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The fellow sitting beside me slammed his book closed and sat looking pensive. 

The bus was approaching Cremorne junction.  I like the M30.  It starts where I get on so I’m assured of a seat and it goes all the way to Sydenham in the inner West, past Sydney University.  Part of the trip is particularly scenic, approaching and crossing the Harbour Bridge.  We’d be in The City soon.

My fellow passenger sat there just staring blankly into space.  I was intrigued.   So I asked what he had been reading that evoked such deep thought.  He smiled broadly, aroused from his reverie.  “Oh it’s just Inferno the latest Dan Brown,” he said.   

“So what did you think?” I asked. 

“Well I’m a writer and all of us want to be read," he replied.  "Eleven weeks at the top of the New York Times Best Seller list, outselling everything else several times over during that period speaks for itself.  He's got a bankable name, even if this book is not his best.”

“He’s a great read on a plane,” I said.  “The only problem for me when I was flying just after Inferno came out was that it was only in hard cover. Too heavy and bulky.  So I didn’t buy it.  But I’ve read it since.  A borrowed copy.  Brown got no royalty from me this time.”

“What did you think of it?” he asked.

“Well I’m getting a bit sick of the paperchase/scavenger hunt formula. It’s getting quite difficult for him to sustain the reader’s credulity when Langdon is so blatantly being led from city to city by a mastermind who stays just one step ahead of being foiled.  And why wouldn’t Langdon be asking, as I was, about the point of leaving the clues, all involving his detailed knowledge of Dante’s Inferno?”

“Yes," he agreed. "About half way through I began wondering how the writer could explain why someone would deliberately lay a trail that if followed fast enough would apparently lead to their master-plan failing.  The plot resolution turns out to be that the trail has been laid posthumously by the mastermind simply to let his enemies discover that he has already succeeded.  But it’s a resolution that suddenly renders all the scrambling about that went before futile.” 

“A classical deus ex machina, an unexpected resolution provided by the gods, in this case Brown” I agreed.

“But like his other books the story is filled out with all sorts of esoteric research and locational trivia,” I added.  “Like some spy novels his books are becoming travelogues.  I’ve been to, and even have photographs of, a number of the locations in the book, including St Michaels in Venice, most of the buildings in Florence as well as the Basilica Cistern and Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.” 

He looked surprised.

Feeling that I had been caught immodestly providing my own travelogue I cut short the list and continued:  “More than his previous novels, with more elaborate sub-plots, Inferno reinforced my view that most Brown plots are simply elaborate scavenger hunts.”

“Pursuing the blood of Christ or an errant priest using antimatter to secure the Papacy or secret Masonic knowledge or a ring engraved with a cryptographic key, the paperchase plot seems to have become a leitmotif in his work.”

“Did you go to all those places after the books came out?  Are you a Dan Brown follower?” he asked. 

“No of course not!  I have other reasons to visit Washington DC, Westminster Abby, St Peters or the Louvre.  It’s just that in the past ten years, since the kids got their own homes, we’ve tried to get overseas once or twice a year.  And Dan’s pretty well been following us about.”  I joked. 

“But I have to confess that when we were in Scotland recently we did go to see the Roslyn Chapel outside of Edinburgh that features in both the Da Vinci Code and the film.  Of course the following day we spent several hours on the Royal Yacht Britannia touring and having lunch.  So I’m expecting to see that as a location in a future Dan Brown novel.”

At that point the bus reached Wynyard Park and my companion rose to get off. 

“Happy writing!” I said as he moved to the door.  “Do you have a name?”  

“Dan Brown,” he replied.

It’s a common name I suppose.

 

 

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Travel

Southern France

Touring in the South of France

September 2014

 

Lyon

Off the plane we are welcomed by a warm Autumn day in the south of France.  Fragrant and green.

Lyon is the first step on our short stay in Southern France, touring in leisurely hops by car, down the Rhône valley from Lyon to Avignon and then to Aix and Nice with various stops along the way.

Months earlier I’d booked a car from Lyon Airport to be dropped off at Nice Airport.  I’d tried booking town centre to town centre but there was nothing available.

This meant I got to drive an unfamiliar car, with no gearstick or ignition switch and various other novel idiosyncrasies, ‘straight off the plane’.  But I managed to work it out and we got to see the countryside between the airport and the city and quite a bit of the outer suburbs at our own pace.  Fortunately we had ‘Madam Butterfly’ with us (more of her later) else we could never have reached our hotel through the maze of one way streets.

Read more: Southern France

Fiction, Recollections & News

The Craft - Preface

 

 

 

Preface: 

 

The Craft is an e-novel about Witchcraft in a future setting.  It's a prequel to my dystopian novella: The Cloud: set in the the last half of the 21st century - after The Great Famine.

 As I was writing The Cloud, I imagined that in fifty years the great bulk of the population will rely on their Virtual Personal Assistant (VPA), hosted in The Cloud, evolved from the primitive Siri and Cortana assistants available today. Owners will name their VPA and give him or her a personalised appearance, when viewed on a screen or in virtual-reality.

VPAs have obviated the need for most people to be able to read or write or to be numerate. If a text or sum is within view of a Cloud-connected camera, one can simply ask your VPA who will tell you what it says or means in your own language, explaining any difficult concepts by reference to the Central Encyclopaedia.

The potential to give the assistant multi-dimensional appearance and a virtual, interactive, body suggested the evolution of the: 'Sexy Business Assistant'. Employing all the resources of the Cloud, these would be super-smart and enhance the owner's business careers. Yet they are insidiously malicious, bankrupting their owners and causing their deaths before evaporating in a sea of bits.  But who or what could be responsible?  Witches?

Read more: The Craft - Preface

Opinions and Philosophy

The Fukushima Nuclear Crisis

 

 

Japan has 55 nuclear reactors at 19 sites.  Two more are under construction and another twelve are in the advanced planning stage.  Net Generating capacity is around 50 GW providing around 30% of the country's electricity (more here).  

As a result of Japan’s largest earthquake in history on March 11 and subsequent tsunami all reactors shut down automatically as they were designed to do but cooling systems associated with two sites had been damaged. 

Three reactor sites are adjacent to the earthquake epicentre and two were in the direct path of the tsunami.  The Fukushima-Daiichi plant belonging to Tokyo Electric Power Company was particularly hard hit.  It lost all grid connections, providing electricity, and its backup power plant was seriously damaged. 

Read more: The Fukushima Nuclear Crisis

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