Let's be clear. The launch of Artemis II is a sideshow, a footnote, an irrelevance.
It won't end any wars, or put food on the tables of the starving, or stop young girls in Africa walking miles to get water from wells, time they could have spent in school. If anything, it's diverting funds from those here-and-now (emphasis on the 'here') problems.
So, let's talk about something that really matters.
Beer.
We recently went on an expedition from the country to the Big Smoke, Olde London Towne (pronounced 'Old London Town', obvs), not for the drinking of beer but for non-yeast based culture, but a few beers were had along the way.
But my ale-adjacent experience somehow illustrates how cultures, traditions, ways of life erode and disappear. And fiction that builds futures has to take in not just the shiny and new, but how the tarnished and out-of-fashion gets pushed aside and pushed away.
I'm not quite sure how, but I offer this as a possible case study.
You'd think getting a good pint in London would be guaranteed. London was once home to some of the largest breweries in the world, rolling out hundreds of thousands of barrels of beer a year. Christ, in the Great Beer Flood of 1814, the bursting of a single vat was enough to collapse buildings and kill people. London brewed a lot of beer because London drank a lot of beer. London knew beer.
But not any more, it seems to me.
My first pint was in an otherwise excellent curry house. There seems to be a curry-house curse, mainly relating to sizing and container-style, where a Venn diagram between what's on the menu, what you ask for, and what's served overlap but don't align.
Seeing a large bottle of Cobra on the shelf, I asked for one with a small glass to serve myself, and was given a pint. A short pint.
Oh. Was that from the bottle?
Yes.
Then where's the rest of the 660ml bottle?
Bafflement.
I still have no idea whether I was served draught or from a can. Certainly not a bottle.
Conclusion: the importance of variation (a can doesn't taste the same as draught, nor does the bottle) and serving (keeping the head topped up and avoiding those stupid bloody tall glasses only good for flowers isn't just a whim) is being lost. As long as the brand is right nothing else matters.
The second pint was just a half before the theatre. The first that was served was flat as a puddle, and, as far as I could tell - because no way on God's green earth was it getting near my lips - had all the other characteristics of a puddle. It took a bit of persuasion to get the point across that beer shouldn't look like that before it got changed.
Oh, and two halves (of a still middling brew) and a lemonade was £12. You'd think they'd treat it as a premium product.
Conclusion: knowledge of what the product should and should not look like is vanishing. It's brown, it's liquid, it has a sort of scum on top. Isn't that beer?
The third pint was more of the same, except this time, as I was ordering two, I only realised the issue when the second one was being drawn. I did query whether that was what that particular beer and was persuaded, reluctantly, that, no, that's what it's like.
Really?
Ten minutes later, that particular brew was off. I did try to tell them.
My next pint there (yes, we stayed) was a New England IPA on tap rather than handpump. It was lovely but a bit heart-breaking as the handpump beer was looking rather like a ageing horse staring at a shiny new tractor. The world turns. But we've been here before - a century ago you'd have had milds and porters in every pub. Now, outside beer festivals, you'd struggle. You don't often even see winter warmers anymore. Bloody global warming.
There's a bit of everything here. The melting pot of cultures, changing habits, lack of knowledge, lack of giving a shit. Suddenly finding yourself out of step. The world changes. You ride the wave for a bit. Then end up dazed with the taste of seawater in your mouth.
My Thoughts are with You. Your Thoughts are with the Authorities for Calibration Against Societal Norms
Meet a man mistaken for a robot, a robot which learns the meaning of irony the hard way, a Frankenstein’s monster with a future in tailoring, a talking cat, a talking car, several time travellers, and a host of other characters.
Award-nominated science fiction and slipstream author Robert Bagnall’s second anthology of twenty-four stories, variously bleak, funny, bleakly funny or – very occasionally – optimistic.
2084. The world remains at war.
In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.
The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.
Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.
Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.
24 0s & a 2
