OZTHOUGHTS

The Furnace – Scary And Gripping “Locked Room” Sci-Fi Novel – Ebook Review

An enthralling Sci-Fi thriller, The Furnace by Timothy Johnston is a Space Opera with a difference. It is a case of Agatha Christie meets Issac Asimov with added Crichton for flavouring.

Before saying anything else I will quote from the author’s blurb on Amazon, which gives a broad idea of the actual story line, without giving away too much:-
As a Homicide Investigator working the solar system’s most remote outposts, Lieutenant Kyle Tanner has been involved in more criminal investigations and captures than any other in Security Division. He hunts his prey stealthily, tracking them through the trail of victims cast behind, and makes difficult captures when no one else can. He has seen the twisted remains, things that used to be human but are now barely meat. And he’s executed those who have done such horrible deeds.

His most recent case takes him to SOLEX One, a power-generating station that orbits precariously near the Sun. Among the fifteen inhabitants is a killer, a disturbed crewman who for some reason has mutilated his victim. But when Tanner arrives and begins the investigation, he’s shocked to learn that this is no ordinary murder. There appears to be no motive for the crime, and no reason for the mutilation after death. But what Tanner doesn’t realize is that something terrifying is amplifying among the station’s personnel … and if he doesn’t solve the mystery, the result could be the extinction of the human race.

THE FURNACE is a locked-room murder mystery, part techno-thriller, part horror, part detective story.

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Gloomy Sunday – The Suicide Song

The other day I wrote a post about Strange Fruit, one of the 20th Century’s more powerful songs, well here is another one for you!

This one in English is called Gloomy Sunday, or conversely, The Hungarian Suicide Song, owing to both its extremely gloomy nature, and the urban myths about how it causes people who are unlucky enough to hear it to rush out and commit suicide instantly – so you have been warned!

In Hungarian it was called Szomorú vasárnap (Sad Sunday),

Obviously it is in fact a Hungarian song, written by a poet by the name of Rezső Seress in 1933 and had words that were a gentle hymn about people’s sins, but very soon after it was published, another Hungarian poet László Jávor (I bet you didn’t know there were so many poets in Hungary in the 30’s) sat down and wrote his own lyrics to this song, and these are the lyrics that we all know and love today. All about lost love, suicide, death and despondency (see a bit further down this post for an English translation of these words).

So the version I have bunged just below here is the music of Rezső Seress and the words of László Jávor, and the singer is Pál Kalmár, and was the first recording of this song, recorded in 1935.

So, have a listen to the original version of this depressing, but beautiful song, and then we shall discuss it further……

The Words:

Before going any further, it is probably a good idea for me to give you the English translation of the words of this song, so here goes:-

Sunday is gloomy,
My hours are slumberless.
Dearest, the shadows
I live with are numberless.

Little white flowers
Will never awaken you.
Not where the black coach
Of sorrow has taken you.

Angels have no thought
Of ever returning you.
Would they be angry
If I thought of joining you?

Gloomy Sunday

Gloomy is Sunday,
With shadows I spend it all.
My heart and I, have
Decided to end it all.

Soon there’ll be candles
And prayers that are said, I know.
Let them not weep,
Let them know that I’m glad to go.

Death is no dream,
For in death I’m caressing you.
With the last breath of my soul,
I’ll be blessing you.

Gloomy Sunday

Dreaming, I was only dreaming.
I wake and I find you asleep
In the deep of my heart, dear.

Darling, I hope that
My dream never haunted you.
My heart is telling you,
How much I wanted you.

See? Not the most cheerful of songs is it? But nonetheless those words have a real power and emotional kick to them, and are all too easy for almost all of us to identify with.

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Strange Fruit – A Grim Song

Possibly one of the most poignant songs about the disgusting aberration called racism is the song made famous by Billie Holiday – Strange Fruit.

I have put a video of her singing it here, so watch and listen, and then I shall talk about it all a bit more.

https://youtu.be/h4ZyuULy9zs

This song – though to call it simply a song seems to be remarkably weak – was written by a New York Jew curiously enough, as a protest to the lynchings that were all too common in the southern states of the USA earlier in the 20th Century.

Abel Meeropol, who wrote this remarkable song as a poem in 1937, wrote it as a result of seeing the famous photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana in the early 30’s, and then put his poem to music at the request of a number of his friends, and his wife gave it its first public performance in New York.

The-lynching-of-Thomas-Sh-007 — **The lynching that sparked this song**

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Nature Is Truly The Boss – Love This!

Whenever I find myself in a huge storm, or any other violent event that Good Old Mother Nature throws at me, I always find the fact of being reminded of who is really in charge on our planet extremely salutary – and I love it!

We humans are so amazingly arrogant and believe that somehow we will last forever, and that this small planet on the outer edge of one of billions of huge galaxies is actually the centre of the Universe – Hmmmm… How long did those huge and probably very stupid dinosaurs last?

Anyhow, this gentle video sort of demonstrates my point, enjoy it!

Committee of 100 – Illegal Radio Resistance Hero!

In an earlier post I talked about my involvement with CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), well it went further after a while.

My involvement with CND brought me into contact with some rather more active individuals, who felt strongly that whilst the marches and their attendant demonstrations were worth doing, more was needed to spread the good word.

This took two forms, the first was a splendid bit of “Resistance Hero” stuff, the second was more passive on my part, but much more profoundly life altering in its effect… See below.

So the first, Heroic Resistance worker:

One day at a CND meeting, I was approached by a couple of guys about my age who had a moderately powerful radio transmitter at their disposal they told me – I never actually discovered who was behind them, but I formed the opinion it was the British Communist Party.

They asked me if I thought I could get my hands on some sort of a van, and would I be prepared to help them make illegal radio broadcasts from the van by driving them around to avoid being located and caught by the cops.

This rather appealed to me, so I casually asked Russ (my dad) if I could borrow his Bedford Dormobile occasionally, to which he agreed, being a nice bloke. So I duly found myself driving around various London suburbs late at night, while the two guys sat in the back and broadcast prepared tapes on the TV channel (In those days TV stopped broadcasting at about 11 pm).

Obviously I never actually heard what we were broadcasting, but they assured me it was messages about banning nuclear weapons. Not that I can imagine anyone ever listened to whatever it was we were broadcasting to be honest.

But I felt like a real resistance worker doing this.

Oh and we were never caught of course – Not that I seriously believe anyone was taking us seriously enough to be bothered trying to catch us.

I See For Myself The Reality Of Police Action.

Some time later, however, I became involved – passively as it happens – in something much more troubling to me.

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Death Penalty – Primitive, Barbaric, Pointless

Indonesia and Saudi Arabia have just executed a total of 11 people in the last week. In the case of Saudi Arabia it took the form of hacking the heads of 2 unfortunate women who had been found guilty of murder, and in the case of Indonesia, it was a case of firing squads in the middle of the night in the jungle.

It would seem that there is little doubt about the guilt of the individuals who were killed in this way, but the point worth exploring perhaps is did these executions achieve anything beyond a form of revenge?

The simple answer to that is no.

Not only has every study of the effectiveness of the death penalty as a form of deterrence shown that it has simply no bearing on the crimes committed or in any way deters people from committing crimes that carry that penalty. The simple fact that Indonesia has executed 19 people in the last couple of months all of whom were found guilty of drug running in a country that is infamous for executing drug dealers might suggest to any thinking person that perhaps the death penalty was not really effective?

In fact the death penalty is generally a sort of knee-jerk reaction to a particular set of crimes, all based on retribution rather than deterrence or sensible punishment. If it is intended as punishment, well a corpse is remarkably unaffected by any sort of punishment – punishment should be a means of teaching a lesson – so long prison sentences would seem sensible and appropriate.

It can (and is) argued that the death penalty will deter others from committing the crime when they see it being applied for the crimes they have in mind – however, all evidence shows clearly that this is simply not the case..

And the idea of murder, no matter who carries it out, is anathema in all civilised countries, and in the case of countries that claim to be based on Christian values (such as the USA), it should actually be impossible for them to apply the death penalty, since their own God has forbidden them to kill.

The Dutch have it right:

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Ereaders Triple Library Visits In Africa

Worldreader, a charity who have been busy giving ereaders and thousands of ebooks to schools in a number of sub-saharan African countries – chiefly in poorer areas have just released a report about the impact their ereaders (and ebooks of course) have had in Kenya.

After several years of providing Kenyan Libraries with ereaders (Kindles) and a wide range of ebooks, by African authors and international authors as well, they have just commissioned a study that has just shown the following wonderful results:-

Monthly library visits nearly tripled across the pilot sites
20,000+ patrons were reached through e-reader training
254 library-initiated community events were held
84% of patrons reported reading more

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Aggie & Agent X; Sci-Fi Fun By Gary Ruse

I recently read a rather curious and odd science fiction ebook by Gary Ruse. Its title, which is direct and to the point, is Aggie & Agent X. I found it to be a strangely endearing and decidedly odd book. Sort of a case of a “normal” thriller that has been acted out by the Marx Brothers, if you can imagine anything so odd. But as I said, a most endearing ebook.

The author, Gary Ruse describes this small masterpiece as follows – Not giving anything much away here though:-

Rookie CIA officer Agnes Westfeld is excited when she gets her first real assignment after only three months at the agency, even though she’s told it will be basically just a “baby-sitting” job. But when her new HQ turns out to be a legendary top secret base in the Nevada desert and her new partner is “out of this world,” pitted against an evil mastermind who will stop at nothing, Aggie goes on a wild and wacky spy mission that is the adventure of a lifetime!

The two heroes of this ebook are engaging in their differing ways, Aggie, (Agnese Westfield) the girl, is a sort of wide-eyed innocent at large, gazing at the world with wonder and apparent confusion, but, but in fact is amazingly together when it is necessary that she be so, and Agent X… What can I say about him? Well, he is an Alien who has a Humphrey Bogart fixation and a number of other strange ideas… An odd creation, but fun nonetheless.

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Why Dick Francis’s Books Are So Popular

Whilst I have read and enjoyed the gently thrilling thrillers of Dick Francis for many years, I have never given any serious thought to why I like them so much.

Until yesterday, when my wife, who is currently working her way through our entire collection of his books (some 10 or thereabout), suddenly looked up and asked me if I knew why she was so enjoying reading his books.

Obviously I replied in the negative.

dickfrancisfeatureoct16_large

So she explained why she – at least – was enjoying reading them so much, and it is remarkably simple.

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Politically Correct Bedtime Stories – Showing The Idiocy Of PC

I have just finished reading a small volume of what has to be the best book to keep in your lavatory. This small volume of highly improving fairy tales written by James Finn Garner and entitled with great accuracy as “Politically Correct Bedtime Stories” consists of some 13 well loved fairy tales rewritten to conform to the needs of our Politically Correct age.. Well, obviously not really, the whole thing is a superb satire on the more idiotic aspects of PC thinking.

To give you a taste of this totally enjoyable little book, here is a section of his “improved” version of Little Red Riding Hood.

There once was a young person named Red Riding Hood who lived with her mother on the edge of a large wood. One day her mother asked her to take a basket of fresh fruit and mineral water to her grandmother’s house–not because this was womyn’s work, mind you, but because the deed was generous and helped engender a feeling of community. Furthermore, her grandmother was not sick, but rather was in full physical and mental health and was fully capable of taking care of herself as a mature adult.

So Red Riding Hood set out with her basket of food through the woods. Many people she knew believed that the forest was a foreboding and dangerous place and never set foot in it. Red Riding Hood, however, was confident enough in her own budding sexuality that such obvious Freudian imagery did not hinder her.

On her way to Grandma’s house, Red Riding Hood was accosted by a Wolf, who asked her what was in her basket. She replied, “Some healthful snacks for my grandmother, who is certainly capable of taking care of herself as a mature adult.”

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