MAY 2025
Book news at last! A Martian Ending is (WAS!) now available as an “Advance Review Copy”. I know I’m always saying how much I want reviews, so you’d think I’d be encouraging you to go and grab one. But next month the damn thing will be free on Amazon for a few days – so I’m guessing you might just want to wait. The difference will be the typos I expect I’ll pick up on the final revision, and the replacement of a few words that I overuse (my brother suggests that we Brits have a tendency to describe everything as “little”, for example). Not much else will change.
I don’t want to say a lot more about the book. I think I mentioned in a previous ramble that I once tried to write a play about a time machine but gave up when I couldn’t imagine how the thing would actually work (not to mention all the parallel universes that would spring up). This time, I think Roland’s plan was feasible, if unexpected. But he was probably right: no one else would have dreamed of trying to carry it off.
Anyway, next month will include the link to the book in Kindle. I’m still pondering whether to stick it in a promo as well. I struggle to find books which I think are similar. (Maybe you can help me?) For example, it’s taken me a long time to put the stories in the “dystopian” category. In many ways, as people have pointed out, I see the future as being less radically different from today than other sci-fi writers, neither flying cars in cities with skyscrapers that disappear into the clouds nor post-apocalyptic groups of scavengers hacking each other to pieces for the last candle. I picture struggles to maintain and recover a climate in equilibrium, drastically restricted access to the mind-numbing Net, and technology that is more robust. In airless space, it’s no good if things stop working and you have to cross your fingers and hope that rebooting will sort it out.
All of which reminds me of the power blackout here in Spain (and Portugal and parts of France) at the beginning of the week, power generation in the Iberian Peninsula falling to ZERO! In the north where I live, we were lucky, being without electricity for under six hours. The local supermarket even stayed open, and we could still pay with cards, while other places were only taking cash or shut their doors. We bought some water (the mains supply nearly went off at one point), but declined to buy toilet paper. (Does anyone get that particular obsession? Do some people manage to do without it unless there is a crisis?) Coincidentally, the EU had advised everyone to stock up with 72 hours’ worth of supplies just a month or so ago. But few of us had bothered. I had a ten year old battery that failed to work in a thirty year old radio, but there was no news anyway.
It was much worse for anyone who relies on machines as a matter of life and death, of course, or for people stuck on trains for two hours without being able to open the doors, and even for pharmacies, shops, bars and restaurants where they had to chuck stuff away, but on the whole most people blundered through.
In fact, the worst thing for many of us was the lack of news. And while I sympathise with wrong-place wrong-time Spanish president Pedro Sánchez, he was perhaps a little too quick to suggest that private energy suppliers were to blame and assure us that the cause of the problem was definitely not the increasing reliance on solar and wind power (Spain and Portugal lead the EU in renewables), before admitting that he had no idea what had actually happened! They still couldn’t explain things on the news the following day, so they showed us a couple of scary looking graphs instead. And I’ve not been able to find out much more, but when a report from March by Aurora Energy Research notes that “rapid expansion [in Spain’s renewable energy sector] has placed increasing pressure on the country’s grid infrastructure, resulting in extremely localised grid curtailment” I begin to suspect that people knew there was a problem and simply haven’t had the time or haven’t been given the money to fix it (even though I’m still not sure what “curtailment” is or why the grid goes into panic mode when there’s either too little or too much energy being produced!).
Finally, on a different subject, I see that Jeff Bezos has got his Kuiper satellite programme off the ground (literally) at last and still hopes to compete with Musk’s Starlink operation (which now has some 8,000 satellites in orbit!), the Amazon and Blue Origin boss having noted in January that “there’s insatiable demand” for Internet. I assume that’s “insatiable” in a good sense of the word that I’m not familiar with and that our insatiable need for more and more won’t lead to blackouts becoming regular events in the not too distant future!