Puritan ethics sweeps UK - Time with a gift of tears

Ten years ago, I took advantage of an offer to get one of my unsold manuscripts (Time with a gift of tears) printed in paperback form – for the princely sum of £60 for ten copies.  I’d tried the science fiction time travel novel MS with a number of publishers and agents, without success. I’d just had my first book published, a western, but that publisher didn’t publish SF or fantasy. As the story was time-linked and it featured a unique time-travel gimmick, I wanted to get it ‘out there’ to establish some kind of provenance.

The story took place in the UK in 2020, at the beginning of a race revolt; the time traveller goes there from 2033.

All these years later, it needs rewriting, not least because 2020 is too close now; also, since I hadn’t predicted the massive surge in smart phone usage, the ubiquitous and pernicious social media, and the switch from laptop to tablets, and of course Brexit.  Some predictions in the book for pre-2007 were: an Iraqi exodus, a Sellafield Accident, Zimbabwe escapees, legalising of cannabis in UK, Britain expelled from the Commonwealth (never saw Brexit coming!), and a terrorist attack on Sellafield… Here’s the timeline for subsequent years:

2014                                African exodus; Racial uprisings in UK; all British police armed

2015                                Solent Islamic Fundamentalist nuclear blast; legalising heroin; Lawless August

2016                                Limited War

2017                Politically Correct Legislation; Typhoid epidemic; 13^th Terror Scare; 

PC Legislation revoked; Zimbabwe settlement

2019                    Puritan ethics began to sweep through UK; Asian Flu computer virus; Sexual Rebound to Puritan ethics

2020                                Race Revolt

2022                Race Revolt ended

2023                Common Sense return to norm after Sexual Rebound

2025                Compromise Peace; Race Revolt ended

What I find amusing is that all that time ago I predicted PC legislation for 2017, and for 2019 Puritan ethics would sweep the UK. Judging by the latest sexual harassment scandals, I may have been out by a year on that last one…

Needless to say, it’s fiction and not likely to happen – any of it. Still, a nice little coincidence! 

Writing – research - displaced persons-1

Refugees from conflict have been in the news quite a while. Sadly, it is nothing new, though the scale and the destination of the refugees have altered over time.

While reading To the Frontier by Geoffrey Moorhouse (1984) I came across a number of passages relating to the thousands of Afghan refugees who fled across the border to Pakistan, long before 9/11 and its global repercussions.

Some were not fleeing actual conflict, but they were fleeing for their lives. Because they didn’t conform to an ideology. In this case, the ideology was Marxism, as espoused by the Soviet invaders and their acolytes.

I’m paraphrasing here, mostly:

This concerns a professor who happened to be a dean of literature and social sciences at the university in Kabul when the communist coup took place in April 1978. As time passed, the atmosphere became charged, with aggressive Marxists making life intolerable and work untenable.

When the Russians arrived at the end of 1979, it got worse. The professor became part of an intellectual underground… ‘holding on to certain verities whose validity had been tempered with time; truths which had remained proven after many different kinds of revolution in many lands.’ (p191)

One by one, members of his fellowship had been arrested. The news filtered back to the survivors that, one after the other, their old colleagues had been tortured, had died. The same fate would almost certainly have befallen him if one of his friends talked. His friend had been arrested on the information supplied by one of his own students. As it happened, his friend was tortured to make him implicate others but he stayed silent and died without betraying anyone.

Still, the net was closing in and one night soon after his friend’s death, in February 1980, the professor was visited by some mujahedeen who helped him escape.

The professor only took his reading glasses; everything else he left behind, including his wife and son, who were spirited out of the country three months later.

History can teach lessons, if people bother to heed history. Career, family, and even life – destroyed because you didn’t conform to an ideology. Now, whether that’s fascism, communism, Marxism, or even political correctness, it’s immoral.

Next example of displaced persons will be gleaned from Beyond the Oxus by Monica Whitlock.