And They Came Back

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

Humanity is full of hubris. We always like to think that we exist in the most advanced moment in time. Everybody on the planet convinced they are at the apex of human creation, at the forefront of technological advance.

And then one day that hubris is shattered. A piece of knowledge here, a discovery there, and we are reminded that the time line has not always moved forward in everything. There are things we know now and things we have lost. And for a moment we are reminded, it’s not always linear it’s much messier.

And then one day, THEY return.

Not where we thought they would, or would have thought if we knew they existed.  They did not rock up to the Pentagon like in the movies. They were coming home albeit briefly.

They arrived somewhere in the desert of Australia. To say they were less than impressed with what we had done with that continent was an understatement. They did not like the arid nature of the interior of it, but they kept that largely to themselves. It was just very obvious when they managed to grow a plush oasis there in a few days, that they thought our desert idea was a bit naff.

We never thought we had a choice.

There was no grand announcement of their arrival either. There were some odd satellite pictures, people were trying to explain. An internet conspiracy about aliens landing within hours of, there had been a long trail of fuel and ash in the air over the northern part of Australia that no one could explain. It was a meteorite according to official sources but not like one anyone had seen before.

Someone should investigate but no one did. So really the earliest anyone knew that they were back was when they walked into an outback pub and asked if they could use the interior space to set up so they could speak to the UN Secretary General.

You see all sorts in these outback pubs so the publican didn’t put much store by it. Just explained the tech they had to hand at the pub and gave the name of the current UN Sec Gen. He’d passed through and visited the pub a few years earlier. He travels more than most people think.

The publican thought he might even still have his number somewhere. They said not to worry they had it anyway. Within two minutes they were set up and rather than using any conventional method, and by this I mean a mobile or satellite phone they had some other device and just put themselves through.

The publican was able to step in and verify for the Sec Gen that the call was real, and that the people though dressed slightly oddly with a weird smell were genuinely in his pub and talking to him. After a few reminisces about the time spent in the pub and the publican being able to recall his order, the Sec Gen took the call.

They were back. Some humans from quite some time ago. They’d colonised another planet. Quite some time ago was the best approximation we got for how long ago they had left earth. Being honest, the local indigenous community did not seem that surprised by their arrival. Almost as if they had interacted at some point in the past before.

The Sec Gen wanted to keep it quiet, but that is not how an outback pub works. People started arriving before the call was even finished.

They proceeded to explain to the UN Sec Gen that they were back and taking passengers, as earth was quite near the tipping point. They didn’t mind him telling people about the tipping point, we were too far gone to overthink the panic apparrently. They had researched everything and were of the view life on planet earth was not sustainable for that much longer.

They had a plan. Not for us, but for their own colony, as a last outpost for humanity when we had destroyed earth, but they needed to boost their population a bit.

The focus would be on indigenous populations from earth who still had a connection to the land, Native Americans, Indigenous Australians, Pacific islanders, some of the residents of Africa, South America, various other places that had a proper bond with the land. That was the type of culture they had came from. Couldn’t risk the more modern cultures of over consumption that had destroyed the planet.

The UN Sec Gen tried to protest, but they just entered direct negotiations with various populations. Some groups opted to stay and some to go. Most opted to go. It seemed counterintuitive that some of these groups would agree to go, given their connection, but they could see the writing on the wall more clearly than most. Many of them had already experienced climate upheaval.

They were taking a few extras, more females than males, roughly 75% to 25%. They had done the Maths and this seemed to produce a stable balance. They would be taking a stable of post menopausal women as part of that, as they were generally the holders of earths knowledge. They had already uploaded all of the books and were quite surprised that humans hadn’t yet bothered to set out to settle any other planet.

We were, on their thinking, a bit behind where we should be, including on how we thought about the stewardship of earth.

They knew the rough timeline of how technology had developed and would develop, having gone through it themselves and reassured the Sec Gen that at some point in the next 20 years or so there would be an explosion in technological advancement. Once the whole AI thing had blown over and died, some genuinely useful tech would come along and we could think about going somewhere other than earth.

If we survived until then that is, and reading between the lines, they were not at all convinced we would. But not to worry if we all died out, they’d come back and settle here again maybe.

Their advice was not Mars, they had tried it and it was a no. Also avoid Saturn. Neptune and Jupiter were starters and they’d left some stuff behind ages ago and moved on. Otherwise there advice on planetary settlement was minimal.

They would be here for five weeks max. No they didn’t need anything. No, it was not possible to share their technology. Yes they had taken the Kit Kats, that recipe being more ancient than many people realised. This was not a benevolent visit really, they just needed a little more cultural diversity and a few older women to store the knowledge.

They couldn’t stay long, the whole place was all terribly backward from what they’d been observing, everyone bent on consuming everything. All of us badly dressed apparently. They had done some earlier species saving journeys and we would at least reap the benefit of that. They announced quietly they would be repopulating the bees before they left. Give us a good chance of survival, although they laughed as they said that.

They’d also be adding some extra sharks, to protect the ocean, perhaps we should stay out of the water. Also more of those human attack orcas, maybe leave the oceans alone now. They’d also do a quick plastic pick up for us and drop a bunch of it in space, and they were leaving a carnivorous tree species, whatever that was. Said it would help preserve our forests.

The transports came and people were boarded in an orderly fashion. They were quite specific, they had a list of the extras, in a santa claus kind of way. There was no other space, for anyone. Not a single tech bro was taken. They didn’t even engage with them, leaving us behind to deal with the subsequent tantrums.

People clamoured and complained. People turned up to look, but they did not deviate from their plan. They maimed and injured those who got in the way. There may have been the odd death but it was not diplomatic to report that.

Within five weeks they were gone. Leaving us with some reminders about our hubris. The whole thing was quite humiliating.

Suddenly the sharks were more numerous, and well, very bitey. The orcas were a menace and shipping dropped considerably, alongside any kind of other activity in or on the water. The carnivorous trees locked us out of the forests. We thought we still had the skies, but they blasted most of the satellites out of the sky as they went, meaning we had no tracking systems.

We were thrown into what felt like the dark ages, and whereas we had thought we were at the front of history, that our technology was the best, we had discovered it was not.

Humans are clever creatures, within a few months, people questioned if it ever happened. Had anyone really seen it? There were some dodgy videos and that one man in the outback pub who kept swearing it was real. People blamed the government, wherever they happened to be. The UN Sec Gen had a breakdown so he was no help.

There were members of some of the groups that went who stayed behind, but they were already marginalised, so there voice was not heard.  

People quickly decided it had not happened. And here we are at the forefront of history again. Thinking of Mars, despite the warnings, and the orcas have always been a menace, and planes unreliable, and the sharks are just something we live with, but every time someone is taken by a tree, there is a feeling deep inside everyone of us, an inkling, that there was something else. Someone else. Something, someone we have forgotten.

An Earthen Queen

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

Its rained for days.  Weeks really.

The sky a dull grey, clouds looming, hour after hour. There has been the odd gap, a shaft of blue but it has been rare. It has not been apocalyptic rain, not sheets of water pounding into the earth. It has been a slow tedious drizzle, falling out of the sky. A steady, stealthy, beat, bent on a ponderous breaking of the spirit, rather than a thrashing of the soul.

It has fallen on pavements and rooftops, on hospitals and schools, in churchyards and backyards and roads and playing grounds. The world is now soggy and damp.

I have not been outside much.

I want to write to the newspaper, to open the machine and type in the words. Tell them this isn’t the first time, this has happened before, centuries ago. I can’t. How would I know that? Its before proper records began.

There are several of them, of us. Spread out across the country, all with the same thought, somewhere out there, something, someone, has called the rain.

English is one of the few languages where the word queen does not derive from the word king. This is why. This queenness thing, born of the land, eked out of the soil. Britain and its earthen queens, I remember them all. Not all queens but all of them queens.

Victoria  was not one, nor the last Elizabeth, although we someone times wonder about both. The Elizabeth before that one, she was one of ours. There was Boudica with all her wildness. She was born this way too, with the rain.  And Aethelflaed, the fearless Mercian prodigy. Each of them, born ready for war.

And this one will be too, a new queen, forged from British soil, literally.

I take out ancient robes, dust them down, ready to begin the journey, to seek out the child, if indeed it is given up as a child.

The rain, a new queens insatiable appetite for the land to nurture her at birth, to give her sustenance. She might be born fully formed. She is a queen with the clouds and the land as her womb and the rain as her milk. Formed in the mud and chalk and the clay, features fine and chiseled by the roots of Oak and Beech, Birch and Ash, Hazel and Blackthorn, succoured on rain tinged with the tang of nettles and blackberries, wild garlic, and wild strawberries.

I wonder what this one would be like, a war monger, or a woman of peace. There has never really been a woman of peace born this way, of the earth itself and not the womb. There is something about this birth, this island, that births them ready for war, even Elizabeth. So almost certainly a war monger, leader of men  but a slayer of men. A warrior queen.

What will that look like in the 21st century?

Will she be born like the others? Boudica was born fully grown. It had rained for months and we stood knee deep in mud as she writhed and fought and finally extricated herself from whatever held her in the earth. She arose like a goddess before us. Her reign short but bloody.

Elizabeth had a more even temperament, she came out of the earth as a child, yet still she had found war. I remember her standing on the banks of Tilbury, still remembered for her urgent message to soldiers, bring me blood. And Aethelflaed, who was born on the winds to the west and stayed there to slay all who defied her. She fought like a mad thing and was the best with a sword I have ever seen.

But it is a different world now. What if CCTV finds some naked woman emerging from the mud and screaming she is queen?

As I start to drive I can smell it already. Its primal this birth, wild, a queen, a thing, caked in mud and grime emerging from the land, an unfurling of limbs from the murky darkness of soil and clay. The rain will stop, the weather will calm and she will be here.

Then if we are lucky there will be days of sunshine before the days of blood. I can feel her, I can feel her power. She is coming. I look at the rain, at the way it is falling, called from the sky for a fickle mistress. I want to pray but prayer has long since left me.

If this must be bloody, let it be short. Let the days of sunshine be long. Let the rain stop. Let there be calm. Before the storm. Because I can feel the power of the storm, of its attraction and I can tell, this one is more Boudica than Elizabeth and the ground that is soaked in mud, will dry and then at her whim, be soaked in blood.

If you like this, hit the button. I wrote it as prose, but am not sure it would not make a better poem. If I was going to write a novel, I think this is how I would start it.

Review: Empire’s Daughter

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

I really enjoyed this book. The narrative is well paced and whilst it’s part of a wider series, it stands on its own as a story. The tension builds nicely in the first part, with more emotional resolution in the second. I liked the main character, and you get a real sense of the physicality of the lifestyle in the early parts of the book.

The scene setting is really good, just real enough that you can picture it in your head, but not too overdone. The writing is sparse in some ways but it fits the mood of the book. Its well drawn, engaging and absorbing. At its centre is an idea that has its roots in a reality that we rarely hear about, there were small women only settlements for various reasons.  I warmed to the central characters, and the dilemmas she faced. It felt real and plausible as a basis for a story.

I liked that that it was real about what a proper defence would have to look like, and that the character arc followed a generous and well thought-out narrative. I especially liked that the expectation around how relationships might work out changed as the story went on, it was intricate and delicate the way that this was done and it didn’t feel forced, like a whodunit, but with clues around how expectations might change. I thoroughly enjoyed it, highly recommended.

I was given a free copy of this book to review.

The great unwritten novel

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

They have just released a list of the best books of the century.

My book is not on it. In their defence my book is neither written nor published.

Still I feel a pang of disappointment at an opportunity missed.

We are only twenty years into the century so there is still time.

And being honest I think their list is a little premature.

Although perhaps after this point we are stopping books.

They have heard that on twitter and I have not.

Because I was not on twitter that day or didn’t follow the right literary society.

Perhaps I should be running out and stock piling books right now because not only are there no more to be written there are no more to be printed. It might be about the trees.

It might not, maybe there’s just a government decree.

I look around at all the books I own.

Will this be enough? I look at my unread pile.

It will be enough.

It will certainly be enough.

What is going to happen to all the authors?

Some will be ok, some have made enough to survive but what about ones like me who haven’t churned out their great novel yet?

Or maybe they are going to rationalise?

Perhaps everybody is allowed one novel apiece and this was simply the last list where it was a free for all. Perhaps right now they are allotting single novel slots and I am missing out. I need to follow twitter more closely.

I sit looking at the list of great novels. I am unsure what to do. Unsure who to call or where to turn. What is going on out there? How can I find out? This was the very morning I was going to start my great novel. And now I have no idea what to do.

This might be the end of my writing career. The one I haven’t started yet. I need coffee. I look nervously at my phone. No notifications. Silence. That is probably because my notifications are switched off. Should I switch my notifications on? How do you even do that? I look at the computer screen. I bring up a new word document. There is no way you can make that phrase sexy or interesting. That isn’t just me, its just not possible.

I stare at the screen.

At the blank page.

Mild panic. I don’t know what to do.

I am only certain of one thing.

Today is not the day to start my novel.

I go downstairs and have that coffee, congratulating myself I have not wasted time on writing anything.

If you write a book and no one reads it, did you ever really write it?

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

If you write a book and no one reads it, did you ever really write it?

The book sat on the library shelf for a good few months after she died. I wasn’t here when the original events happened, only when the end came. I had thought to put the book in the coffin but then events intervened.

Lynette was always a little odd, but only a little, not so wildly odd that you needed to worry. I managed her in the last few years she worked here at the library. Lynette wore the same plaid skirt, same olive cardigan and green shirt almost everyday. She had the same box haircut all the time I knew her. All that ever changed was the little pin she used to keep her hair off her face. Sometimes it had a tiny enamel flower on it, sometimes a little cat, sometimes a strawberry or a heart.

Truthfully I should have made her redundant when we got computers but she was compliant, easy to manage. She had the neatest handwriting and she seemed to just be part of the library. Even if I’d have made her redundant she’d still have been here every day.

The story goes that there had been an academic here, a man. Married apparently. He used to come into the library. He was always friendly to Lynette. It was no secret she was infatuated. It wasn’t returned.

There were, apparently, a lot of girls. He had his favourites, one of whom was Jeanette. They flirted a lot, in the library. He would lean in close and she would smile up at him. There were rumours. His wife was a harridan-aren’t they always though? Jeanette was by all accounts young and attractive and now I have seen a photo of her I can see that they looked good together. Too bad for the wife.

Lynette and Jeanette were friends despite Lynette’s feelings for the man. We’ll never know what really happened. They simply disappeared one day-Jeanette and this man. Just sort of ran away together. No one was surprised. Jeanette had a cousin who thought it was out of character but no one bothered with it much. The wife pressed the police but who believes a scorned wife.

There was a lot of gossip but not much else. Lynette never mentioned it.

In any event a few months afterwards, the book turned up. In the library. On the shelf. Catalogued and all. No one thought anything of it. It was his last work before he left and ran away, a hardback version, properly bound. It was the only copy we had but we assumed somehow that there were other copies out there.

We should have offered it to his wife, but I wasn’t here then and that didn’t happen. So it sat there and the only person who ever took any notice of it was Lynette. She would take it off the shelf occasionally and look at. Just look at the cover. I once told her she should read it and that’s when it became a kind of joke-if no one reads it has it ever been written. We didn’t do it intentionally but we just kind of made sure that we didn’t ever direct anybody to the book and it just sat there. There was no title printed on the spine and everyone overlooked it.

Then Lynette died. Quite suddenly. And I thought of the book and how it had made us laugh. I thought it would be a nice gesture to place it in her coffin. She had seemed attached to it, a memory of an unrequited love. She had few friends and no family. So I took the book off the shelf.

I sat down to thumb through the pages. It occurred to me after all this time I had no idea what it was even about.

I opened it. And there, where the pages had been cut out neatly to shape a space was a pair of hands bound together, severed off at the wrists and perfectly preserved and a note, in the neatest handwriting.

‘Romance is dead.’