11:49
Devious16 wondered why time existed…. if time existed at all.
He attached the power pack to the modified rotary assault rifle. He switched it on, pressed the trigger and the disk above the weapon hissed, spinning at two thousand and a half meters per second.
Continue reading “Devious16”
One may readily be prepared to die.
Any punter can act bravely when faced with imminent death. Even the foolish among warriors can be willing to die for the most hopeless of causes.
Continue reading “INTERCEPT THE WET SPARROW”
Writing science fiction gives an author the opportunity to have a go at predicting the future. For me, the best tool I always find useful is this; in order to build a world in which to set the novel, you start by going back into history. ‘To see the future, one must look into the past’ and follow the trends. In the case of ‘A Hostile Takeover’ I began by asking ‘What is a nation? A state? A country?’ and then went on to research different types of sovereign nations throughout history. I followed the trends and discovered the future of the world’s political landscape is obvious and surprising. The one prediction that seems most definite among all the others is that the nation states we live in today are not static, rigid institutions, but evolving, changing political creatures.
One obvious development is the trend towards nation progressing into supernationhood. Historically, growing and successful communities constantly expanded to accommodate the increasing power of the citizens of these states. A town grows into a city-state; a city-state turns to empire. Up until last century ’empire’ was a natural progression for any nation blessed with the position of economic power. However, empires that refused to evolve by the time the twentieth century came along struggled to survive. The spread of democracy made sure of this. Ever since the city-state of Athens experimented with mixing democracy and empire, large dominions struggled or faltered once injected with representative government.Successful empires were the ones that dealt with democracy by absorbing the ideal into its political composition, alas the advent of constitutional monarchy and republicanism. As these forms of sovereignties become irrelevant into the twenty-first century, new forms are beginning to arise.
Continue reading “Supernations, Mega City-States and Virtual Countries”
The genesis of this project began way back in 2004. Working as a corporate audio visual technician, sitting through endless conferences and business meetings, I posed the question; what if some of these corporate cats around me, who behaved almost like scheming gangsters and money pirates, were indeed genuine gangsters and pirates. How would they fare in this corporate environment? What economic conditions would spawn such a corporate breed?
I wrote a draft script for a short film. Then made the mistake of fleshing it out into feature film. I don’t know how but somehow the story took a life of its own. Soon, I realised a screenplay was not going to be enough. It could never be made and would therefore never find an audience. So I decided to unshackle the story from the constraints of a screenplay and found myself on a long odyssey trying to complete a novel.
This book was written on notepads, scraps of paper, on the back of receipts, on desktops, laptops, numerous smartphones, Nokia phones, iPhones, stored on hard drives, miniSD cards, in clouds. Entire technological inventions and innovations would come and go. I worked on it on trains going to work, during work, underneath the bed covers, in dreams within dreams.
In the end, after finding exciting answers to my inciting questions, and raising new questions and attempting to answer these, I believe this is a story that delves into a near future that is loathsomely familiar, unwelcome, divisive, and yet one we all know is coming.
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