Is the Journeymen coming true? Pt 4

 The Journeymen is fiction, a figment of my imagination, but elements of it provide some sort of explanation for events around us.  Let's take a fanciful look at some of the real people in real life and speculate where they should fit in with the Journeyman concept.  I'll start with the UK first, apologies to North American readers, you may have to Google some of these characters.

The Royal Family, the late Queen, the current King and the future King(s).  Absolutely the epitome of Colonists and protected, you might say insulated, from real life.  In the Journeymen story their sole purpose is to preserve and provide the DNA needed for the home planet.  In Journeymen II: Days of Reckoning this provides food for thought at the epilogue.

Now lets take a look at recent Prime Ministers of the UK, and to be fair we've had a few in a short term.  Let's start with David Cameron, a shoo-in for a Journeyman by most measures.  Privileged background, over-promoted to way beyond his natural capability in my opinion, he's the perfect example of someone who overtook better qualified candidates which, in my books, is one of the hallmarks of a Journeyman.

His successor, Theresa May, would appear to be more likely to be an IB.  That shouldn't be a surprise because although Prime Minister is one of the highest political positions, as we've experienced it's also one of the most fragile ones, too.  May was succeeded by Boris Johnson who has and had the aura of a Journeyman and definitely promoted above his ability.  His sense of entitlement would be consistent with the group.

I'm afraid my jury of one is out on Liz Truss.  Over-promoted? Absolutely.  Sense of entitlement?  In spades.  Journeyman?  Possibly, but I suspect she is an over-ambitious IB who got the top job over Rishi Sunak in major part because the group who voted her in is notoriously prejudiced.  Sunak, I suspect, is an ambitious IB who probably chose the wrong time to make his bid.

What about Keir Starmer? His father was a tool-maker, by the way.  I feel Starmer is pure IB.

The point is that the position of Prime Minister, powerful a position it is, is held by people guided by senior Civil Servants and hundreds of years of precedent.  Those senior Civil Servants not only exert enormous influence on the PM but crucially provide the continuity for the Journeyman project.  The Senior Civil Servants are the puppeteers, not the puppets.  Many, probably not all, will be Journeymen.

What about the US?  Are there any Colonists in the US?  Officially not in power, the Constitution was clear on that, but the US has long been a safe haven for people who would qualify as Colonists - exiled Kings, for example.  The UK might have an example or two living there now, although the bloodline might not be pure Colonist anymore.

The current President would appear to be a perfect candidate as a Journeyman, fulfilling the role but I suspect he has the ambition to be a Colonist.  Unfortunately, the way my story is written, you can't just 'become' a Colonist.

What about other World leaders?  Putin, for example?  Possibly Journeyman, possibly a Son.  Although he appears more interested in consolidating his own power, he could either be using force to promote the project or to disrupt it.  To make your mind up you will need to read both Journeymen books, and even then I would probably have to agree to disagree.

To end this short series of discussions on the background to the Journeymen I'd like to reiterate it is fiction, made up by me.  I'm not suggesting it is 'really real', or that my evaluation of where the characters above should sit in the fictional hierarchy should be taken as fact.  Far from it, but if you immerse yourself in the story then you may well find yourself looking at bosses, colleagues and politicians and wondering where they fit in the scheme of things.

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Follow me on Twitter: @RayASullivan

email me at raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com

Check out my comedic ramblings as Throngsman on www.newsbiscuit.com

     

   

 

Is The Journeymen coming true? Part 1

 A long time ago I wrote The Journeymen.  Some years later I wrote the sequel, Journeymen II Day of Reckoning.  I've toyed on several occasions to write the third and final part of that story, but in many ways it looks like it's being written for me in real time.

First, a reminder of the main story that starts on a planet in another solar system a long, long way away.  It is home to a society that that has developed superior technology not once but at least twice.  A previous society virtually wrote off the current society in a planet-wide war that saw a phenomenal proportion of the planet wiped out and the society reduced to what we would regard as the Dark Ages.  We meet the society many millennium later, repaired, restored and bound by a common will to co-exist under a set of guiding principles.

For the population of the planet life is good.  There's a problem they have been shielded from, though.  The war that destroyed their earlier civilisation also destroyed a significant amount of the ancient DNA that had evolved to create their lineage and the surviving DNA and gene pool wasn't as diverse as needed to build the healthy population they needed.  Slowly, the gene pool was diminishing faster than Natural Selection could improve it.  They could see a future, admittedly many generations away, where the gene pool would decrease to the point that the population would die out.

Fortunately for them, but not for us, they learned of a planet far away where the earlier, more technologically sophisticated population had visited and believed there was a possibility that the missing elements from their gene pool might still exist there.  They mounted an expedition on a comet that passed their planet and the planet we call Earth on a two thousand year cycle and make preparations to hitch a multi-generational ride to travel to the far-away planet to find out if the genes they were missing was still around and uncontaminated and to find a way to bring it back - clearly the comet was a one-way ticket.  

There's a lot more to this background story, and it's intertwined with events in a modern-day Earth.  In the next instalment I'll introduce you to the Journeymen themselves.

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In the US Bronze is on a countdown promotion starting Sunday 14th September at $0.99 for the eBook, rising to $1.99 on the 17th September before reverting to the full price of $2.99 on the 20th September.  All promotions commence at 8:00 am PDT on the stated days.

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Follow me on Twitter: @RayASullivan

email me at raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com

Check out my comedic ramblings as Throngsman on www.newsbiscuit.com

     

   

 

Life on Mars, and over the Moon about it

 I grew up in the Sixties having been born in the late Fifties.  It was a golden age in some ways and to a pre-pubescent boy the space race was one of the most exciting things around, culminating in the moon landings in 1969.

Of course the Sixties weren't perfect.  I was raised as one of six in an industrial town in north Wales.  My dad was middle management in a large steel works and probably was well paid but the benefits of that were offset by the number of mouths he raised.  Consumerism wasn't a word or even an idea - stuff lasted for as long as it could be made to and hardly anyone aspired to new cars or home ownership.  None of these things were problems - I never went hungry and didn't feel disadvantaged, still don't.  They were simpler times, great music was happening and something as basic as  transistor radio was the epitome of indulgence.

The space race, though, showed an alternative reality.  It's easy to look back on those days and the basicness of the technology the astronauts had to work with, but it was a close to science fiction without actually being fiction you could get.  Unless, of course, you're a conspiracy theorist believing it was all filmed in Burbank.

Roll on the Seventies and music really got a grip on me - everything from Glam Rock to Motown (having started influencing me towards the end of the Sixties).  In my teens now I was interested in other  distractions although space still fascinated me and Bowie provided the track to my years.  I was convinced in the existence of aliens and believed that UFOs were a thing, but life as always got in the way and as Punk Rock, a genre I never really got into, kicked off I had joined the military and my aeronautical engineering career.  Oddly I became less enthused with space, but with retrospect, space had started to become a little stale.

The moon landings had finished - to be fair after Apollo 13 it was a hard act to beat - and the Space Station was embryonic.  The Space Shuttle caused a stir but was deliberately low-key, almost day-to-day.  The Shuttle disasters reminded us that it was actually still a high-risk affair but with earning a living, raising a family and avoiding the worst of Eighties music space faded into the background.  Of course then came the Nineties and in retrospect the Eighties music wasn't too bad after all.  The Noughties gave me a similar appreciation of the Nineties.  I have no idea about the recent teens, having focussed on the blues.

But now it's getting all interesting again - I have two grandsons, one seven, the other three - and as they grow up towards their teens humans are returning to the moon, Mars is going to be explored and who knows, colonisation on Mars might be an employment option for them in their twenties.  The older one is aware of the International Space Station and has watched it pass overhead but currently space is a slow burner for him, however I'm sure his generation is going to have an exciting time watching the build up to the next moon landings and the colonisation of Mars.  I hope to be able to witness these events myself, just a bit wary of the soundtrack to be honest.

After years of baby steps it looks like we're suddenly going full pelt.  Space tourism is looking like a reality for a select wealthy few and pushing back the boundaries of near space is happening on a weekly basis.  The reasons for this are apparently clear - our wish to discover new ground is one touted reason, the need to be ready for the next asteroid impact is another.  I proposed an alternative a while back with The Journeymen and the sequel, Day of Reckoning - books about the longest game played ever to curate and send ancient DNA to a home planet with a very distorted set of values driving it.

Both of those books are available in eBook and paperback format from Amazon and if you have  Amazon Prime or Kindle Unlimited they can be read for free.  I'm convinced they are fiction, but I think that about the Burbank link to the moon landings, and a lot of people disagree with me on that score, so who knows?

The Journeymen is on Countdown offer

My second novel, The Journeymen, is on countdown offer at Amazon for a few days (until the 26th April).  This novel should ring a few bells with those of you who believe you've been unfairly passed over by inferior colleagues or that some people seem to have a disproportionate amount of good luck.  In fact, it is a conspiracy theorists book of choice.

Unlike most conspiracy theories this doesn't just make unsubstantiated links between what we see and hear and draw conclusions that many think are outrageous - it provides an entirely fabricated backstory to hand the lot off.

OK, bit of background might help you here.  We're not the only planet that has created civilisations, or indeed created the means to destroy itself many times over. Part of the focus in this book is one such planet approximately 9 light years away that has been there, done that, destroyed the Tee shirt.  In the book it is going through a renaissance following a period, a long time ago, when war nearly destroyed the planet and everything on it.  Critically the human stock, who are genetically very similar to us guys and gals, has depleted its genetic diversity to the point that the race is slowly dying out.  

Before the terrible wars that created this situation the planet had developed technology that allowed easy space travel over immense distances and had populated a planet nine light years away (coincidence? I don't think so).  They don't have the technology they had so embark on an intergenerational journey to what we call home, only to find things have changed a bit.  These guys, by the way, are the Journeymen.  A subset of them are a group that becomes sworn enemies, they are known as the Sons of Arlgon, nowadays referred to as the Sons.

The main problem when they got here, apart from the total loss of the technology they were hoping to harness to return with suitable DNA samples is that the original Journeymen have embedded (and bedded) the original humanoids on our home planet.  Luckily for the project, but arguably not for most us, many had kept to their own kind, but many had also bred with the indigenous population.  This resulted in the people discovered on arrival as the Colonists (AKA original Journeymen) and Interbreds (AKA IBs, also known as you and me, in the main).  

The Journeymen resolve to protect the Colonists, who generally had managed to secure positions of power and authority, by forming the second tier of authority - the Civil Servants and captains of industry, defending, protecting and directing the Colonists through the generations while the technology necessary to capture DNA and send it through space is developed from an extremely poor starting position.  And you thought HS2 was challenging.

The book starts, though, in the present day when a space vehicle engineer, Tom Roberts, presents a novel invention to help make long term space travel possible.  He is attacked, possibly by Sons who will do anything to thwart their sworn enemies, and rescued by a pair of Journeymen who happen to have their own agenda.  Tom is effectively imprisoned and ultimately framed for the murder of an ex colleague.  He escapes and through a series of adventures helped by a former lover and a reluctant senior Son seeks to secure his freedom.  The book interleaves Tom's story with the original Journeymen story, so aspects and subtleties of the history are revealed throughout the novel.

Back to my original statement about being passed over by less capable colleagues - and I bet you have - they were almost certainly either Journeymen being propelled to a position of power to better protect the Colonists in theoretical power.  Don't take it personally and don't try to stop it - none of us have that much power.

Obviously, if you have access to Kindle Unlimited then this book and its sequel, Journeymen II: Day of Reckoning, are free.  Otherwise, if this sounds like your kind of lockdown reading then why not grab a copy while it is price reduced?

Random thoughts on random Covid 19 testing

Back on my current hobby horse - the corona virus pandemic. I've been reading lots of various views around the world today (and the last few days) and there is a consensus forming as far as I can tell.  Apart from the fact that most places aren't testing anywhere near as necessary, which I bleated about a couple of times already, the testing isn't helping anywhere near as much as it should.

OK, many countries are choosing their own way of testing, that's their prerogative in the absence of an international standard.  Although the World Health Organisation has stated test, test and test again, and I don't think you could get a bigger nudge towards standardisation than that, it's a little light on direction.

Statisticians are now claiming that the methods used up to now are not suitable, and the arguments I'm hearing are compelling.  We had, in the UK, the herd immunity argument that suggested that by voluntarily socially distancing people you could flatten the now famous curve and save the health care system from imploding, while getting the majority of relatively fit people exposed and presumably immune for the short haul.  Completely isolating the vulnerable - and that means identifying them and ensuring they have a suitable support network for the twelve weeks that seems to be the common standard - while the rest of us get the disease, shrug it off in the main, treat the few that react badly sounds like a plan.  However the numbers of deaths started to stack up, and the simple requests around social distancing to allow the herd immunity to develop in a controlled manner wasn't being followed by a significant number of people.  If it helps, I followed it as far as my employer let me - cramming 22 students into classrooms designed for 18 at a push and rotating them from classroom to classroom every hour and a half didn't help.

The real problem, well two problems actually, are that many people didn't take the sensible measures to avoid mass contamination seriously and on top of that there wasn't any apparent plan to identify the vulnerable and support them.  They're working on that now, but only because we're in lockdown and I'm hearing anecdotal reports of clearly vulnerable people not being on the database the government has compiled.

But testing as it stands is way below useful.  As a minimum the NHS staff need to be tested - and by the way there are 1.2 million of them.  Not all doctors and nurses, of course, but receptionists, cooks, cleaners, admin staff all working in close proximity and interacting with the front line guys and gals.  And one test each is only a start as someone could be given the all-clear and pick up the virus fuelling up on the way home.

But the real challenge is knowing where the country is in relation to infection rates.  The current process of only testing people who are showing signs of the illness is going to give a fairly high success rate, if determining someone is suffering from Covid 19 can be called success. It makes the hazard rate appear larger than it is, for one thing, and fails to tell us anything about how prevalent the disease is.  An analogy I'm going to steal here is one I read online a day or so ago:

Suppose you wanted to know how popular Ford cars are in your area.  One way is to pop over to your local Ford main dealer and ask everyone who walks through the door during a determined period of time, say one day, what make of car they drive.  Many will say Ford, because many of us are creatures of habit.  That is what the testing has been like in the UK, testing those exhibiting signs of CV.  Alternatively pop over to your local Asda (Walmart for US readers) car park and count how many Fords there are and also how many non-Ford cars there are.  Don't advertise it, choose a day at random, and you'll get a pretty good idea of how popular Ford cars are in your locality.  There should be random testing in supermarkets - there would need to be legislation and the government would need to provide strong guarantees that the data will only be used for CV testing purposes as they would need to know who provided the sample.  They would need to provide assurances that persons tested wouldn't have DNA information provided to the police, because that would provide people reasonable excuse to not participate.

That way we would have a better picture of the distribution of CV in society.  It would have been useful to have known where it was before lockdown, but we can't go back there.

I for one wouldn't have any objections, and would happily share my DNA if it was for a useful purpose.  In another world, maybe, I might be more circumspect - if you've read the Journeymen, and especially its sequel Journey Men II: Day of Reckoning you might wonder if the information was being used for other, nefarious reasons.  But right now I'd like to think that sorting CV 19 out is our main priority.

You can access my books on Amazon using the links provided on this blog post.  Stay safe and follow the rules, please.

Working from home

Writers, even part time writers such as myself, are used to working from home.  I've a sneaking suspicion that even the most successful of authors are unlikely to have an office away from their home for the purpose of writing.  Sure, a few will have dedicated rooms in their homes that they use, possibly, exclusively for the purpose of producing prose, but I reckon most of us don't.

I'm very fortunate in that I actually do have a dedicated home office room complete with a custom built oak desk and bureau - we had them built by an artisan woodworker twenty years ago or more when I was studying with the Open University and, partly because it is a timeless design and the builder was such a good craftsman, it's still as good as new.  Perhaps the odd bit of distressing here and there, but that's the beauty of this type of furniture.  The room's not used exclusively for writing - far from it - we have a wall mounted TV and a leather recliner sofa in the room as well, and during the late autumn to early spring we both use it as our TV room in the evenings.  Most of my work, all year round, is actually crafted on my knee regardless of which room I'm spending time in.

In fact my second novel, The Journeymen, was written in large part on a Palm PDA - remember them? -with a folding keyboard.  It was very portable and until it let me down on a transatlantic flight in 2003 it had become my go-to resource.  I guess that failure was my personal wake up call - I'd written a large part of the battle scene in the Journeymen on board the facility on the comet between the J-Men and the Sons of Arlgon and the battery failed, taking several thousand words with it.  I dragged a foolscap pad out of my bag and scribbled down what I'd just spent a large part of the flight typing.

However, like a lot of you guys, I've been working from home - mainly by email - as a result of the Coronavirus crisis.  The desk has really come into its own.  I've resisted the temptation to sit on the sofa and put my feet up for the slightly irrational feeling that it wouldn't feel like work if I did that, even though the end result would be the same.  And maybe that's one of things about writing, why I can choose to write on my knee, on an aircraft, on a bus or wherever.  Because writing doesn't feel like a job.

And because we can access all our work resources via VPN and can chat using WhatsApp it feels like I'm still in the office.  I just don't have to face students four or five times a day, and I'm not complaining about that.  I'm sure the lockdown is going to result in a lot of issues for many people, most need some form of physical social interaction and at the time of writing this lockdown looks like a long haul but I've been practising (anti) social distancing most of my life, so I should be OK.  I may even find time to complete my tenth novel.  Even if I don't, I reckon my Kindle will take a hammering this summer - when I'm not working from home, naturally.

If you're looking to stock up on reading matter to weather the lockdown - it looks like practically everywhere on the planet is going through lockdown at the moment, then at the time of writing - 24 March - Digital Life Form is free to download.  It looks like that offer is good until about 8 a.m. Friday morning, UK time.  Be my guest.

If you're entitled through subscription to download Kindle Unlimited books for free then you can choose any of my titles, to keep you occupied when working from home loses its appeal.  Otherwise I like to think they're reasonably priced.  Links to them all below are to the Amazon US site - I'm sure you'll be redirected to your regional website if you are outside the US.

Hotel California
Assassin
The Journeymen
Journeymen II: Day of Reckoning
Project : Evil
Digital Life Form
The Last Simple
Skin
Parallel Lives

Accessing my books

Sometime last year I relinquished the domains to my websites - selling ebooks is far from lucrative and for the last few years my online presence was costing more than it was raising.  Consequently if you have been trying to use the links in any of the 500+ blog entries I've made you'll have found the websites don't exist anymore.

While it is clear some of you are still finding your way to my books, I fully understand the issues with searching the bookstores.  Consequently I'm going to list links to the books in this blog post and hopefully over time will embed it in the posts that still attract traffic.

Feel free to browse these books at your favourite store.  I'm focussing on US, UK, Australian and Canadian bookstores initially as these make up 99% of my sales, but if you'd like links to bookshops (and I'm thinking Amazon really) then email me and I'll update.

Smashwords (international - covers all regions)

Parallel Lives

The Journeymen

The Journeymen: Journeymen II - Day of Reckoning

Skin

Digital Life Form

The Last Simple

Project: Evil

Assassin

Amazon US

Parallel Lives

The Journeymen

The Journeymen: Journeymen II - Day of Reckoning

Skin

Digital Life Form

Project: Evil

Assassin

Amazon UK

Parallel Lives

The Journeymen

The Journeymen: Journeymen II - Day of Reckoning

Skin

Digital Life Form

The Last Simple

Project: Evil

Assassin

Amazon Australia

Parallel Lives

The Journeymen

The Journeymen: Journeymen II - Day of Reckoning

Skin

Digital Life Form

The Last Simple

Project: Evil

Assassin

Amazon Canada

Parallel Lives

The Journeymen

The Journeymen: Journeymen II - Day of Reckoning

Skin

Digital Life Form

The Last Simple

Project: Evil

Assassin

Barnes & Noble US

Parallel Lives

The Journeymen

The Journeymen: Journeymen II - Day of Reckoning

Skin

Digital Life Form

The Last Simple

Project: Evil

Assassin