I wrote this book twenty five years ago in Seattle, where I lived with my wife and child and worked as a self-employed and often unemployed electrician. That I post it now, after all these years may seem odd, but the ability to write a novel and then broadcast it are two very different skill sets. The first requires a dreamy and free ranging imagination. The second, a sharp focus on the details of day to day business. These two traits are so far apart, even opposed to one another, that one would wonder to find both in the same person.
With more of the practical mind I might have persevered to find a publisher. But in matters of business I was, back then, lackadaisical at best, thus my spare time. I began the story as a hobby, not a career and just as I finished the first draft, with the help of an old TX computer and a daisy wheel printer, making a few copies on a xerox for some friends, I boxed it up with all my other possessions and moved to Puerto Rico for a new business opportunity in the construction industry. This time, with two partners, the business thrived and the book was forgotten.
But the changing times in which we now live has revived my fascination with dystopian worlds and some months of leisure have allowed me to revisit the novel, edit it a bit and, in this far quicker, computer managed era, present it online.
What strikes me is the unsettling possibility that what I idly imagined over two decades ago might now actually come to pass. When I wrote it the ozone layer was melting down and on that premise I began my story. But now we have the equally serious Eco-disaster of global warming, not as a threat but a reality, which may very well entail the crop failures and the seeding of the skies with permanent clouds which I long ago postulated, and this in my novel is just the beginning of the end.
My megalomaniac, billionaire, founder of a new world order named Herbert Luke, bears a striking resemblance to one of our new world leaders, even before I’d heard his name, two syllables in his first name, one in his last, a megalomaniac (with the emphasis on maniac) and narcissist, guess who.
But the catalyst for the fall, the plague, still lurks as a very real threat to society in the COVID virus. The avian flu, in the ripe breeding grounds near the equator, with impoverished masses living in close, squalid quarters with animals, could with one slight gene variation, as the W.H.O. organization so frequently reminds us, turn into a deadly pandemic. These are our times and they are fraught with peril.
Our boasted technological revolution, wondrous and widespread as it appears, also hangs upon a very slender thread, which is an electrical grid, so interconnected and interdependent that I see it as a spider’s web on a tree which any violent storm in our society might easily blow completely away. And our interconnected computers, now running almost everything, are at least as vulnerable to viruses as we are, even more so, being in their infancy, one helpless babe, crying in its cradle.
Religious fanaticism hasn’t changed. If anything, one might say it’s grown in the last twenty five years. Religion and science are diametrically opposed. One is spiritualism, the other, materialism, and our human nature, which I guarantee hasn’t changed in the last twenty five (or the last ten thousand) years swings to one or the other, violently so in times of extreme stress or change. If our technology trips up and harms us, I could easily see a backlash, a paradigm shift against it and mob rule and mass destruction are not so unimaginable if the crisis is serious. For all our logic and reason, violent passions still lurk in our semi-dark natures and if science fails us we might turn on it, reject it, just as a child angrily throws a broken toy against a wall and then crushes it under his shoe.
And with our scientific world condemned, what better symbol of spiritualism than a blank page, because it seeks to rise above all materialism, into a heaven indescribable, uniform, universal and perfect. So the bible of the blank page is born.
But these pages aren’t blank, so read on.
