Ebook Discount

From May 27 – June 3  Jonathon Munros will be discounted to 99c on Amazon in the US and 99p in the UK. The third book in a series, in which the evil Jonathon Munro violates the only reason his evil behaviour has as yet not been punished. He is to be replaced by an android, who learns to behave like the real man. However. Jonathon’s inherent evil has been underestimated, and the android, knowing of Jonathon’s obsession with sex, and knowing that sex is needed for reproduction, decides to start reproducing itself. What could possibly go right? A dystopian hard science fiction novel that, while the third of a series, stands alone as long as you accept the characters have a past, and a problem that makes the Terminator seem modest.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EK5T6WE

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Book Discount

From August 22 – 28  Jonathon Munros will be discounted to 99c on Amazon in the US and 99p in the UK. The third book in a series, in which the evil Jonathon Munro violates the only reason his evil behaviour has as yet not been punished. He is to be replaced by an android, who learns to behave like the real man. However, Jonathon’s inherent evil has been underestimated, and the android, knowing of Jonathon’s obsession with sex, and knowing that sex is needed for reproduction, decides to start reproducing itself. What could possibly go right? A dystopian hard science fiction novel that, while the third of a series, stands alone as long as you accept the characters have a past, and a problem that makes the Terminator seem modest.

Brexit – Where is the Logic?

Governance is an interesting problem, and since I write novels, a number of them are about this. In my Dreams Defiled, one of the characters is given responsibilities on the highest governing body, and what she finds is that while some, as expected, oppose what she wants to do, others, who are supposed to be working for her are busy undermining her. If that sounds like what is happening to Theresa May, it is of course accidental because the novel was published well before this Brexit debacle, but had she read my novel, just maybe she would have taken some of the advice I had given to my character (who ignored it, of course) and would not be in this mess. Of course she could well be in a different mess.

Why logic? Logic may seem a funny requirement to some, but it is a means of reaching conclusions from a given set of premises in an orderly fashion, and it requires you to state the complete set of required facts, which include your objectives, then clearly identify the premises to be used.

In this context, the opportunities for Britain are to remain in the EU, exit with a deal, or exit with no deal. A deal involves both parties, and the EU has stated clearly that the deal Theresa May put to parliament is the onlydeal they will accept, there are precisely three possibilities. Corbyn has voted down the deal, he has stated that no deal must be voted down, which leaves only remain. Except he has not got the courage to say so. He has now proposed that there be a second referendum, except he also refuses to say whether he believes this to be the proper way to go. Brexit has been plagued with leaders who have behaved illogically, starting with Cameron. If you are happy with where you are, it is illogical to offer change. Cameron, satisfied that the people would vote to remain, offered the referendum to silence some vocal members of his party. Risking the country’s future to address a personal deficiency is not “top of the class material”.

If you set out on a journey, logic suggests you should have decided where you are going. It helps to point you in the right direction. Accordingly, before issuing the leave notice to the EU, the British politicians should have decided what they were trying to achieve. Of course they would not get all they wanted, but they most certainly would not get what they failed to request.

The first requirement in any negotiation is you should have a line below which you say, “No deal”. Each side usually starts with a position that is most desirable from their point of view. Each side then decides what from the other’s position they can accommodate, what they cannot give up, and how badly they want the deal. This last part is important, because the more you want it, the more you have to concede. However, the final result must not be too one-sided, because if it is, the losing side will then set about doing whatever to undermine it. However, one of the more bizarre facts of this situation is that the UK politicians are finally realizing they will have to accept some of what they do not want.

For the Europeans, they have several objectives, but one of the main ones is to protect the integrity of the EU. If a leaving country were to get the same advantages as a member, the EU would disintegrate, so the UK has to realize it has to give up something. I believe the major thing the UK values is the free movement of goods and people going into the EU, but what it does not like includes the free movement of people tothe UK, the imposition of Brussels rules, and the concession of sovereignty to the European Court of Justice. There are other issues, such as the potential for a European army, and the trend towards downstream political unity. They are not ready for the United States of Europe. 

If the UK leaves, they can do nothing about the free movement of goods and people to the EU, as the EU determines these. On the other hand, the EU should see advantages in keeping an association with the UK, so reciprocal rights come into play. The fear of sales declining is probably unwarranted. The UK has a trade deficitwith the EU, so the EU has an interest in keeping trade going. The UK is Germany’s biggest market for cars, and the UK could easily purchase vehicles from elsewhere, or even go back and make them, given electric vehicles offer a great start-up opportunity. Of course there have are advantages in being in the EU and these have to be given up, but a trade deal is not imperative. New Zealand has no such deal, and we trade quite harmoniously. Yes, there are limits to how much we can sell, but that is one of the facts of life. There is the rest of the world.

We also hear statement that there will be chaos with “No Deal”. This reminds me that chaos sufficient to bring the industrial world to its knees would occur on January 1, 2000, through the so-called millennial bug. I seem to recall waking and finding things going on more or less as expected. Unless politicians do something very silly, I expect the UK citizens will wake up on March 30 and feel more or less fine.

If you ask, what do border inspections achieve, you will conclude there is no need for a hard border, or border inspections. What would they achieve? Leaving aside the fact they cannot be put in place in time, tariffs do not need to be collected at the border. Sales of all goods have a VAT tax. That can be modified to collect tariffs at the same time. If the objective is to keep out people, why? If they are simply coming to spend money, who cares? If the objective is to stop illegal immigrants from working, then you do that through the tax system. They have to register to get a tax identification number. Sure, they could break such laws, but the simplest way of stopping that is to make it very expensive for the employer. The employer now becomes your immigration officers while you sort out these border issues. The prevention of criminals entering, or agricultural pests or viruses would be dealt with the same way as now. There is no reason why March 30 should be particularly different from March 28. So the EU might block things. That you cannot help; all the UK can do is make things sane where it controls them.Just to add to the complications, the Irish backstop is claimed to be necessary because of the Good Friday accord. As I argue above, the absence of border controls is not insurmountable, butthe recent terrorist attack by the New IRA may be making that accord lose value and harden attitudes. It will be interesting to see what the Republic does about such activities. In the meantime, good luck, UK. The current efforts suggest it might be needed.

Ebook discount

Discounted to 99c/99p from August 9 – 16: Jonathon Munros, book 3 of the First Contact trilogy. Jonathon Munro, a truly evil man, was to be removed from society and an android is made to substitute for him. The android has to study what Jonathon did, so he could act like him. When the android learned to self-replicate, what could possibly go right? A story of corruption, revenge, greed for power, and sentient machines in a dystopian future.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EK5T6WE

Scottish secession? A failure of governance?

In the previous post, I discussed the issue of secession, admittedly, because it was a blog post and not a book, in a very oversimplified way, but the question remains, why join, or why secede? First, union. Groups unite because together they are stronger than when separate. Historically, strength was important to save the citizens from being exploited, or even pillaged. The US is now so strong militarily that probably nobody can defeat it, but that would not be the case if it comprised fifty squabbling separate countries. Similarly, the fact that the US has such a strong economy means that it alone of all countries can print the world’s reserve currency. However, to form a union, the various disparate groups have to give up things. Why secede? My guess is, at least one of the various groups feels it has been discriminated against. Thus in Iraq, the main problem is probably not religion, but rather the corruption of the various leaders who use religion to support their positions and suppress others. We see that at present in Iraq where the US set up a “democracy”, and al-Maliki set about suppressing the Sunnis. But shortly, Scotland will vote on secession. What could have led to that? The question is important because it shines some light on the nature of governance. Points to note are that the Scots have not been deliberately treated differently from any other citizens in the UK, which in turn has been quite reasonably governed. There has been no selective discrimination, and no clearly bad governance or corruption. So why? 

My guess is the ignition point came from Margaret Thatcher. Her ultra right wing policies caused the end of heavy industry in the UK, which in turn was largely in Scotland. The problem was not restricted to Scotland, as the Welsh coal industry shutdown, and the English automotive industry was effectively ended, but the damage to Glasgow was probably far greater than anywhere else. So, why did Thatcher do that? It most certainly was not just to deal to Labour party constituencies. The problem was that the industries in Britain had become very inefficient, and could not stand on their own two feet.

There were various villains. First, the cost of labour was not competitive with the cost in places such as Korea. The options for Clyde shipbuilding, for example, were to pay workers on Korean levels (that was not going to happen), sell their ships for higher prices (how?), or they had to make them more efficiently. The German automotive industry faced the same challenges, and it succeeded by accepting it would have to sell cars at a higher price, but they would make them better. The key was to give value. Many British industries did not follow this strategy, which required intense investment in R&D, and in modernizing their factories. Management failed Britain, and management is also part of governance.

The Unions were also part of governance, and were part of the problem. To protect employment, they demanded over-manning. The classic example involved changing a light bulb. It has been stated that an electrical worker had to change the bulb, a rigger had to hold the ladder, and there had to be someone from stores to bring the new bulb. This in turn has given rise to a range of jokes. One of the more biting examples is:

How many theoretical physicists are required to change a light bulb?

Answer: Two. One to hold the bulb, and one to rotate the Universe.

The joke has nothing to do with light bulbs, or employment.

Another problem is that union requires sharing, and agitators leap on the advantages of not sharing, when there are such advantages. Thus if Scotland secedes, Scotland will get the oil money. That will make some Scottish politicians salivate. There will be a price, and whether the voters hear about such prices is another matter. I have no idea what the Scottish voters will decide, but it raises the issue that as the size of a union grows, what matters most? Economic efficiency or fairness? What should be done to promote what you choose? Any thoughts?

Syria, Iraq and Ukraine: Is Secession right?

Those who have followed this blog for a while will recall a number of posts on some of the issues involved in these countries. What is common to these countries is that all have armed uprisings to achieve either overthrow of the government, or secession. We might also note that many in Scotland want to secede, BUT they are going about it by having the Scots vote on it. Further, my guess is that if Scotland secedes, there will still be a substantial fraction of the Scots who do not wish to. If we think of Ukraine, the question of secession by the East may well be answered differently if only the east votes, or if all Ukraine votes. Majority have to win a vote, but the majority of whom? If there is an armed uprising, for the uprising to end, there has to be a good reason to lay down the arms. So to end the uprising, either concessions have to be made, or the rebels have to be removed from the field, either by arrest or by killing. Now, not everybody can get their way, so why do they want secession? Alternatively, why does Union work?

The most obvious example of where union works is the US. There we have fifty states, many of which would qualify as powerful countries, and they are held together by a Union. The United Kingdom almost works, but is apparently a little creaky at the seams. So what are the differences here? The most obvious one is history. Scotland and England spent many centuries warring. The parts of the UK still consider themselves separate countries within the Union, which makes it different from the US. One important aspect of the US is that the educational system imprints the importance of being United, and the citizens accept that. So, in my opinion, a United system works best when everyone speaks a common language and has no more than location to identify citizens as being different. Notwithstanding that, a Federal system works quite well when there are regions with different languages and different cultures, provided the Federation accepts the differences and shows pride in them. Thus Canada, although occasionally a little creaky, basically works well. In the US there are differences between states, and again these are accepted and praised. The Federal government makes a major effort to see that all states are treated more or less equally. Also, a fair application of fair law is required.

Now if we look at our troublesome regions, Ukraine is plagued by a section that uses a different language, and worse than that, the Western Ukraine has in the past seemed to want to suppress that language, and there is no reason to believe that attitude will change. Poroshenko has promised that suppression will stop, but the problem there is nobody believes him. That gets to the next obvious requirement for a Union: the various parts have to trust the whole to treat them according to agreed rules. Ukraine fails because law is not strongly founded there.

When we look at Syria and Iraq, the problem is reasonably clear: governments based on religion do not work when there is more than one religion. Governments must be secular. It is here that the West has failed these regions. Yes, Saddam and Bashir are not exactly examples of good governance; they have been brutal and of course they are/were anything but democratic. However, provided you obeyed the rules, you were generally safe there, and until the West started bombing Iraq the first time, Iraq was prosperous, secular, safe, and reasonably liberal. Now it is a feeding ground for Jihadis, who cannot wait to get revenge on the West. Now, the Shia government has decided to get revenge on past suppression, and it is actively discriminating against the Sunni minority, which is hardly desirable when that minority provided most of the military class previously. The US hardly helped either by effectively making the Kurdish part a separate entity.

The question now is, what should be done? My view is that everybody else should keep out. Yes, what is going to happen is not going to be pretty, and a lot more blood will be spilt, but this is largely due to outside intervention. There has been no sign of competence so far, other than in bombing, so why does anyone think there will be an improvement? The problem is, politicians visualize the ending they want; they do not seem capable of visualizing what they do not want.

Why should my comments count? I have no special experience that makes my opinion more important than yours, and my one and only experience that is relevant was being caught up in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, during which I talked to people from both sides. On the other hand, I have thought quite a bit about the issues in general because in the future history novels I write, I have “invented” various forms of governance to support the themes related to abuse of power. After all this thought, I do not know the answers, although I think I can guess what will not work. If you, the reader, feel you can contribute, please do.

Finally, remember the reduced prices on my Mars novels this solstice; see the previous post for details.

How would uncontrolled growth affect society?

In the previous blog, I mentioned Paul Ehrlich’s dystopian view of the future, based on the argument, which is indisputably true, that you cannot have exponential growth on a fixed area. That is straightforward mathematics, and there is no way around it. Once upon a time, apparent limits were dealt with by emigration, thus many from Europe that could not make out went to America, but that was only available because we could expand the area. There is, of course, the rest of the Universe, essentially an unlimited volume, but there are problems, the most obvious one of which is that we have no way of getting there right now.

So, what do we do? Many will argue that we can put off the decisions. Thus the resource shortage is not imminent. Oil is obviously going to run out eventually, but eventually should be a long way away. We can make out and deal with that when it turns up, right? In my view, wrong. As illustrated in the futuristic ebook novels that I am writing to illustrate my argument, I think there is a worse problem: economics. What has happened is that governments have tended to leverage themselves. The idea is simple enough: if you borrow now, then grow nicely, it is far easier to pay back in the future. Much of the infrastructure built in the early twentieth century was constructed this way. That is fine while the economy is growing, but less so when it begins to contract. Think of owning a home. As your salary increases, mortgage repayments are progressively easier, but if your salary decreases or ends, or if interest rates rise, an overcommitted home-owner faces insolvency. And with fixed resources, certain types of growth go on indefinitely. We cannot know when opportunities will cease to arise, but we know they will.

In my ebook Puppeteer, I suggested a future where the cost of filling a car, admittedly with a big tank, cost $1,000. Because of the cost of oil, only too many people could not get to work so employment dropped, tax takes dropped, consumption dropped dramatically hence businesses collapsed and governments became insolvent. The problem then is, everybody still has to live, they have to eat, they have to keep out of the rain. At first, people try to get by and the wealthier ones succeed, but what happens to those who cannot? How many of those who are not wealthy but who are in a position of power or authority will not try to use that position for personal benefit? My guess was that lawlessness and corruption would obviously increase. Not everybody will become lawless, but enough will to make a country ungovernable at which point society starts to fall to pieces. If the choice is between robbery and starving, what would you do? Of course this will not happen overnight, and Puppeteer is set as the decay is commencing, and the plot involves one person’s scheme to avoid collapse by organizing the greatest piece of terrorism with the goal of bringing everyone to their senses.

Why write such a novel? Apart from the fact it gave an environment to write a thriller, I am hoping that some of the thoughts expressed might make people think. If we go back to Ehrlich’s equation, the outcome is not inevitable. There is no reason why we cannot use our brains and work out a way to avoid these desperate outcomes. But if we are going to do that, there is no time better to start than now. And that will start with working out what we have to do and how we are going to pay for it. Of course you would not approve of the terror methodology in Puppeteer (and neither do I), but what do you think could bring governments to act for the long-term benefit of society?

Voting: a right or an obligation?

Nobody can predict the future, but I think you can make reasonable guesses about some aspects of it based on applying logic to current evidence. An example might be, eventually, if we keep expanding our use of fossil oil, there will come a time when production cannot match needs. After all, we are using oil that was formed tens of millions of years ago, and even if nature is still making it, it is doing so too slowly to be of any further use to us. We do not know how much is there, so we do not know when the shortage will bite, but we know it will sooner or alter. In logic, our choices would appear to include (a) find an alternative source of energy, (b) find an alternative means of making products similar to what is made from oil, e.g. biofuels, (c) find an alternative means of propelling vehicles, e.g. electric vehicles, (d) transport fewer things and more slowly, e.g. walk to work, use wind-powered ships. There are probably others, but that is not the issue. What is obvious, at least to me, is that at some time in the future, those in power will have to make some very difficult decisions that will affect everyone’s future. The question is, how will they decide? And how will the decision makers be chosen? In a democracy, the voters select the decision-makers, but what happens if the election is based on little more than attractiveness on TV?

 What bothers me is that only too many people are not interested in thinking, but in our democracy, they have equal influence. As an example, check out some of the debates on evolution. Some people seem to believe asserting evolution is a challenge to their belief in God. Their thinking then goes, God is, therefore evolution is not. This is just silly logic. There is absolutely no connection between whether God or evolution, or both, are true. Einstein was amongst one of the greatest scientists of all times and he happily accepted evolution, and he believed strongly in God. The issue lies in the failure of many to accept and analyze the facts through logic. Strictly speaking, it hardly matters whether everybody properly consider evolution, but it matters if people stop logically analyzing the facts when forming policy upon which millions of lives depend. Should not everybody who wants to vote accept the responsibility of thinking about the issues?

 The question then is, what can be done about this? When I was writing the trilogy of futuristic novels, starting with A Face on Cydonia, I needed a new form of government to get around this problem. What I proposed was that many countries formed a Federation, they retained their national governments, but the Federation Government had members appointed partly by election from sections of the community, but all candidates had to be approved as capable of doing the job for which they were standing. Their role was to determine whether a given policy was workable, and to show what the consequences of implementation would be, and to prevent anything that would give consequences outside those considered “acceptable”. People standing for power had to announce in advance essentially what they were going to do, although of course there was always flexibility for reasonably unforeseen circumstances. The novels, of course, are not intended as a political treatise, but merely to provide some rules that the characters must follow.

 What I was trying to do, though, is to suggest that decisions have to be made based on analysis of the situation, and based on the facts. The stories are based on the obvious problem: people do not necessarily follow the rules. Nevertheless, I feel that it is important that governments behave logically. I am sure that with climate change, debt, decreasing availability of easy resources and an increasing population, some difficult decisions will need to be taken. If we get it right, future generations will be secure, but if we do not, then we are in trouble. My argument is that the time to start thinking about these problems is now. Do you agree?

Democracy and governance

One of the subthemes in the futuristic novels I am writing is, how should we be governed? Most readers of this blog will think the answer is obvious: democracy. Think about this for a minute, and ask, is this true, and how do you know? My answer is that democracy is too cumbersome. Trying to get everybody to even consider an issue is hopeless in our modern life, and even if you can get them to think about it, the thoughts tend to be very superficial. So, what we tend to do is to give everybody a vote, but they have to spend it on a politician. We do not have democracy; we have a republic, and the United States constitution in particular is based on the Roman republic. What happened then was that the eligible citizens were all given a “stone” and they went to a selected spot and cast it. The United States President is elected in a similar way to the Roman Consul, the electoral college representing the role of the great families. Most other “democracies” work in a similar way. This is more efficient at decision-making, but it has its problems.

Recently, the death of Margaret Thatcher illustrated what I consider to be much of what is wrong with our political system. You may not agree with her policies, but why not disagree while she was alive? Perhaps because there was nothing the public could do to change them? In an election you get one vote, so one issue predominates. It is not democratic to have no means of deciding separable issues, but merely more efficient.

I think it is a fair assessment that when she came to power, Britain was sick. The manufacturing industries were simply non-competitive. There were several reasons for this. One was the overall debt incurred by Britain in fighting Hitler. This debt totally wrecked Britain’s economy, and Britain would have been better to have stayed out of the war, or to have made peace after Dunkirk. The world, of course, would have been a much worse place, but the fact remains, Britain never really recovered from that war. The second problem was that British industry did not reinvest, but rather it ran its factories into the ground, and did not value what it had. A long time ago, I owned a Datsun 1600, which was quite an advanced car for its time, and one day, while driving in the Australian country, I had trouble with a hose. I limped into this small country town with one garage, which nominally was an Austin/Morris agency, so I stopped. Could he do something to get me to …  No problem, he had the part. Austin had sold its designs to Datsun, and persisted with a much inferior design, but the Austin hoses exactly fitted the Datsun. So Japan has a car industry and Britain does not. The final piece of bad news for Britain prior to Thatcher was the Union movement. Nobody would do anything that was not on their formal job description, which meant that industries were hopelessly overstaffed. Margaret Thatcher excised the cancer. The trouble was, she excised far too much. She closed the coal industry, almost overnight, and industry simply collapsed, unable to compete with German and Japanese industry. I consider this was a triumph of political dogma over logic

Thatcher became extremely unpopular, until the Falklands. Whether she was completely rational there is a matter of opinion, but she decided to retake them. In my opinion, all other things being equal, Britain should have failed. What happened is that Thatcher risked many lives as she staked her reputation, and the question is, was what she did a rational assessment of the situation, a moral stand, or was it a throw of the dice to rescue an otherwise impossible political position? Whatever it was, it worked, and her reputation reached unparalleled heights.

So what we saw was that prior to Thatcher, Britain was sliding into a depressed inefficient state, thanks to politicians who refused to take hard decisions. Thatcher went to the opposite extreme: there was no shortage of hard decisions, but how many of them were right? What we need is a government that makes the right decisions. The problem is, how to get such a government?

 

The power play!

When some people get their share of what a group wanted, the first thing they do is seek a bigger share. Following on from the previous post, we won the right to purchase a durene-rich gasoline stream. Now what? Superficially, the answer should be obvious: design the plant, build it, float a company, etc. What actually happened was that I got a much deeper view of how the management of large companies operates. Basically, the egos of many of the managers get in the way. The first thing that actually happened was that ICINZ wished to take over completely the development, thus leaving the small company with nothing to do. They argued we had no experience and could contribute nothing; my concern was that they had equally no experience in a venture this size. I wanted the parent company ICI to do it, and had that happened, I would have been happy to walk away. The UK parent was clearly competent to do this, but it was far from clear that ICINZ could do it. I tried to get them to hire a project manager from the UK, but without luck. However, it was not all bad. We managed a concession: the right to purchase the eventual product at factory price, i.e. nobody could get it cheaper. While ICINZ was busy getting the project underway, we had to work out ways of using the product in further downstream ventures. One of the stranger outcomes of these maneuverings was that the joint venture company had to have its own Board, and it decided to call itself ICI Synchem. The small company put forward the founder with a legal background as its director.

What happened over the next two years could even make a small book. Basically the tension grew, and at one stage I was called into a Board meeting to act as a witness. Our lawyer then accused ICINZ of intending to supply durene to an American company to make pyromellitic acid there, which could compete with the proposed venture. ICINZ denied this vigorously, things got heated, but there was no evidence provided. To maintain the joint venture, that director had to resign, and I found myself a director of an ICI company. (Actually, I was already – that is another story – so that made two.)

Two years later, during which the venture spent $5 million developing the project, the New Zealand government killed the project by selling the synfuels plant and refusing to include the supply contract. Worse, they sold it to one company, without competitive tender or negotiation. They did not inform us, and recall, ICI at the time was one of the largest chemical companies in the world, and one of the largest methanol producers. Even apart from the durene, ICI at least could have been a bidder. ICI then walked away from the venture when it became apparent the new owners would not negotiate supply, with ICI Australia taking over and absorbing ICINZ. There was no legal action for breach of contract.

Why did they do that? Who knows? The Synfuels plant was not a success, but recall in a previous post I showed that it would have been reasonably straightforward to make it earn up to $500 million per year more, and simply selling most of the methanol it made would have made it much more profitable. This illustrates a major problem with a government owning a major productive facility: politicians tend to have fixed ideas, and they apply them wherever they can. This Synfuels plant was so outside their experience they simply had no understanding of what they had, and since it started with the opposition party, why not make it look as bad as possible? That illustrates one of the problems with democracy that will become more prominent in my future history novels: too many voters do not put in sufficient effort to understand what they are voting for.

Why no legal challenge? For ICI it was not necessarily a bad outcome. Their PEEK and PES factories were now no longer under pressure, and since essentially all the work that had been carried out could be called research and development, with the takeover it probably qualified for the Australian 150% tax write-offs. ICINZ had also collected the minor party’s share of the cash, and finally, after shifting staff into ICI Synchem, it could unload certain staff without some of the financial liabilities. Our financiers also did not sue because they had their eyes on the state-owned Bank of New Zealand, which was about to be privatized. The small company was effectively wiped out financially. (At that time, contingency law suits were banned in New Zealand, and when you take a financial hit like that, there is no possibility of paying hideously expensive lawyers, whose only incentive is to keep the suit going as long as possible.) Then, to make things worse, shortly after this, Wall Street decided to collapse. I was down to the financial survival mode! One thing I did have was plenty of spare time so I decided to try my hand at writing again. Rightly or wrongly I felt this unusual history might give me inspiration for novels that were a little different.