Available Now

This is my fourth book set in an alternate-history Britain under Nazi rule, though heaven alone knows why anyone would consider that sort of thing relevant these days. I assume that a victorious Reich would fall away from its wartime virulence and would settle into more or less conventional, corrupt authoritarianism, though not without a few characteristic flourishes among its English-speaking peoples. Set at quarter-century intervals after the defeat, the books have only the setting in common and do not form a sequence, and anyone calling them a quadrilogy will be hunted down and horribly re-educated. The Last of Glasseye and The Foundations of the Twenty-First Century (reviewed here) are both ghost stories; I, Mengele (reviewed here and here) emulates Spinrad's The Iron Dream in presenting an actual cultural product of the alternate timeline; and The National Genius features AI technology and European retrenchment as vehicles for patriotic insight. It's available as a real book or, if you must, as a PDF ebook. I started it in March and then had to coax it through all the heatwaves, so in either format it merits immediate purchase, avid perusal and enthusiastic publicity.

Political Pareidolia

Even the most venerable heritages are not immune to controversy, and that of Egypt is no exception. A wall mural painted in Cairo for the occasion of a state visit by Xi Jinping depicted Nefertiti and Tutankhamen with dark skin, precipitating an immediate fracas and the mural's hurried deletion. Ominous noises were made about Afrocentric conspiracy theorists attempting a cultural hijack of the glory of the Pharaohs; in fact, what had happened was that those responsible for the painting naturally decided to favour the all-conquering artistic merits of the fast and cheap. Rather than wasting time and money consulting mere historians and archaeologists, they assigned the design commission to an infoslop generator, which reasoned that since Egypt is in Africa the Pharaohs must have had a touch of the tarbrush.

Incomplete Correction

The Christian state of Tennessee has declared a moratorium on terminally correcting its enemies in the wake of yet another botched execution; doubtless because the object of the exercise is female, nobody has yet suggested that she was saved by divine intervention. As a mentally disturbed teenager with an alleged history of childhood sexual abuse, the beneficiary was convicted of murder and sentenced to death because she happened to be slightly over eighteen; her accomplice in the killing, who happened to be slightly under, received a prison sentence. The injections failed to accomplish her correction after forty minutes of trying, so she is receiving "life-saving medical care," presumably so that the Christian state of Tennessee and its friend Baby Jesus can have another bash later on.

Simple, Simone Says

With remarkable diplomatic tact, the head of EDF Energy has waited entire weeks after the year's fifth fatal heatwave to recommence touting the virtues of fossil fuels. As always, the solution to the climate catastrophe is to enable those primarily responsible for it to keep doing more of the same. It also stands to reason that locally sourced oil and gas are greener than the imported varieties, because the most harmful aspect of fossil fuels is famously transportation as opposed to extraction and consumption. Still, it would be unfair to label the head of EDF Energy as simply a salesman for oil and gas: he is also a shill for the blanched radioactive pachyderm at Hinkley Point C, which EDF Energy has been charitably described as building for nearly a decade and which is expected to remain in that euphemistic state for half a decade more at double the original cost. Alas, "it will take decades to wean off from that dependency," not because of anything EDF Energy and its cartel-mates might be doing or not doing, but simply because that is the way of the world.

Detectable Advantages

London's railway stations have been privileged to host the latest glorious manifestation of technological Britishness, namely the automation of witness unreliability. Six months and three hundred thousand in taxpaers' money were spent on a trial of surveillance equipment which scans faces for comparison against a police blacklist. The equipment recognised one single face, and did so incorrectly; hence the trial has been extended another four months and allowed to metastasize onto the Underground. Fortunately, Britain's leading liberal newspaper reports as a fact that the aim of the exercise is to help catch offenders and people breaching court orders; so the throwing of taxpayers' money at profit-making snooper companies must indubitably, as always, be purely secondary and entirely incidental.

Not Altogether Why We Fought

Patriots will no doubt rejoice to discover that, although British awareness of the Holocaust did not necessarily begin with Mr Churchill's personal liberation of Auschwitz, British values regarding the victims were about as robust as ever. Public sympathy for European Jews was duly balanced with legitimate and understandable concerns about shirking and black-marketeering; and when immigration restrictions were slightly eased after Kristallnacht hinted at what was to come, the mercies of the British state were confined to selected children. Roma, non-heterosexuals and other genuine Untermenschen were doubtless as common-sensically forgotten at the time as the sufferings and sacrifices of the Communist hordes are patriotically elided today.

Lourdes, Art Thou Not Worthy to Receive Me

While visiting France amid the Church of Rome's customary trappings of poverty and humility, the Pope has once more called for a healing of the church's "deep wounds, infidelities and painful errors." Apparently we are to hope that the recovery process will be aided by the absence among these afflictions of crimes and sins. His Holiness is due to meet a handful of those whom various soldiers of Christ treated as spoils of war; although at least one survivors' group has already complained that the delegates have been "carefully selected" by the church, presumably in order to avoid tainting divine justice with the merely human variety and its inconvenient lust for compensation. It may not be entirely irrelevant that the Pope's words were delivered at Lourdes, which is reputed, no doubt reliably, as a place of healing; and that his prescription was to "humbly place ourselves under the Lord’s purifying gaze" - that same Lord who gazed down from His heavenly throne upon each and every abuse, and decreed that each and every one of them should go ahead as He had planned since the beginning of time.

Doubtful Thomas

Having spent so much time and effort protecting their realm from the perils of science and history, the Trumpster and his head-tribble will be relieved that an embarrassing document penned by a Founding Father is about to be auctioned off. The document is a letter from Thomas Jefferson, a slave-owner who compromised his admirably anti-woke domestic arrangements by dabbling in philosophy and by mixing his Christianity with rationalism instead of nationalism. It seems that his correspondence further tarnishes his reputation by advocating peace abroad and fiscal responsibility at home, in defiance of all that made America great aforetimes. Though privately owned, Jefferson's letter has also subverted American values by having itself displayed at a place of education; it is now to be sold for an estimated hundred and forty-two and a half thousand portraits of its writer, and patriots will presumably be hoping for its rapid disappearance into some collector's trophy hoard.

Your Gravy Train is Buffering

The nation's greatest infoslop emporium appears to have developed a certain Britishness about its completion schedule. Initiated as part of Team Starmer's dash for data and boosted as oven-ready for 2027, the project thus far amounts to the promises of some people who value themselves at a modest twenty-six thousand million sterling, and an empty scaffolding yard. A further three hundred and fourteen infoslop emporia are waiting in line, and it is estimated that their energy consumption will amount to a hundred and sixty per cent of the peak demand for the entire country; so the National Grid will need some time to adjust its priorities and get the little people accustomed to the blackouts and the bills. Doubtless the discombobulation of the beastly Russians and the Heathen Chinee will make it all worth while at some point.

Coming Soon