students have already started reading the books, and will be voting for their favourite on the shortlist in February, with the winner to be announced in March. They will need to read all six to be able to vote.

They add: "We also expect many students to write reviews of the books which will be posted on the Lewisham VLE (Virtual Learning Environment)".

The other books on the shortlist are:
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne
The Black Tattoo - by Sam Enthoven
The Wave Runners - by Kai Meyer
The Book of Everything - by Guus Kuijer
The Outlaw Varjak Paw - by S.F. Said

"Thank you for writing such a thought-provoking and thrilling book," they conclude.

Whose collective memory is it anyway?

ADS, or attention-deficit syndrome, is the metaphorical disease of the age. Just as junk food creates unfit bodies so junk culture produces unfit minds. By consuming it the current generation lays itself weak for exploitation, its minds open for colonisation by commercial and political interests.

What is required is the cultural equivalent of wholefoods, slow food, organic, fair trade, fresh and local nutrition - but what is this? Where are there examples of mind vitamins, spiritual enzymes, emotional minerals, intellectual roughage - brain nutrition?

It comes to something when the utterances of ex-Stone Roses front man Ian Brown seem to be extreme - reference his new album and the interview in this weekend's Guardian Guide.

Looking back, the most dystopian past visions of the future have turned out to be the most accurate, and the most radical ideas have turned out to be the most necessary.

But the flow of mindless mediocrity and short-termism - both short term thinking and short attention span fostering - which the global capitalist system and its politicians have been foisting on us for the last two decades, has produced a generation that barely seems to understand the meaning of words like 'radical' or 'protest'. The recent climate camp at Heathrow, for instance, was attended by around only 1800.

That's why every generation has to keep questioning. Every generation has to understand the status quo and attack it. If it fails to understand, recognise and attack it will be ruthlessly exploited and its life wasted, sucked dry, spat out at the end as a useless husk full of nothing but regrets.

For example, this is why we have a credit crisis now - millions with a massive millstone of debt round their necks that will take a lifetime of pointless, soul-destroying labour to pay off. They seduce you with baubles, get you into debt and then you're hooked into the system.

Kids, don't get into debt! It's a trap! Don't believe marketing and advertising. It should be banned! Question everything. Believe nothing.

Teach yourselves what they don't expect you to know! But how?

The problem is that each generation has to learn this for themselves. They have to start afresh. They have to reinvent protest.

But the enemies - mainstream history and the status quo - have an excellent inter-generational memory - a version of history. They fill your head with it at school. They fill your head with it in the media. And they have their own vast, extensive archives. They have honed tactics, resources, laws, etc. etc. They therefore have a massive head start.

As a result, normal conventional protest (Live 8, Live Earth, marching against the Iraq war) doesn't stand a chance. It will always be out-propaganda'd, out-manoevered, or beaten into submission. Hence terrorism - the last resort of the powerless.

Because, it's in the nature of opposition that much of what happens from its point of view is undocumented. Therefore there is little inter-generational memory.

For example, I was involved in the Leveller magazine's successor, Monochrome, in the '80s. This lasted about six years and put out bimonthly issues - 10,000 print run - all free - financed by adverstising and the Leveller Graphics studio, itself set-up to pay off the debts of the Leveller Magazine, the most radical mag of the late '70s (its heyday was the ABC (Aubrey, Berry, Campbell) Official Secrets trial of 1979). Some of the covers of this you can see in 'my pics' on my myspace.

Naturally, both journals took inspiration from the Levellers and Diggers, the seventeenth century's give-the-land-to-the-people revolutionaries.

In the sea of history, Monochrome has disappeared without trace, as no one documented it, not even the book about the '80s counterculture media 'No Way To Run a Railroad'. (The same is true of the excellent Vague magazine, featuring Jamie Read, Jon Savage and Tom Vague.) I have a complete set of Monochromes that one day I must digitise.

Now in the '90s I had a conversation with the manager of that excellent band, the Levellers, and established that although they also took inspiration from the original Levellers, they had never heard of the Leveller Magazine or Monochrome. And this was barely a decade later. No inter-generational memory. No foundations, no learning from experience, no sense of tradition.

Most people haven't a clue about the rich and noble tradition of political protest, radical thinking, extreme art, revolutionaries, riots, strikes, working class movements, emancipation struggles, human rights struggles, and more, that has been going on in this country since the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

Where do you go to find out about it?

My dream, then, is for an alternative online and perhaps offline college and library, a wiki-style place where all this stuff can be stored and learnt. A resource, a memory, a constantly self-updating treasury of radical history, culture, ideological, methodological, and strategic weaponry.

Who will be its curators and lecturers, its librarians and chancellors?

As Tony Benn once said, you can't trust what you read in their media; you have to have your own.

Why we fight for freedom

Before I explain why, let me ask you a question: Is satire dead?

I mean, is it possible to have political satire in an age where everything that the satirist can possibly imagine has already been exceeded by somebody somewhere? Our society has become a caricature of the kind of nightmare society writers used to imagine 20, 30 or 40 years ago. We gratefully watch rubbish and consume rubbish while CCTV cameras follow our every move and our every spending habit is tracked remorselessly. Robot police drones police pop concerts. Someone becomes Prime Minister without being elected. We imagine we live in a sensible country while over half of the world regards us as a jingoistic menace.

Surely, political satire is only possible in an age when people care about these things. Instead they laugh at the idea that anyone could care.

Perhaps instead it is possible to satirise the satirist who attempts to write satire -- Armando Iannucci, for example, who has been co-opted as the latest court jester. You can't get away from him these days. Why do the powers that be find him so irresistible? Another Oxbridge darling. He paid somebody to tell him what is really going on inside the Cabinet so he could put it in fictional form and astonish us. He paid someone else to write in the expletives. This is not satire, it is plagiarism. It is bad journalism.

So why should I care? Why do I care? What does it matter if I care? It matters nothing, nada, nihil.

In fact as of last night I have decided and resolved not to care any more -- I am giving up caring. And I am someone who used to care a lot -- after all, I was a Guardian reader (that's a joke). I supported lots of charities. I campaigned extensively on the subject of climate change. I believe completely that in the next 80 years millions of people are going to die as a result. Not to mention thousands of species. As if enough have not been sacrificed already on the altar of so-called progress.

I must have cared in the past -- I bought the Big Issue. I wrote passionate articles about important subjects as if I cared about them. I raised money for poor people in Africa. When friends came to me for advice and help I would do my best to help them. Even people I didn't know very well. People think I know something about computers and ask me to sort out their problems which I almost invariably have done. All of this is now going to stop.

I am no longer going to put my clothes neatly away at night. I am going to leave them in piles. I am not going to religiously clean all the surfaces in the kitchen every day and do three lots of washing-up every two days. I am not going to clean the car ever again. If the houseplants need watering and are about to die, what do I care?

I am not going to judge people -- they can do what the hell they like for all I care.

If I don't care about anybody else, why should they care about me? I don't want them to care about me. If they care about me it means they are watching me, and if they're watching me they are judging me, and if they're judging me I can't do what I like.

Besides, most people, it seems to me, especially politicians and corporate executives, seem to get away with not caring. They just do what they want to do and sod everyone else. I've always been someone who goes out of their way to, for example, pass on a bit of information that I get that I think will be useful to someone I know. I scrupulously recycle and watch my energy usage. No more.

My head has become too full of what other people think ought to be there, and what I think up other people think ought to be there. My time has become too filled with things that I do because I think I ought to do them or because somebody else wants me to. Now I'm going to be like most other people and just do things I want to do. And you know what? I don't care. I don't even care if you care that I don't care.

It's very liberating, not having to care. I feel free -- lighter than air. I am like the people of Iraq -- liberated.

Now I understand why we went to war, in Iraq and Afghanistan. We are supporting freedom, we are fighting for freedom. We are fighting for the freedom not to care, to stop caring. Why should we care that the world is going to pot? Tigers are about to become extinct. People are dying of malaria and beri-beri because pharmaceutical companies can't see a profit in producing a cure. Leprosy is still around. Children and pets are mistreated all over the world. Why should we have the burden of worrying about this?

Well, we don't. We are free of it. We are convinced that it will happen whether we worry about it or care about it or not.

In truth, we are fighting for freedom from the burden of having to care about the consequences of our actions. If these consequences occur on the other side of the world or if they occur in our own backyard it doesn't matter. Like the Catholic faith and belief in God, I am absolved of having to care because I believe in freedom.

Freedom is therefore the only thing worth caring about.

Thank you President Bush and all other previous American presidents for continually reiterating the reason why we have such big armies. No other country values freedom so highly, therefore America must be right.

It follows that it is right not to care. And that anyone who does care is an enemy of freedom.

That's why we fight for freedom.

(And a big Hah! to anyone who thought I was going to say it was because we want the freedom to satirise.)

"It is the government’s pandering to mass fear ... of which we should be afraid"

A pleasing new review by Donal Cumiskey in Inis - the Childrens Books Ireland magazine:

Hybrids is a thought-provoking novel that delivers a fast-paced plot, good dialogue and engaging characters.

As the story progresses it becomes evident that it is not just another 'live and let live' moral tale of inclusion and social harmomy, but a warning to readers of the danger of public panic and misuse of technology.

The Machiavellian actions of the corporations and government agencies and the differing responses from volunteer groups, freedom fighters, the media and the international community are all too real to people growing up in the modern political climate.

Thorpe injects a seriously Orwellian feel to the book, illustrating how it is the government's pandering to mass fear and not the victims of the disease of which we should be afraid.

Readers aged 13+ should enjoy an exciting read with substance from this great debut.

More Hybrids reviews

These have just come in:

• "When our teenage reviewer took this into a school as part of a lesson showing what you read at home, the book drew an appreciative crowd and was the star of the show. Not a bad reaction for a first novel! David Thorpe has cleverly tapped into the teenage psyche with awesome precision. The main characters are totally reliant on the gadgets that teens now take for granted and this book takes that obsession to a different, almost believable level. Oh, this is clever stuff and you will just love it! Bring it on!" - From Bump to Grump


• "Seriously spooky" - CY ezine, which made it Book of the Month, as did Collins Educational


• "An inventive, dystopian world whicvh plays with the role of technology in our lives and as part of our humanness. The plot hurtles along ... a rattling adventure" - Books for Keeps


• "The writing in Thorpe's debut is tight, and the dialogue convincing..... It would serve as a good jumping off point for debate about ethnic cleansing and human nature with young teenagers, as, like all good science-fiction, it's parallels can be clearly seen in the real world." Write Away (Featured title)

Full list on Del.ic.ious

The Next Big Thing: Who will be the next JK Rowling?

A Texan journalist, Kevin Garcia, had the neat idea to write a piece about authors who've been labelled "the next JK Rowling".

They include Michelle Paver, author of the amazing "Wolf Brother" series (I saw her speak at this year's Hay Festival and she was fascinating), Emma Maree Urquhart, of "Dragon Tamers" fame, and Louise Arnold, whose story "The Invisible Friend," won a contest by BBC Online - as well as myself.

We all agreed that there can be no next JK Rowling.

As Paver says "we don't actually need the next JK Rowling" and Arnold: "I don't see it as a void waiting to be filled."

Urquhart "loathes" the title.

And I'm quoted as saying "There's never going to be a next JK Rowling. That's not the kind of thing that you can manufacture.

"It's a very, very competitive field. In the end, it's the kids who decide who's big and who isn't," Thorpe said. "The only thing you can do as a writer is write what you want to write about and tell a damn good story."

> Read the whole piece - The Next Big Thing: Who will be the next JK Rowling?

Sold out again in less than 24 hours!

A few weeks ago Doodled Books sold out in one week of 20 copies of signed and drawn-in copies of Hybrids at £19.99 and ordered 15 more. They went on sale yesterday and sold out again in less than 24 hours! More are on order for me to draw in. I wonder who is buying them?

> See the galleries here
> Read their interview with me

I'm looking forward to Womad and a break.

Is the mood of the country changing?

• The Scottish and Welsh assemblies have green and anti-Westminster coalitions. Both are pro-peace, and anti-nuclear power and nuclear weapons


• Seven British cabinet ministers have admitted to smoking dope


• The super-Lotteries have been scrapped


• The Daily Mail attempt to smear the Labout Administration has failed


• Here in Wales the new cabinet gives fresh hope for international peace and justice:
  
  
  • Of the three Plaid Cymru ministers, Rhodri Glyn Thomas is a former Chair of
    CND Cymru and Elin Jones and has been a speaker at all the peace and justice demonstrations in Aberystwyth over the past 5 years
  
  
  • Labour cabinet members include: Brian Gibbons, who spoke regularly at anti - nuclear medical campaign against Nuclear Weapons meetings in the 1980s;
  
  
  • Jane Hutt is an ex-Greenham Common campaigner
  
  
  • Edwina Hart supported the Stop the War protests in 2002-3
  
  
  • John Griffiths is against nuclear power was involved in Stop the War
    protests
  
  
  • Jane Davidson has recently pledged to work to reverse the senseless House of Commons vote to replace Trident.

I've always been too much of an optimist whilst writing dystopic narratives. Perhaps with Blair out of the way, we have a window of opportunity to work with more chance of success for a fairer, more peaceful and environmentally sane world.

What's it feel like from where you sit?

Doodling fun

There's a remarkable web business dedicated to selling first editions of books. Their gimmick is they get authors to sign the books and doodle in them.

Needless to say, it's called Doodled Books.

Its manager, Claire Main, asked me to doodle in 20 copies of Hybrids, which she put on the web site. They sold out in a week at £19.99 each.

Now Claire wants more of them. Very nicely, she says "I think you have huge potential" and all the ones I do in the future will go "on the Harry Potter pages as we are getting loads of hits due to the next book coming out and it would be a shame for you to miss out on the hype."

She's going to send me batches of 20, and each book will have a different doodle and slogan. I've promised her that as long as she keeps sending them, I'll keep defacing them!

You can view the sold out doodles here.

An immense number of ideas

Isn't it nice when a book reviewer gets exactly what you're up to?

So it is with Anthony Brown, reviewing Hybrids in Starburst 351. He says:

"Hybrids may have the length and style of a Young Adult book, and two teenage heroes to go with them, but Thorpe doesn't pull punches with the satirical ideas he packs in.

"From detention without trial and three-layer registering of Creep victims that smack of control orders, through a Centre for Genetic Rehabilitation that reflects Guantanamo, to HIV-echoing conspiracy theory accusations against pharmaceutical companies.

"Thorpe approaches distinctly adult ideas in an approachable hero-led way, as Johnny and rich-kid fellow Creep victim Kestrella become the gurus of the Hybrid Resistance Army whose existence allows the hardline Deputy Prime Minister to call for harsh measures for dangerous times.

"Over the mere 296 large print pages, Thorpe packs in an immense number of ideas, shaking up the situations in surprising ways time and time again."

"An immense number of ideas" in only 296 easy-to-read pages for only £5.99. Who says you can't get a bargain these days?!

Aesthetic offsetting service: Web site design

Today I will solve two problems for you at the same time.

Problem 1: Too many web sites are hideous. Let's face it, how many do you click onto an then have to click away instantly because even the subliminal glimpse of them will ruin the rest of your day?

Problem 2: There are too many excellent artists in the world who struggle to survive because the art world loves to lavish its attention on just a few superstars who command ridiculous prices and who, anyway, are quite frankly past their sell-by dates - I mean, please move over Emin, Hurst, etc.

My solution: Following the success of our Fart Neutral scheme, which neutralised the methane emissions from your bum and, indeed Cheat Neutral - the hilarious film about which was produced by a colleague in this office - which neutralises your love cheating - we offer:

Aesthetic Offsetting

If you are aesthetically challenged and have a butt-ugly web site with flashing animations, clashing colours and unreadable fonts, send us some money and we'll give it to struggling artists that we know.

People like Clare Maynard, Merchant Merchant and Cheryl Huntbach.

This is a voluntary scheme. Simply assess the aesthetic value of your profile on the following scale and send me the appropriate amount:

1. Mildly irritating - £5/$10


2. Frankly disturbing - £10/$20


3. Pass the sick bag - £20/$40


4. I'm going to take a sledgehammer to my monitor - £50/$100


5. Somebody call the men in white before I go on a random rampage or fall on this Samurai Katana sword - £500/$1000

If we find that a voluntary scheme is not sufficient, we'll just have to lobby the W3C to get tough and make it mandatory.

Artists!

If you think you deserve to be a beneficiary of this scheme, get in touch!

Mundane SF

Perhaps you've already heard of Mundane SF? If not you may like to know that it's a "new" idea being touted by a guest editor of Interzone, the UK's foremost SF mag.

When my novel Hybrids was published I was bemused to learn that it was to be marketed as science fiction. Somewhat naively I didn't think I was writing SF.

It's obvious in retrospect, but the elements they think of as SF I thought were metaphorical. After all, is Kafka an SF writer?

My agent says that is what I must continue to write. This is fine by me. Except the thing is I don't read all the stuff people normally call SF - space opera etc.

Now I find there's Mundane SF, which Hybrids possibly fits into. This is because Hybrids, like MundaneSF, contains no faster than light travel, psi power, aliens, computer consciousness, teleportation or time travel.

The following usual suspects form some of my touchstones - Kafka, Orwell, Burroughs, Dick, Ballard. Perhaps they are 'Mundane SF'?

My reservation is that the term 'Mundane' seems a put-off - as if the subgenre isn't interesting.

HarperCollins thinks that SF will be the next big thing for kids - we've had enough fantasy.

I hope so. I plan to keep writing this kind of SF.

InterZone is now accepting submissions for their Mundane SF issue. I've submitted a short story. I'm not at all sure if it's SF, but really, why do we need labels at all?

> Want to read more?
> MundaneSF Blog

Beware, Canada and Australia

Creep is coming... spreading over the globe like a stain...

Reaching out from the initial contamination point: London...

We tried to contain it but failed. The quarantine was broken by Persons Unknown. Their motive may have been greed, desire or just pure randomness.

You'll never know. That's the nature of modern terror. The sheer uncertainty.

One thing is certain: Hybrids will be published in Canada and Australia on July 1.

Be afraid. Be ever so slightly afraid.

Feel that itch? You just have to scratch it. Immunity is not guaranteeable.

A Hybrids role play game

It had to happen. Someone has started a Hybrids role play game.

Er, guys, you don't get it do you? You're supposed to use the computers LESS.

We are becoming hybrids part 2

[continuing last week's train of thought]

The whole trend [of endlessly replacing consumer technology with newer versions] is driven by business and 'lust for the new' which we have been conditioned into.

If I can take you back to where it started - end of World War I. Soldiers back from the war, here and in the US. After the rebuild, most households had the basic necessities, and manufacturers were worried that they would go out of business as their markets dried up.

At this point, a nephew of Sigmund Freud began using Freuds's ideas about the unconscious to design advertising campaigns that made people believe for the first time that it was not enough just to have a washing machine, but that the washing machine had to be aligned to their sense of self-image.

It was he who made it ok for women to smoke, for example, by photographing some glamorous women smoking at the end of a Women's Emancipation march in New York in the early '20s. This associated in women's minds freedom with smoking. Of course smoking is addictive so they weren't being freed at all. Glamour is a smokescreen for sordid reality. This is what my short story, Perfection, posted last year here, was about.

Fashion is the supreme example of this. It's not enough to wear clothes, but the clothes must say everything about you and you don't want to seem out of date and you have to look cool. Fashion has existed for much longer, but the concept was in the 20th century systematically applied to other products.

Manufacturers love this as it means that markets will never dry up as long as people remain insecure... and their advertising makes sure that they do remain insecure.

Innovation is the other side of this. You have to buy the latest phone and computer after a few years because your old one, even if it works perfectly, will no longer be compatible with everyone else's. Some analogue products work better or are more appropriate than their digital counterparts (watches, radios), but the strong current towards convergence is sweeping them or has swept them all aside.

So the waste mountains pile up, and we ae actually running out of the natural elements which are used in these products. Last week's New Scientist looked at all these metals - such as iridium, galiium, etc, - and found that most will run out in our lifetime. Perhaps human ingenuity will come up with something to replace them, but it does demonstrate graphically that the corporate-driven growth and pace of change is - to use that over-used and tired word - unsustainable. It has severe limits.

We don't like limits. We like freedom. But we rush headlong into a tangle of self-delusory madness and the very opposite of freedom, because we don't realise how, by imagining that we can buy freedom with every new product, we are actually increasing our dependency on ties that will really constrain us.

One constraint I am concerned with is this human-hybrid tie-in with technology. We are/will be unable to function without it. And how many of us understand it? - forced to use (as in your case Sharon) - or even hypnotised by (as in your friend) - the glitter; uncomprehending (if I can say so without sounding patronising) of the specialists who invented and designed it - who seem almost a different breed of human.

'Consumers' cruise the shopping malls of the developed world on their days off, looking for the next fix, using text messages to alert their friends. Elsewhere, one billion people in the world live in slums and own next to nothing.

We are in the last days. I'm sorry, I never wanted to be a doomsayer.

The Changes

I've just come across a tv series and novel trilogy from the '70s which I didn't know of before, with some similarities of theme to Hybrids. Does anyone remember it?

The Changes was a British children's science fiction television serial filmed in 1973 and first broadcast in 1975 by the BBC. In the first episode, ordinary people smashed ordinary objects in fits of seeming madness and this apparently made a great impact on its young audience.

The Changes posits a Britain in which the population have mysteriously rebelled against modern technology, destroyed all modern machinery and reverted back to a pre-industrial age.

The madness is triggered by a sound emitted from electricity pylons.

Even the words for modern inventions became taboo - 'car', 'tractor', 'electricity', 'toaster', 'pylon', etc. Just to mention them brings on the noise and the uncontrollable anger against machines again. These items of modern technology are described by people, including the central character Nicky, as cursed.

At one point the main character in the series, Nicky Gore, is asked whether it will induce the noise to start a blacksmith's forge. She asks, "where will you get the iron from?" On hearing there is plenty of scrap lying around the farm (obviously a sensible bit of recycling) she announces that the forge will probably not invoke the noise. So the forge goes ahead. But bicycles are sadly trashed.

Its theme echoes the adult drama series Survivors (1975) in which a small group of British people attempt to survive the decimation of the world's population by disease. This itself is reminiscent of 'The Memoirs of a Survivor' by Doris Lessing (1974), made into a film with Julie Christie. The preoccupation with this theme at the time may have been due to the oil shortage and other environmental and nuclear scares going on, with parallels to our own time.

The Changes was directed by John Prowse.

The TV series was freely adapted by Anne Home from a trilogy of novels by Peter Dickinson. The series took most of its material from The Weathermonger which, together with Heartsease and The Devil's Children has recently been reissued in a single volume in the UK.

You can read more and buy The Changes on Tony Gosling's web site - this is a private site. The BBC have not re-issued it for contractual reasons.

We are becoming hybrids

Sherry Turkle is a clinical psychologist, author and professor of the sociology of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She worries that new technologies like instant messaging, Wi-Fi and cellphones are transforming human psychology.

In an article this week in the New Scientist she goes further to worry that this same technology is gradually turning us into cyborgs.

Naturally, I share this concern.

Sherry runs seminars at MIT on 'Technology and Self - how our sense of self is changing as a result of our interactions with technology'.

These have led to three edited collections, being published by the MIT Press, on the relationships between things and thinking. The first, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, was published in April.

Eleven years ago she wrote: "When I landed at MIT in 1976, I was struck on day two by two things—that my students had what I considered eroticised relationships with their computers, which had an intensity, a holding power... it was compelling. It was not addiction, but it was something very powerful and it was completely new to me.

"And secondly, the way they use computer language where I would have used psychoanalytic language to talk about the self. I thought this was fascinating. For example, they say "Don't interrupt me, I have to clear my buffer", or "It's not a Freudian slip, it's an information processing error."

I have noticed the same response in myself.

The mind controls the body - mind over matter. As our thinking is changed by technology, and our bodies are distorted by using technology, so we recreate our bodies in the image of technology.

Sherry says this is not an addiction (or wasn't 30 years ago). I believe it is now. Anyone who has tried to get a child or teenager to come off a computer or watch less tv will agree.

She is right to say that it is also eroticised.

The first technology to be eroticised was the car. The most eroticised artefact now is the mobile phone, followed by the car and the MP3 player.

What does eroticised mean? That the technology's use triggers a state of arousal and anticipation, and produces attempts through whatever means to incite those feelings.

This is a response below conscious level. It becomes almost instinctive. Computer use, like driving, becomes an extension of our selves and incorporated in our dreams. It becomes desirable and necessary of and for itself.

SF stories of the past foretold that machines would take over. They never dreamt that this would not be by deliberate machine-led conspiracy but by an insidious process of designers producing desirable objects for profit-driven corporations, that use the tricks of marketeers to hook into our psychologies.

This drives an iterative process resulting in consumers becoming more and more wedded to successive generations of better-targeted products.

This process is akin to natural selection. Which depends partly on sex.

The erotic relationship demands consummation. At this point we have surrendered to the masters, the purveyors, the manufacturers, the corporations who are technologies' pimps.

We have surrendered our self-control and let go of the link to 200,000 years, or 99.9%, of our species history, when everything humans related to, and were part of, were biological (natural) ecosystems.

Now, at this moment in our species' development - as we are radically destroying or modifying these ecosystems, through mass extinctions, climate change, and the addition of 100,000 new chemicals - we are becoming intimate with technological ecosystems, without any idea of the consequences...

We are becoming hybrids.

Beneath the table of the 'gods'

Yesterday was peaceful at Rostock, where the G8 titans do battle. Good photos in the German papers today, thousands of protestors with muitlcoloured flags wandering through fields to get to the fence, police and heicopters in the background.

I think if I had time I would have gotten up there. Glad though to see that the thing is not passing off without protest. Attac seem to be getting the most coverage and all sorts of people are joining them, even some CDU and CSU politicans here - well, one or two.

But I still can't make out what exactly Attac politics are beyond asking our leaders, the world bank and the corporations to be nicer - which is a bit like asking monkeys not to steal nuts ....

In my cynical moments I see it as the standard bi-yearly circus attendant to the world's giants, who are pleased that they receive attention, but otherwise regard the actions of the great unwashed as beneath their dignity to acknowledge.

Like pilgrims following an impatient and wilful God the protesters send their prayers and offerings with rituals and rites handed down by the high priests of their NGO churches, in the hope of attracting a favour.

But these gods obey their own laws, have their own masters, and when their actions do coincide with the will of their followers it is usually only down to coincidence.

Nevertheless dutiful followers must maintain their faith, for you never know what dire fate may fall were it to fail. Besides the churches (NGOs) need the offerings they donate to maintain and spread their influence, for secretly their leaders desire to be gods themselves...

"If I ruled the world, all problems would be solved..."
(co-written with Frank)

Win a signed copy of Hybrids!

Competition reminder. Only three days to go to win three signed copies of Hybrids.

To enter, please answer the following questions, and email them to me:

1. What is the secret at the middle of the Centre for Genetic Rehabilitation?
2. How can you make me happy?
3. If you were to become a hybrid, what would you merge with and why?

The answers to the first two questions are in the book!

The competition closes on May 31, and I will repost this during the month for newcomers.

the competition is open till the end of May. On June 1st I'll look at all the entries and select a shortlist of those which answer the first two questions correctly.

The last question is a tie-breaker, so of that shortlist the three answers to question 3 which I like the best will win the signed copies.

I'm afraid the competition is not open to relatives or employees of HarperCollins.

Good luck!

"A stunningly clever novel" - The Times

With modesty I record my first review - I'm so relieved it's a good one. Amanda Craig in today's Times looks at it in the context of other titles about technology and children. Hybrids is reserved for the highest praise.

Comparing it to Kevin Brookes' Being she writes: "David Thorpe's Hybrids takes the cyborg idea even further, with a stunningly clever novel that won a nation-wide competition run by its publisher, HarperCollins, and Saga magazine.

"A dystopian version of Blairite Britain is drawn with economy and wit.... Johnny's cynical, off-beat narrative voice, and Kestrella's hopeful, tender naivety are both well done."

For her it has "a disappointing climax" (I guess critics have to complain about something - I wonder what she expected?) but "Hybrids will get boys (and girls) talking and thinking about a brave new world without technological stimuli". I hope so.

>>
Read the full review.

Book signing Thursday May 10 Aberystwyth

Before it was announced that Hybrids had won the Saga/HarperCollins competition, some local teenagers including my son Dion wanted to turn it into a podcast.
Dion recorded and edited half of the 26 chapters and produced them, including writing the signature music.
Now it has won, HarperCollins are advising us to postpone the podcast, but the actors are doing readings at signings. The next one is:
Aberystwyth: Waterstones, Great Darkgate Street, 10 May at 5.30-6.30pm.

The actors:

Kestrella Chu is read by Izzy Rabey:

Johnny Online is read by Peter Horne:

Dion Thorpe, the producer:



Izzy is acting in King Lear at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre later in the evening.

Win a signed copy of Hybrids!

It's Hybrids publication day - May 1.

To celebrate I'm running a competition all through May giving away three signed copies of Hybrids.

To enter, please answer the following questions, and email them to me:

1. What is the secret at the middle of the Centre for Genetic Rehabilitation?
2. How can you make me happy?
3. If you were to become a hybrid, what would you merge with and why?

The answers to the first two questions are in the book!

The competition closes on May 31, and I will repost this during the month for newcomers.

Good luck!

The second review of Hybrids

The Bookbag, a website about new books gives a very good summary of the plot and a positive review, with one irritating nitpick of the type "well if only I'd thought of this, I would have done it better". But you didn't, Jill.

However, it's the reviewer's children who give it the best response, especially when Jill says "my sons and I - even my younger son, the notorious reluctant reader - fairly galloped through it in our rush to find out what happened at the end".

It's the kids' reactions that matter, after all.

The older son noted, "perceptive as ever, that he had thought Hybrids was going to be 'just another' book all about how we should be nice to someone that's different, but it wasn't really about that at all".

She likes the double narrative strategy: "while I don't usually like a book to have multiple narrators, I enjoyed it here. It gave a double perspective on the disease and it also made the love affair between the two much more accessible to pre-adolescent readers."

"We also liked the way the book ended on more questions, not neat solutions."

The summary is: "A sharp, strong and tense debut novel."

The official launch date is 1 May, but copies are trickling into bookshops now.

"Essential reading for the cyberspace generation"

Hybrids has effectively been published. I have the first copy sent to me today, and it looks great.

The official publication date has been moved forward to 1st May - a lovely day to be published. It used to be Labour Day and all the unions would be marching with their banners celebrating socialism and workers' solidarity.

Copies will start appearing in shops during April though and I'd be interested to hear when anyone receives their Amazon order. You can pre-order it from there now via the link on my profile, but I'd rather you supported your local bookshop if you have one at all.

It's good to see the paper is FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certified to prove it didn't harm any virgin rainforests!

I would say "Currently reading Hybrids" but MySpace doesn't yet list it. I suppose that's because it's American and it won't appear there till later.

We are betraying our children

The UK is bottom of a league table for child well-being across 21 industrial countries, a report by Unicef says today.

This comes as no surprise. Children are ignored, their views unlistened to, their needs unmet.

Instead children are subjected to a barrage of conflicting pressures from educational to commercial, while their parents ae encouraged to extend their teenage behaviour into middle age.

Their conceptions about their bodies are attacked by deskbound and sedentary activities on the one hand and commercially driven fashionistic images on the other.

At the same time they are given few opportunities to experience the joy of being in their bodies - through activities, physical work, play, sport - and affection.

Significantly, over half of UK children report that they can't trust their peers. This is scandalous - the worst of all the statistics. They are divided amongst themselves by the competitive nature of these pressures upon them, whether this is to be smart, dumb, aggressive or cool.

Do we ask children what they want and need and respond properly? Not nearly enough. Instead, we live in a society where the disparity in income between the poorest and richest creates envy, personal unhappiness, stress, and crime. The countries where the wealth gap is smallest have the best overall sense of wellbeing.

In short, our priorities are topsy turvy and we are betraying our children - despite all the New Labour 'interventions' and misguided 'nanny state'.

This is why I'm glad I moved out of London to this part of Wales to bring up the kids, and that they have been members of the Woodcraft Folk (misleading name, great ethos) all their lives.

It's a theme at the core of most of the books I plan to write for kids in the future because I feel so strongly about it.

Keep Britain Normal! - the rap

I'm working on a rap to go with Hybrids that we'll put up on myspace nearer publication day. Right now I'm looking for teenagers who want to evolve and record the music and words. It can be performed at signings etc. Here's what we've got so far:

Keep Britain Normal!
- Hybrids out! Hybrids out!
Keep Britain Normal!
- Hybrids Hybrids Hybrids out!

Banish strange diseases
Chuck out the wicked
Except for coughs and sneezes
We don't want no sickies!
Anything unusual
Gotta be reported
Watch the technology
Keep yourself sorted!

Keep Britain Normal!
- Hybrids out! Hybrids out!
Keep Britain Normal!
- Hybrids Hybrids Hybrids out!

Laptop ipod digital gizmos
Gameboy lameboy Stole his charisma
Mobile Camera Never been the same
Since I pressed that button
Now I'm self-cutting
Got a DNAberration Electronic nation
Wired up blanked out Missing generation
Creep! Creep!
Panic on the streets
Paranoia is what greets
Me everywhere I go
No one wants to know

Keep Britain Normal!
- Hybrids out! Hybrids out!
Keep Britain Normal!
- Hybrids Hybrids Hybrids out!

Hunted Shunted on the run to Nowhere
Nothing's fair No peace
No hiding place from the Gene Police
Just cos I'm different
What's your frame of reference?
Help me Save me
Give me salvation
There's no cure but
Genetic Rehabilitation

Keep Britain Normal!
- Hybrids out! Hybrids out!
Keep Britain Normal!
- Hybrids Hybrids Hybrids out!

Pre-order Hybrids on Amazon! And new cover info!

Great news! You can pre-order Hybrids on Amazon now! Just click on the following link and you can preorder it for £4.79 - a 20% discount on the cover price of £5.99!

>> Buy David Thorpe's Hybrids on Amazon UK. What are you waiting for?!

New cover image

And I've just received from my editor the latest image for the front cover design with Johnny Online's face changed, as previously mentioned on the last Hybrids update blog entry. Do you think it's an improvement?


Funny how both his face and mine on my profile are backlit. Do you think Harpers are trying to tell me something?

The row over gay adoption

I've got three things to ask the churches about this stupid row:

1. How many gay priests are there?
2. There are ten commandments and last time I looked none of them said "You shall not give children to gays to be adopted" or even: "You shall not be gay". Why don't we hear you making a fuss about other commandments, like the one about adultery, or "you shall not covet your neighbour's wife, ox, donkey, or anything that belongs to them", or: "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour"? Why don't we hear you banging on about the Sermon on the Mount precepts, especially the one about "turning the other cheek", or "the meek shall inherit the earth"? Or even "love thy neighbour"?
3. Which is better, a kid being in a loving home with gay parents, or languishing in an institution? Is it the latter because you can abuse them there?

Finally:

• Why don't you just go back to your medieval torture chambers where you belong?

[note on the book cited below - it mentions the torture chamber in the Tower, where the Protestant chief inquisitor invented the rack to torture Catholics as painfully and long as possible. Nice one, God lovers.]

I'm currently reading : Her Majesty's Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage
By Stephen Budiansky.

Technorati Tags: Religion; News; Children;

Hybrids: Progress report

With less than four months to go now to publication of Hybrids, the proofreading has been completed, and happily my editor, Stella, has accepted 99% of my textual corrections and abrasions. I've submitted my acknowledgements and a dedication.

Although you've seen and commented on the draft cover - thanks again - there'll be a final one soon, which hopefully incorporates all the feedback on what main character Johnny's face looks like (not a monitor, but using the 'plastic flexible displays' (there's a video here). I had amended all descriptons in the book to reflect this, but that hadn't got through to the artist. I expect this technology will be common in the future. I'm now waiting to see what the designer comes up with and will post the results here as soon as I get them for your feedback.

I've told Stella and the PR people about my operation, and they are drawing up a publicity schedule.

I am due to present the concept of a Hybrids TV series to BBC commissioning editors on Feb 22 and yesterday took part in an excellent training workshop for mid-Wales media types provided free by the generous Welsh Assembly Government on presentation skills.

This is all fun, but a distraction from writing. Nevertheless I am now in the swing of Hybrids II, with 12,000 words under my belt.

Just remember - watch the machines, for you can be sure they are watching you!

Technorati Tags: Novels; Writing; Fiction;

Should Britain have war capability?

Take Blair and Iraq. The people told him not to go to war. He ignored them. The people of Iraq are now much worse off. Last week he said he still wants Britain to have full defence capablity and be able to make more wars. He also wants a new generation of Trident (WMD) too.

Let's imagine a child. This child wants to play with a dangerous toy. You say "Not a good idea," but he does so anyway, and burns the neighbour's house down. Then he says "Want to play more with it."

Would you say the boy was stupid? Would you take the toy away?

If the boy was a man, would you say that describing his behaviour as psychopathic was accurate?

What's the difference between this boy/man's behaviour and Blair's?

The best book about Taoism I've found

The best book on Taoism i've ever found, in my humble opinion, is now all online, courtesy of Google - a good thing as it's out of print.

Tao and Method: A Reasoned Approach to the Tao Te Ching By Michael LaFargue

Should I have this operation?

I have to decide whether to have an operation.

The purpose is to help me walk properly again and prevent possible future trauma, like whiplash, paralysing me.

A vertebrae in the neck is pressing on the spinal cord, interfering with the signal to the right leg, causing it not to work properly.

The operation involves removing this vertebrae and replacing it with a titanium mesh filled with bits of the crushed bone, and securing it with a titanium plate and screws to the vertebrae either side.

I would be off work for two months.

My book Hybrids is out in May. There will be interviews & signings and of course I don't want the operation to interfere with this.

The book is partly about (in my mind) disability and responses to it.

I was born with mild cerebral palsy which has led to this condition.


For the first ten years of my life
I tried very hard with my body,

For the next eight years I hated it, hated it.

For the next twenty years I was in denial, denial, denial.

But ever since then I can't avoid it, avoid it, avoid it.

My body bites back
It reminds me who I am
I'm fragile, so fragile
But I want to be strong

I am familiar with the surgeon's scalpel
With the physio machines
With the assistive aids

It's always been true
That if I tried that much harder
I'd make a difference.
Self-improvement.

But now things have changed, changed
I don't have that power, no power

I have to make friends with the men in masks
i have to place trust in their interventions, inventions, intentions.

What do I care if there's a risk?
I've always been impulsive, daredevil, crazy
If you cross the road it's usually less safe
Than an afternoon spent in theatre number two.

Perhaps after four years the chance to walk, walk, walk
Like you and you and you
Is worth more than a legful of stuck fear.

But the wall of pain
is not easy to approach.

Can we learn this simple lesson?

2006 saw the end of the American neo-con dream (as the BBC's Paul Reynolds describes here).

The idea of American domination of the planet based on military might has foundered at the first hurdle -- a tiny, poor country called Iraq. The world has paid a huge cost for the massive mistake made by these extreme rightwing conservatives, who have pulled Tony Blair in their wake. We can only breathe a big sigh of relief, and another huge sigh at the idea that we all have to pick up the pieces and try to carry on from where they began back before 9/11 and the Bush administration's criminal (because based on electoral fraud) rise to power.

I just want to underline one simple lesson to be learned from this unsavoury episode in global history. It is so simple that even a child understands it, and yet some politicians find it terribly hard to get their heads around.

It's just this: opposition breeds opposition. Conflict breeds conflict.

Cast your minds back to the days following 9/11 and remember the global outpouring of sympathy for America. Never has most of the world been so united in such support for the American people. Briefly, there was an idea that out of the carnage of that attack, could come a realisation that to prevent such things happening again, one could talk with one's enemies, negotiate one's way out of a crisis. That by talking to the administrations of Afghanistan, Pakistan and other neighbouring countries, one could isolate Al Qaeda and the Taliban. America at that point was in a position to call in a lot of favours. It seemed to me briefly possible to obtain a non-violent solution to the problem of Osama bin Laden.

Instead, the Bush administration wanted revenge. The Neo-cons like Donald Rumsfeld saw an opportunity not just to attack Afghanistan, but to target their number one enemy, Iraq. In a few weeks, all that sympathy and goodwill in most of the world was squandered. Hatred of America began to spread like a stain. The unjustifiable level of its violence was used as an excuse to foment anti-American activity -- and by extension, anti-British activity -- in many parts of the world. We now know what a disaster the whole episode was.

Many people saw this coming right at the start -- I'm afraid I am one of them, but it gives me no pleasure to think "I told you so" in these circumstances.

It's a simple fact; I say it again: opposition breeds opposition. Aggression and breeds aggression.

For example, just remember the Second World War. When the Nazis bombed the hell out of England, did we roll over and say okay we surrender? Does any country adopt that reaction when attacked? Of course not, they unite against a common enemy. So why is it that an attacker thinks that when they attack another country they will surrender? America may be the mightiest military power on the planet. They may have by far the largest military budget. But that counts for nothing when your enemy adopts different tactics.

Where do we learn how to deal properly and sensibly with opposition? I know where I learnt -- from martial art philosophy. Taoism, t'ai chi, kung fu -- they all explain how the soft overcomes the hard. How the hard and rigid can be easily broken, but the soft absorbs the shock and bounces back.

The bigger they are the harder they fall. Case in point -- America.

Judo explains how to use the power of your enemy against themselves. T'ai chi demonstrates how you meet opposition by moving out of the way, offering no resistance for the enemy, and then with a minimal effort help them on their way using the momentum of their own attack to topple them or let them tumble to the other side of the room.

In warfare such tactics require thought instead of brute strength. It requires wisdom and patience, not the arrogant, self-centred, narrowminded and ideologically driven madness of the neo-conservatives.

The only battle worth fighting is for hearts and minds.

To create loyalty and friendship you behave with generosity and therefore inspire thanks. You lead by example. If your democracy is so great then it will produce a well-balanced, great and prosperous country, and others will want to emulate it. How, through behaving like a bully, can you expect anyone to be persuaded that you are right?

Why should anyone want to adopt a political system which contains such injustice and inequity as that demonstrated by America nowadays? Many of its people are poor, illiterate, and live in daily terror of violence from gun crime. Hmm, that sounds a bit like Iraq.

What the world needs is not a single superpower. It did not need two superpowers. America did not win the Cold War, Russia lost it. Soviet communism and American imperialism both now belong to the past and deserve to be buried there, along with Nazism.

My hope for 2007 is that we can begin to put this behind us and move towards greater global harmony.

Tools for Tanzania

Wanted: Tools for Tanzania
We've just had a flying visit from Joseph Sekiku, who runs Fadeco, a grassroots development project in NW Tanzania. This remote area of Tanzania is informally twinned with the Dyfi Valley where i live.

I'm chair of Friends of Fadeco, which i and some friends started eight years ago after I visited the region and met Joseph.

Joseph is a beautiful man after my own heart, a total inspiration, modest and visionary, and supremely resourceful as Africans have to be.

He is one of three people in an area the size of Wales with a population of 500,000 that have a degree. Most are illiterate and subsistence growers.

I am fully aware of the dangers and ambiguities of much so-called 'development', but we support Joseph's work because it is appropriate, sensitive, and necessary.

In particular we are now supporting the building and fitting out of a training centre - The Eden Centre for Sustainability. They need equipment to train people so they can become self-reliant, and gain an income.

Tools for Self-Reliance is making a delivery to the area in January 2007. We want to get as many tools as possible on this trip. The tools they need are:

Sewing machines: treadles, hand or even electric; carpentry sets: saws, planes, etc; mechanics tools: spanners, car jacks, ladders, wielding tools, soldering tools; masonry tools: brick making machines, trowels, squares, tape measures. etc. A 4X4 motor cycle which can pull a small trailer.

Please donate anything you can.

If you're local perhaps you can leave them at in Machynlleth: Peter Harper/Andy Rowland's houses (21 Heol Pentrahedyn, Machynlleth) or Taliesin: Flic and Richard's /Temperance House or Corris: mine (Glanydon, by the bridge). Or we can pick them up. Someone can then take them all down to TFSR Crickhowell (Is anyone going that way in January?).

If you're not local, TFSR has many local branches. Or go to the FoF web site - link above - and join/make a donation.

We're also supporting a radio station - Joseph has just got a licence from the govt. If anyone has a transmitter, or can donate £1000 to buy one. This would allow the broadcasting of vital health and ecological information to an illiterate and rural population otherwise unreachable.

Thanks!

Origins of the modern Christmas

Why December 25? Because The Romans held a festival on December 25 called Natalis Solis Invicti which marked the birth day of a solar deity called Sol Invictus or Mithras. There's a beautiful temple of Mithras, in Merida, Extremadura, Spain.

Sol Invictus is Latin for The Sun Undefeated - as he survived the shortest day, the Winter Solstice.

In the Vatican is a 3rd century mural of Christ as Helios, the Sun God.

Who is Father Christmas? The traditional Father Christmas was neither a gift bringer, nor associated with children. He has his roots in Paganism.

By the time of the Anglo-Saxons in England (around the mid-5th century AD), it was customary for an elder man from the community to dress in furs and visit each dwelling.

At each house, in the guise of "Old Winter" (or "King Frost" or "King Winter"), he would be plied with food and drink before moving on to the next. It was thought he carried the spirit of the winter with him, and that the winter would be kind to anyone hospitable to Old Winter.

The tradition was strengthened when the Vikings invaded Britain (during the period from the late 8th century to the 11th century) and brought their own midwinter traditions with them; these involved the god Odin, traditionally represented as a portly, elderly man with a white beard.

The custom was still kept in Medieval England, after a decline during the Commonwealth under the Puritans.

Christmas itself was banned by Puritans between 1647 and 1660.

The custom became widespread again during the Restoration period. Father Christmas was also a significant character in Christmas Mummers' Plays.

A book dating from the time of the Commonwealth, The Vindication of Christmas, depicts Father Christmas advocating a merry, alcoholic Christmas and being cynical about the charitable motives of the ruling Puritans.

During the Victorian era, he was merged with "Old Winter", "Old Christmas" or "Old Father Christmas", and the charitable Saint Nicholas, a Greek Orthodox Saint (or Dutch one, depending on the version). This character did give gifts to children.

In 1863, a caricaturist for Harper's Weekly named Thomas Nast gave Santa a "flowing set of whiskers" and dressed him "all in fur, from his head to his foot." Nast's 1866 montage entitled "Santa Claus and His Works" established Santa as a maker of toys; an 1869 book of the same name collected new Nast drawings with a poem by George P. Haddon identified the North Pole as Santa's home.

In 1931 Coca Cola helped popularise this already existing, portly, sack-wielding image of Santa in a successful advertising campaign, but did not create the image, as they would have you believe.

Perhaps it's time to return to the roots of Christmas, and away from the modern consumer frenzy, which is hardly compatible with either Christianity, paganism, or sustainability.

How scientists are stupid

What is it about scientists that they never learn? Isn't the scientific method supposed to be about: theory -> prediction -> observation -> evaluation -> new theory? The so-called falsifiability method?

But here they are in the latest edition of the New Scientist - a special half-century birthday edition - all lining up to tell you all the wonderful things they think are going to happen in their own specialist fields in the next half-century. The leaders in their respective fields wax lyrically about everything from unlimited supplies of transplantable human organs to invisible technology with the potential to create life on other planets, from information sharing between parallel universes to robotic scientists, from artificial life mimicking human consciousness to the death of religion, and whole body replacement.

It all seems strangely reminiscent of the Sixties, when scientists envisaged a future where we would by now have conquered Mars and Venus, be living a life of leisure serviced by robots, and flying around in our own personal hover cars. Instead we are living in a world which is for my money even worse than any of the pessimistic dystopias created by science fiction writers ever since then.

Of course it's not science that is to blame for this necessarily. It's the application of scientific discovery and technology by politicians, society and economists. We are creating the largest amount of species extinction in the shortest amount of time since the asteroid that wiped out all the dinosaurs. We are sitting on a massive population explosion in which most people don't have access to clean water and enough to eat let alone can afford a whole body transplant when they get ill. We cannot eradicate war and the arms trade. We are causing irreparable harm to the planet's climate.

It's astonishing how optimistic the scientists are. Don't they ever poke their heads out of their own research cubicles to look at the world around them? Don't they learn from experience? Isn't that what science is supposed to be about?

None of them even mention climate change, biodiversity loss, the lack of clean water supplies, eradicating war, resource depletion or a hundred other problems affecting the world's poor or the environment.

Are these scientists really any better than the leaders of monotheistic religious cults who themselves never look at the practical effect of preaching that theirs is the one true religion - while claiming it to be morally irreproachable?

Perhaps if scientists ruled the world things might be a little different, but they don't. Instead we keep electing people who don't know much about anything except how to persuade us that they know best and convince us to believe in their vapid promises. We listen to people who appeal to our short-term and narrow interests.

I'm glad that scientists don't rule the world, since they have little idea of the value of the imagination. They are far too specialist to see the big picture.

Perhaps our only possibility of being saved by science is that scientists will one day create a machine that is capable of computing all the possibilities and mapping out for us the best of all possible worlds.

But even if this was possible, I'm sure that nobody would trust it sufficiently to do what it says.

The manufacture of terror

Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller of MI5 has made the unusual step of going public to say that MI5 knows of 30 terror plots threatening the UK and is keeping 1,600 individuals under surveillance.

Do we believe her?

The threat from this quarter is certainly higher than it was before the asinine invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

But 30 plots? Here are some reasons why we should treat her remarks with some scepticism.

1. She made it at the same time as asking for more government funds, and government departments always want more funds. And yet MI5 is already twice as big as it was pre-9-11. But do we want to live in a paranoid state? Does the potential threat to a few individuals really justify this level of stress for the whole population?

2. Eliza talks of future threats such as dirty bombs, biological weapons and other horrors, designed to make us rush into her protective arms for safety. I'm sorry, I've heard it before, and even if it may be true, again, the potential threat doesn't make me want to live in the kind of country Eliza wants to create.

3. The timing of her remark comes just a few days after Dhiren Barot was sentenced to at least 40 years in jail for planning a series of attacks, for maximum effect. Fear distorts judgement, and she knows that.

4. An example: over 1,000 arrests have been made under anti-terrorism since 9/11. Out of those, 27 have been found guilty of which only nine have been Muslims. Less than 1% of those arrested.

5. Fear breeds fear. We are in danger of helping to create - as we already have done by our meddling - itself caused by faulty intelligence - more of the very thing we fear.

Let's try and learn from history, get some perspective.

The origin of MI5

Modern Britain began in the 16th century with the foundation of a Protestant state. At that time the majority of the British population was Catholic. Lord Burghley and Francis Walsingham helped to found the secret service - today's MI5 - to protect this fledgling state from real and perceived Catholic plots and bolster the hegemony which they benefited from.

Yes, the motivation was religion and power.

At this time, wonderful innovations were introduced - such as torture on the rack to extort confessions, usually suspect, sanctioned for use by Queen ELizabeth and employed by one of the most perverted sadists ever to serve the British State, a man called Topcliffe.

Walsingham created a network of paid informers, dubious spies, encryption experts, forgers, shady double dealers, fanatics, criminals, businessmen wanting diplomatic help with deals in exchange for information, and agents provocateur, to gather information (or misinformation) about Catholic priests and their supporters at home and abroad, in order to persecute and prosecute them.

Many of these 'plots' were invented, manufactured or helped along for political ends. This eventually resulted in his entrapment of Queen Mary Stuart, and her execution.

There is no difference between the methods used then and now. They just seem to be more sophisticated. Then, as now, Burghley and Walsingham exaggerated the threats for their own purposes. They used all the techniques of modern spin for propaganda. They spread rumours to stir the population against Catholics.

Walsingham even proposed an alliance with Islamic Turkey against Catholic Spain before the Armada.

How things change - or not.

The enemy changed

Only twenty years ago the enemy was still Catholic - the IRA. How distant this seems now.

But there was another enemy in the '80s - so-called anarchists. I myself was allegedly one of these, and operated on the fringes of various activities in London. I saw first hand the absurd attempts of MI5 to infiltrate and spread scare stories about anarchist activities.

At one point an attempt was made to plant an agent in our collective. He was spotted straight away, so inept was he. Simultaneously it emerged that Greenpeace London's group - the one campaigning against McDonald's - contained more agents reporting on each other than it did real members.

Every so often a scare story about an anarchist plot to blow something up would appear in the press, which we knew was a silly season tactic, more to do with MI5's funding needs than reality.

How times have changed - or not.

Of course there is a threat - but mostly it's from misguided little-more-than-children. A simple change of foreign policy will nip most of it in the bud, don't we know.

So should we trust Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller?

I wouldn't trust MI5 further than I'd trust Tony Blair. Can I make it any clearer? I trust my cat more.

Mass graves of babies in Ireland

I met Barry Simner the other night at our local writers' group. He's a long-time tv scriptwriter. He said that he was researching a story in Ireland recently and came across two mass graves - 5000 bodies each - of babies, being dug up.

This is literally a buried scandal of Irish life... For various reasons - mostly to do with Catholicism of course - unbaptised, some possibly aborted, babies were secretly buried at a locally known spot out of town.

Everyone knew about them but 'officially' they did not exist - no one spoke of them. Presumably most towns have such spots.

As the Vatican is now considering abolishing limbo - the fantasy place where unbaptised babies' souls are alleged to reside for eternity - this topic is coming to the surface, again literally, in Irish discourse.

Parents, unable to grieve publicly for their lost children, need to be able to do so but have been prevented by a moralistic Church.

Another example of the anguish caused by a so-called compassionate religion.

Anybody have any more info on this?

Whose agenda is served?

Last Saturday the lead item on BBC News all day was the one about a BA air hostess suing her employer because as a 'devout Christian' she couldn't wear a cross openly at work.

There was so much newsworthy material around all day, including major riots in Chile that didn't even make the bottom rung of the news. How was it decided this should have top billing? Why? Who sets the agenda? We should be very worried.

People who are so monomaniacal about what they wear (like the teacher/hijab wearer the previous day, whom someone sensibly suggested should be fired) would be advised to have cognitive therapy to 'cure' them were they not claiming to be a member of a major religion.

As it is these attention-seekers are given the attention they crave, which only serves to inflame the siituation further, causing more with their type of mental disorder to come forward.

Politicians are required to 'declare their [commercial] interests' and disqualified if conflicts of interest arise. Any employee who is evangelical or fundementalist has a similar conflict of interest and should similarly be disqualified. There's no such thing as a 'higher calling' - it's actually a form of hallucination.

Praise for Orhan Pamuk

It is entirely appropriate that Orhan Pamuk has been awarded the 2006 Nobel prize for Literature.

I don't believe critics who say his comments on the Armenian genocide have been influential in his winning this prize.

I predicted a year ago he would one day get it. His work simply deserves it.

My Name is Red and Snow are among the best books I've ever read, and the former rivals novels like 100 Years of Solitude in its poetry, scope, multi-levelled effectiveness and ambition. Not to mention its enjoyablity.

He straddles the difficult terrain between east and west, Islam and Europe with imagination, courage and dignity.

I've seen him speak and exchanged a few words at the Hay Festival. A modest man with a thorough and complete approach to his work, who believes in truth and the power of literature to enlighten and have a positive influence. An example to all writers.

In literary and academic circles the announcement that he's become the first Turkish person ever to win a Nobel prize has been justifiably greeted with joy. "He is a representative of modern Turkey," said Cengiz Aktar, an academic in Istanbul. "He will probably now become the conscience of modern Turkey." Let's hope so.

Naturally he has his critics. Especially in a corrupt government that wants to have it both ways - to be 'European' and to abuse the powerless. More power to Orhan Pamuk.

Sad news, Terry jones is ill, gig is off

from Terry's agent:

"Bad news, I'm afraid. Terry has had to go into hospital for emergency surgery (actually it's next Friday) but post op will need other treatment. His consultant is saying it's best for him to cancel things for the next six months. I'm awfully sorry but I'm sure you understand. Keep my email and maybe sometime in the future....."

I've sent our best wishes to him. Thanks everyone. Sadly the gig is postponed indefinitely.

Monty Python Brian's Second Coming!

We've confirmed Sunday 7 January 2007 for monty Python's Terry Jones and Sue Jones-Davies, stars of 'Life of Brian', to be at the Machynlleth Tabernacl and discuss the film and see a screening to raise money for Fadeco. A big thank you to both of them. I don't think they've ever met since making the film, though Sue's made a few more films and is now ... my yoga teacher!

This is the biggest fundraising event Friends of Fadeco has attempted and a big opportunity to raise our profile. [If you're not a member please join by going to that web page and downloading the form!]

It might be nice to have a get-together afterwards at someone's house in Mach as well, to which we could invite Terry and Sue, to chat more informally, with a small buffet. I wonder if anyone wants to volunteer their house and we could all chip in with the buffet?

Could we have a get-together to plan the event, and who wants to do what? I'd like to start on publicity now, to maximise turnout and awareness. Could we meet on Monday 16th in the White Lion at 7.30? Is there anyone else as well - other FoFs - eg in Taliesin - that you could tell about this please? Feel free to pass this on.

With Pete Telfer [of documentary production company the Pixel Foundry] we are hoping to film the event and cooking up an idea for a documentary programme where we might fly Terry and Sue out to Tanzania to see what's really going on there. We're working on the idea 'The Second Coming of Brian'. What would Brian think if he came back 2000 years later and saw the mess people had made of His legacy?

We've suggested the idea to Terry's agent and I'm waiting to hear back.

Hybrids proof copies mailed out

Hundreds of uncorrected proof copies of Hybrids have just been mailed out.

Cover blurb

Are you...

• A slave to your computer?


• Welded to your mobile phone?


• Joined at the hip to your iPod?

Maybe, one day, you will be...

Johnny and Kestrella are hybrids, victims of 'Creep', a virus whiuch cauases sufferers to merge with frequently-used items of technology.

As hysteria grips the nation, they live in fear of being rounded up and sent to the mysterious Centre for Genetic Rehabilitation, never to be seen again...

Compelling, contemporary and though-provoking, David Thorpe's sci-fi thriller is esssential reading for the cyberspace generation.

• Winner of the nationwide HarperCollins/SAGA Magazine competition which attracted nearly 900 entries.


• The panel of judges included Ornage prize-winning author Helen Dunmore, who says: "The writing is sharp, the dalogue good, and the action pacey and page-turning. But there's real depth to this story too. like all good fiction it makes the reader see the world in a different light, like HG Wells and J ohn Wyndham."


• Also from the judges: "wonderfully original...totally fresh and exciting...vivid and unputdownable."

Publication: 8 May 2007

• Proof mailing to all key influencers including UK buyers, journalists, teachers and librarians


• Blanket review coverage and features in national, local and trade press, magazines and online


• Major feature in Saga magazine, as well as reviews and author interviews in teen press and national and regional newspapers


• Radio interviews.

For more information contact:

• Catherine Holmes, Press officer, tel. (+44)(0)20 8307 4453


• Alison Ruane, Head of Marketing, tel. (+44)(0)20 8307 4380

ISBN 0 00 724784 4 | £5.99

Praise

Word is my friend
I shall not want.
I make him lie down on white
And he leads me to the waters of comfort.
He mines my soul
And directs me towards the light, for his and my sakes.
Even if I am lost in the field of confusion
I will not be afraid.
For he is with me;
His grace and his logic.

You provide me with riches beyond count
And unite peoples.
You have swept a wind of clarity through my mind
And my well of inspiration will never run dry.
But your loyalty and warmth
Will bring me calm all my life
And I will live in the House of Word
For ever.

[from a radio play, The School Play, I'm writing now]

I'm on Wikipaedia. How weird is that?

My younger son came in yesterday and said "You're on Wikipaedia". We looked. And I was.

It was almost as weird as the day nine months ago when I found a book I did a long time ago, Doc Chaos: The Chernobyl Effect, was for sale on Amazon, when the publishers melted away 15 years back.

[I've since taken over the stock and ordering of it. So if you want to buy it direct from me, please email me, then I get the whole cover price instead of just 40%.]

Who does this kind of thing? Methinks the latter was a comic shop in the US called Mile High, and I don't know which lovely person did the Wikipaedia entry.

Anyway, being a stickler for truth and accuracy, I have updated it. So you can go and see it - and even change it - if you really like.

Maybe anyone, however obscure, can be on Wikipaedia, for doing hardly anything: "Jack O'Donnell [fictitious name] in 1989 wrote ascreenplay 'The Other Side of My Foot', which was never made." I wonder how at Wikipaedia they decide how trivial something has to be before it goes in?

Science fiction is the main literary tradition of the last 100 years

Science fiction is indisputably the main literary tradition of the 20th century and, for all we know the 21st, although there are some who may not want to recognise the fact. Over the last 100 years, ever since Einstein achieved his revelation with his special theory of relativity, science has pushed back our understanding of ourselves and the universe to an unimaginable degree and brought technological benefits and curses that previous generations would have called miracles and cataclysms.

By using technology to magnify and extend our natural senses we have made exponentially revelatory discoveries about the world around us whether by burrowing deeper into the nano scale or peering further back to the far side of the universe and the beginning of time. We have discovered how tiny and insignificant we are, and how, if there is only one God, He must surely have His hands full with all those billions of galaxies to look after, so what time could He possibly have for us? The more we discover with our hyper-magnified senses, the more we develop and refine our theories of reality -- although each generation of scientists has liked to appear supremely confident in its knowledge. Cumulatively, the effect has been to instil in us a sense of inevitability of progress -- a future which goes on until the heat death of the universe -- in which mankind has the potential to continually adapt himself in order to survive, and in which cultures and societies may be disruptively different from our own.

As a partial consequence, fiction writers have had their imaginations magnified by a greater ability to perceive the possibilities for human endeavour, and compare them with the reality.

One of JG Ballard's insights is that Surrealism is the main visual tradition of the 20th century, as well as science fiction being the main literary tradition. As someone who studied Surrealism and Dadaism, I would say that it is not just the visual tradition of Surrealism but the philosophy of Dadaism and Surrealism together which represents the only sane and the dominant response for witnesses of the tragic vulcanic chasm that exists as a tectonic rift valley between the parallel paths of the development throughout the last 100 years of science and technology on the one hand and human political misgovernment on the other. After all, at the beginning Andre Breton could not even imagine that Surrealism could be a visual art movement.

Dada, Surrealism and science fiction all employ the imagination to objectivise aspects of our present condition which we may find painful or difficult to explore otherwise. From HG Wells through Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, Ballard himself, William Gibson, Ursula LeGuin, Marge Piercy, Kurt Vonnegut and many more, science fiction has been used to seduce us into accepting the dark and unforeseen consequences of our shortsighted decisions. It has of course also been used to trace the dreams of imperial fantasies, especially when sanctioned by the mighty corporate finance of the planet's dominant hegemony -- we are talking Star Trek, Star Wars and similar space opera. Here we see America dreaming an interplanetary pastoral allegory of how it would like the rest of the world to perceive its benign expansionism. Such films have dominated the top ten box office smashes of the last twenty years.

And then there are comics, specifically American comic books, which frequently merge both Surrealism and science fiction to create, as Stan Lee himself has often said, a modern mythology all the more remarkable for being the product of hundreds and hundreds of authors working in concert to create a self-consistent universe populated with fantastic characters who act out their parts in cosmic dramas of life, death and ultimate meaning, as well as love, tragedy and betrayal. Like any good pantheon from Norse to Hindu mythology, there is always one superhero you can choose to identify with, whether it's the driven, guilt-ridden Batman, the messianic Warlock, the simple-minded, clean cut Superman, the Jekyll-and-Hyde rage machine that is the incredible Hulk, or the macho loner with the sensitive heart who is Wolverine. Although much of this pop art is trash, it has also produced its share of the greatest literature of the last hundred years, from the keyboards of writers such as Neil Gaimon, Grant Morrison and Alan Moore, whether or not these are recognised by departments of English literature in any of our universities.

A central principle of Surrealism is taken from Pierre Reverdy, who remarked in 1918 that the most powerful poetic image is one which brings together the most disparate and even opposing elements. The further apart they were originally the greater the charge generated by compositing them side-by-side. A central principle of Dadaism is that rejection and gallows humour are legitimate responses to the absurd atrocities generated by the so-called developed world's way of life. Mainstream 'modernist' and 'post-modern' literature, with the exception of 'sociological' big picture fiction, has failed to tackle these issues with such effectiveness and engagement. Much mainstream literature, particularly in Britain, tends to concentrate on pitiful singular dramas of frequently isolated and alienated individuals. By contrast science fiction takes the big picture and forces us to confront what is at the focus of our blind spot when we stare into the mirror. And it frequently does it by using the above principles.

The greatest exponent of this type of writing and the greatest writer of the 20th century is undoubtedly.... William Burroughs. To call him a science fiction writer is a bit like calling Mozart a pianist. The potency of Mozart lies in overarching virtuoso energy and originality of his total vision, and the same is true for Burroughs. If one were to seek out a single metaphor which more than any other expresses the relationship of the individual to the time in which he lives during the last hundred years it has to be that of the junkie and his supply chain. Eric Mottram's book on Burroughs, the Algebra of Need, explains brilliantly how this metaphor pictures humanity as trapped in the web of exploitation and deceit that is the inevitable result of predicating that society on naked economics, removing meaning from life, and the leeching of power from the individual to those at the top; and how the success of this system is akin to the success of a virus which infects its host and uses it to manufacture further copies of itself, ad infinitum. The means of the infection of our minds is metaphorically the same. The result is the environmental and human suffering and devastation which we see around us burgeoning on every continent on the planet.

This can be the only valid topic for any self-respecting and compassionate writer nowadays. The corporations have hypnotised us by letting us wallow in one end of the Horn of Plenty, but at the other end of this supply line is a vision of hell on earth. Science fiction writers can help us visualise a better alternative.

Richard Collins

Richard Collins is a local writer and an old friend. He is the author of two published novels, the first of which, The Land as Viewed from the Sea, was shortlisted for the whitbread First Novel Prize in 2004.

This novel is set in unnamed but recognisable locations around this part of west Wales - anyone who knows the area will have a great time recoginsing them. And anyone who knows our community, will have fun trying to identify the real people his characters are drawn from too!

It is a Chinese box of a story-within-a-story-within-a-story, a beautitiful love tale lyrically told.

Richard's second book, Overland, was published in May and is a road movie set on the continent.

I have a feeling his third novel, in development on now, will be even better - like his first, a complex interweaving, this time of identity, outdoor theatre and gardens. He is currently seeking an agent.

Richard and I are co-chairs, with his partner Flic, of Friends of Fadeco (there's a picture of us both on this link!), which supports local development work in one of the poorest and remotest parts of the worls. We have all been to this part of NW Tanzania and come back enriched.

We urge you to join the FoF, and send us donations to help the grassroots developmnt work there, including building and running a training centre.

Richard is a great guy, and one of these days I'm going to build his web site. In the meantime, you can discover a bit more about Richard Collins here, here and here.

Happy Birthday David Rudkin

David Rudkin was 80 very recently. Quite amazing, the man doesn't look much older than me, with his pepper-and-salt beard, and his stocky, fit frame. He looks more like a sailor on shore leave than one of the UK's foremost playwrights and screenplay author.

I felt very privileged to be invited by David Rabey and Charmian Saville (of Lurking Truth theatre company) to a celebration in their garden of the occasion, and of the Aberystwyth Unversity Theatre Dept giving Rudkin an Honorary Professorship.

Some of the cream of the old guard of British theatre were at this small gathering, including Howard Barker, Arnold Wesker, John Arden (with a halo of white hair), and Margaret D'Arcy (resplendent in a brown headscarf and dark glasses).

Tributes were read out from friends present and absent, and Rabey read an extract from The Sons of Light, about turning the pain of human existence into raw material for creativity, which I thoroughly identify with.

He co-wrote the screenplay to Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 - still relevant today, as is most of Rudkin's work.

There were guests from as far as Sweden, and a sprinkling of local writers and artists. I had an inspiring conversation with Lucy Gough, who has just finished writing for Hollyoaks - she wrote 300 episodes - I can't imagine what that would be like.

She's working on a stage version of Frankenstein, sympathetic to the monster. My own work is on similar themes. Because of my health, I'm fascinated by science-human interface, by health issues, and by 'outsider' status - how it happens.

We agreed to share progress on our work.

And we all toasted Rudkin's health - happy birthday and many more to come!