life | Martyn K Jones

Seem to be writing a lot of short stories that are what I’m beginning to call ‘future parables’. Which actually goes with science fiction as a genre. A lot of stories come from the viewpoint of knowing what I have learned about humanity, what would happen if?

‘Blink’ is about full retinal controlled digital life of a hard partying socialite, a borderline narcissist, and what happens when her digital life disappears in what might be called a fifteen minute city.

A new 6,000 worder called ‘The Winter Trees’ similarly asks what might happen if a Carrington level solar event takes down the electrical grid and much of the electronics reliant thereon. Written from the perspective of a small group of determined holdouts who live their lives dodging killer drones acting as enforcement for the all controlled.

Then there’s the ever changing versions of ‘Not with a bang’ about what might happen if those zany kids in the World Economic Forum and their adherents actually get ‘carbon capture’ to work on an industrial scale. In my version children betray their parents to the authorities for the crime of ‘denial’ and the machines actually work. Until of course all the plant life on Earth dies, thus every human does too, eventually. Not telling how, that would ruin the ending.

I seem to have a whole collection of such stories which have never been submitted to a mainstream publisher, and probably never will because I tired of that circus over ten years ago and rarely send anything to anyone except good old Leg-Iron books. Maybe I’ll just post them on this site. Don’t know.

Still struggling with the overall narrative of the final in the trilogy ‘Darkness between the stars’. Trying hard to keep the narrative consistent from the point of view of technology. Alcubierre type warp drives, no sub or hyperspace comms, a fractured Earth full of power games and ruthless ambition. Same stuff different day.

Then there’s ‘Straight on through morning’ a novella length MSS about the rise and fall and rise of a bunch of Asteroid miners set in the ‘Stars’ technology universe. Still contemplating putting in a fight scene where one of the protagonists calls another a ‘Musky’ (A fan of Elon Musk) leading to broken furniture, missing teeth and various items of grievous bodily harm. The sequence in question is still in note form at this stage, but am vacillating. Is it too near the knuckle? Might as well have a play, see how it feels.

One obstruction to writing has been the ongoing process of refurbishing our home in the west of Ireland. Latest upgrade is a revamped kitchen. A saga full of expensive wood, lots of white tiles and getting rid of a whole pile of 1990’s kitchen cabinetry. We know this because people had written names and dates on the plasterwork behind them. This has given rise, on my part, to a couple of burns, the recurrence of old back and knee injuries and various cuts, bruises and a great deal of florid four letter invective. Fortunately that’s mostly over and my kitchen will soon be fully operational once more.

Sometimes I wonder if I might like to go back to using an old typewriter. Had one back in the 1970’s and 80’s, which did sterling service until I lost it in a house move. Did try to buy a replacement from a person in Sligo, but after a number of enthusiastic online messages and a minor road trip on my part he never showed up at the location provided. So after a two hour wait I simply walked away and had a nice day instead.

Sligo is quite a pretty town. I’ve stayed there before. It’s relaxed and easy going, an Irish University town well worth a visit. Pity about the typewriter, but since that was not to be I’ll just keep my old laptop limping along.

Living out in county Mayo as we do, we recently had the mispleasure of experiencing a particular storm which left us without electricity from the early hours of 24th January to mid afternoon on the 2nd February, over ten days.

The storm damage to us personally was fairly light. A couple of dislodged tiles, parts of our old famine era stone wall on the western boundary, two galvanised steel gates were seriously bent, a block built fence post shattered, and a number of branches felled. My two bee colonies were destroyed, once neatly ordered combs littering the landscape half way to Donegal and two outbuilding doors damaged. The shed doors and the gates have had running repairs. The felled branches will provide firewood for next year.

However, the electronic fallout was worse.

The resulting ten day long power outage wrecked one of my laptops, a Linux machine, leaving me with my remaining, and increasingly finicky Windows 10 laptop, which drops network connections at the drop of the proverbial hat. The Linux client can be rebuilt, and all data was successfully backed up. Just not for some time. I like Linux as an operating system, but on my current hardware it is unstable and more trouble that it is worth.

However, one of my digital alter egos will never recover. The decision by WordPress to insist on dual logon verification and a similar decision by Google and all the other online platforms means that he is effectively and digitally dead. The blogs in question will remain until the platform we subsist upon disappears, but they will never be updated again. Not unless WordPress and Google release the accounts.

Then there was the rapidly thawing mess left in our freezers, the monetary value of which was approximately 3-400 Euros worth of frozen food. This was hygienically buried in a specially dug pit just beyond the back garden wall. A task which took up time and energy between boiling water for washing and beverage production, temporary fixes to gates and shed doors, as well as keeping our one source of reliable heat, a log burning stove in one front room. Then there was the lack of water when our local water pumping station was without power, it’s backup generator moved to the south to ensure that Kerry did not lose water when the well-predicted storm hit. The brunt of the storm itself hit further north.

In advance of the predicted bad weather I had laid in a supply of drinking water and about forty litres of other water for flushing toilets. For the three days we were without any mains water, that was all that stood between us and some very unpleasant outcomes.

For ten days we struggled along, burning up almost a third of our winter log supply simply keeping warm with none of the conveniences of modern life. Effectively living like our parents and grandparents did in the 1920’s and 30’s without all of their social support mechanisms. Almost a hundred years back in a single night.

Had it not been for the timely purchase of two high storage energy banks to keep our mobile phones charged and a friendly service station with its own generator, then the sense of being dropped through a time warp to the early 20th century would have been complete.

On the tenth day we decamped in abject frustration to county Wexford, en route for France, on a holiday we had booked and paid for last August. On the ferry to Cherbourg, one of the last notifications we received from ESB, Ireland’s electricity generation board, was that our power had been restored. The twenty first century had returned! The heating and security systems booted nicely, so we can now not only control the heat within our home, but actually see who comes a-visiting while we are on holiday in France.

Which is where we are now. Currently in the historic centre of Tours, home to many of the rulers of ancient France, enjoying the sights, even if frustrated by the one way system.

We’re simply enjoying the slightly warmer weather and richness of French food, being reminded that the French are the very monarchs of baking. Which makes the next few weeks something to look forward to.

Given the last ten days, Angie and myself desperately need this timeout for recovery. The relationship between us was recently put under extreme pressure and unbalanced us both. Before we begin moving forward again, we both need to recover our centre, our inner equilibrium. That is what this break is to be about.

As far as writing is concerned I’ve been looking at the manuscript for ‘Darkness between the stars’. Frankly it’s a mess. In the 80,000 words so far, too much has been cut and pasted disrupting the story flows to the point where a complete re-write of the whole trilogy is in order. On the other hand perhaps I might do better disassembling it and beginning the project I first envisioned in 2009 called ‘Earth’s night’, a series of future history style manuscripts where the events of my ‘Stars’ trilogy underpins most of the events, assisting with some of the foreshadowing.

So long as no more storms or major power outages hit, or we decide to move continents yet again, I might actually finish something worthwhile.