Catmachine

As has been chronicled several times in the past I was a child obsessed with the space programme. And no wonder; those were exciting times what with the moon landings, Skylab and the Apollo Soyuz Test Project . What with the Space Shuttle on the horizon I was sure that my future lay off world. It was only a matter of time. One of the most exciting things I'd read about in the Brooke Bond Race Into Space picture card set and Reginald Turnill 's The Language of Space was the Manned Flight To Mars . This was likely to happen in the mid eighties. I imagined that by the time I was in my forties that it wasn't beyond the bounds of possibility that I'd have been to Mars once, the Moon two or three times and the various space stations more often than I could remember. Spaceflight would be commonplace in the 2010s. Civilization's failure of nerve and imagination since the 1970s has never failed to disappoint me. We are living in an age when even the prospect of re...

I started writing when I was a kid. Aside from short pieces of creative writing, my childhood magna opera were comics drawn in biro. The first was about a giant called Bigfoot who was "twenty five miles high" and arrived on Earth and proceded to get into a rage. I'm not quite sure how I managed to sustain this wafer thin premise for as long as I did; perhaps by being derivative. In the Bigfoot in Space sequence he did meet Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, K9 and the crew of the Liberator... I moved on to a series of comics about the exploration of the Solar System starring Captain Dawswell. For some reason this one astronaut was involved in the first mission to every single planet. Apart from Pluto, which wasn't a planet at all (was I a bit ahead of my time there?) but which turned out to be a massive space station built by dolphins. Furthermore, flying in the face of the best evidence of the time, every single planet in the Solar System seemed to harbour some kind of li...