Perhaps Sci-Fi has passed its golden age, but it seems to me that now is absolutely the time for a new crop of writers to emerge. After all… we have climate change on our plates now. Where are all the dystopian views of a world where humans pick their way along flooded coast lines in search of the ultimate bounty… a last remaining polar bear?

Sheepy heads

Wasting time reading was definitely a better alternative to doing more quizzes, and Androids also became the first book I downloaded rather than reading in print. (Literature major, not technology). As Science Fiction it seemed a suitable choice, anyway.

I have to say, the Facebook Quiz was for once accurate; this book contains many of my favourite themes: crumbling city-scapes, human isolation, people desperately scrabbling to hold onto their last connections with nature, cruelty and exploitation neither excused nor disguised. It is classic science fiction in that it is both cool and disorienting, but it is also sad on a wholly human dimension. And like many distopian-future works, it makes you curious for that world, and at the same time you want to reject it completely, and hope that society is not headed that way. Owls extinct one day, badgers the next. Highly recommended.

The bizarrely appropriate cover art that first drew me to this book

It’s been a while since I’ve had the funds to travel further than the next city, and while I hope that changes soon, there certainly aren’t any immediate plans that look like reality. So I’ve switched tactics, and now am reading books that make me feel like I’m traveling and experiencing more exotic locals. December Heat, a murder mystery set in Rio, Collapse by Jared Diamond to explore some ancient and modern civilizations, and to remind me that I should at any rate reduce my carbon footprint. But by far the most successful, in terms of strangeness, believability, and eeriness, all in a very exotic local, is A High Wind in Jamaica.

I found this book randomly at a second-hand bookshop and bought it on a whim, never having heard of it before. It was written in 1929 by Richard Hughes, a Welshman, and was a controversial work of its time. And it turned out to be an excellent book; thoroughly unsettling and dysfunctional, yet weirdly realistic in its portrayal of its child protagonists.

The Bas-Thornton children, John, Emily, Edward, Rachel and Laura, and the neighbouring children Margaret and Harry Fernandez are put aboard a ship bound for England for their own safety after their expat Jamaican home is destroyed by a hurricane. Emily is much more impressed with the minor earthquake she experienced the day before, and much more upset over the death of the family cat than with the destruction of their house or the separation from their parents. The parents hopes for their safety are soon dashed however, for the children’s ship is captured by pirates and the children soon find themselves the unwanted guests on a pirate ship.

Much of the book simply follows the children as they pass their makeshift life aboard the pirate ship, highlighting all the while their disconnect from the real world. They are preoccupied with their dolls made of kitchen spoons, with the fun of sliding down the deck in their underwear and with winning the attention of the captain and first mate; the accidental death of John is hardly noticed and never spoken again.

Indeed, the children’s innocence is revealed not to be something precious or to be idealized, but something that when combined with adults preconceived notions about children, can be destructive. Parents, lawyers, and adult passers-by who play a role in Hughes’ novel all view the innocence of the children as sacred, and therefore the perceived crimes of the pirates inexcusable; even the pirates themselves act within acceptable boundaries. Yet the children themselves pass their lives in oblivious amorality.

What began as a casual read soon revealed itself to be an eerie, violent and poetic book that resonates with the force of the titular high wind. Part of me feels it should be re-released with a fanfare and accompanying motion picture; another part of me would like to keep it as the strange, surprising little-known classic in the second hand bookshop.

The Red Hat Society is a group of women, mostly over fifty, who have taken to heart Jenny Joseph’s famous poem “Warning,” which begins with the lines: “When I am an old woman I shall wear purple/ With a red hat that doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me.” The poem is a complaint about the dullness of the socially approved ways to live our life, and a playful threat that when you are old, you can do what you want, and the poet intends to. The Red Hat Society sprang up in approval of this, and the members are a cheerful alternative to the typical, depressing vision of an old lady: the one with watered-down purple hair.

The poem also contains some words of wisdom for those of us several decades from being considered old. “But maybe I ought to practice a little now?/ So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised/ When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.” Ah-hah! Now, with a line or two of literary context, I can feel a social rebel in my purple rain boots…