Smashwords now, was Skrev Press Category:  Science Fiction Publisher: Skrev Press ISBN-10:  190464645X Type: Fiction Pages: 118 Copyright: 2007 ISBN-13: 9781904646457 Post WW3 novel of dubious morality wherein a camp survivor acquires the means for revenge With his arm tattooed Henry, a camp survivor and petty thief comes upon a case full of money belonging to supporters of the deposed fascistic government. Buying a gun he goes on a revenge spree, which to begin with seems righteous, but then....  Excerpt 'History does not make moral judgments: history records events, conjectures on their causes and traces their consequences. In history there is neither good nor evil, right nor wrong. Things simply happened. That is all that concerns us.' Frieda G. (UNESCO Contemporary History Lectures. Series 2.) Railway stations make Henry nervous. Having been nudged into petty thieving by awkward circumstance, he is aware that he is about to commit a crime and feels compassion for the person he is about to rob. Not being naturally vindictive he lacks the necessary ruthlessness. Henry has charitably decided that this is why he so often gets caught, and this knowledge lifts him above his fellow petty criminals. '...Soper, for instance... he has become a bogeyman. So too did Napoleon and Hitler. Yet look at the good that came from them. After Napoleon came the "Grand Alliance"; and then Bismarck came along to upset that balance of power, which led to the First World War. That gave birth to the League of Nations. After Hitler came the United Nations - a forum that Soper forced us to arm in order that we avoid a nuclear or biological holocaust. Because of Soper we now have a federal world, a global constitution. Malnutrition will shortly be a thing of the past. Nuclear and biological disaster is no longer a debilitating anxiety. Equality is at last a true and a real thing. Soper slaughtered millions of people; and we have now rid the world of Soper. But the world today is a better place for Soper having existed. I give you a theory - We need madmen like Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin and Soper to teach us values...' Frieda G. (UNESCO Contemporary History Lectures. Series 2.) Here on this platform they had placed one group of ten - always numerically exact - in front of each steel-lined wagon. Each group of ten was guarded by one Special. Each Special had an M1S. Each M1S had a silencer. With as much noise as a horse farting, as porridge boiling, each M1S sprayed each group of ten with soft-headed bullets. Each of the wagon doors were closed and the bodies were taken to the processors. Word came through to the Camps. Henry went in fear of being transported by train. "But surely," the Blues prosecutor asked a Special's Captain, "some of them must have screamed?" The prosecutor was trying to indict the people who had lived nearby, and who had claimed to have heard nothing. "No," the Captain shrugged, "They seemed to be expecting it." 'In the Boer War they were christened Concentration camps. Hitler kept the name. Stalin called them Labour camps. The British renamed them Internment camps. The Israelis referred to theirs as Refugee camps. Elsewhere they were known as Transit, Displacement, Detainee, Re-education, Migrant, etcetera. Their fences were all topped with barbed wire. By the time Soper arrived there were no euphemisms left. They have become simply Camps.' Joseph Tsolke (Daily News. Tanzania.) When Henry was released from his last Camp his skin was sagging like a deflated balloon on a wire frame. His hair had come out in combfuls. But he is plump again now, his hair a thick silver grey. A tweed hat covers his hair, slightly alters the shape of his smooth round face, might make it difficult for him to be readily identified. Leather gloves hide the tattoo on the back of his hand. Despite these precautions he expects to get caught. The first two years after his release, when not in hospital, Henry was in the courts identifying Specials. His memory is true to Specials' faces. But, though he can remember his every keeper, his fellow inmates - alive and dead - blur into a scrawny grubby mass. (It is some years now, his growing criminal record casting doubt upon his testimony, since he has been called as a witness. The trials too are a fewer.) 'Name: Bethune. Henry Kevin. Age : 35 Height: 168 Weight: 74.4 Eyes: Grey Hair: Grey Complexion: Ruddy Distinguishing Features: Tattoo on back of right hand - numbers - 5807656 Convictions: Shoplifting x 2. Breaking & Entering x 4. Aggravated robbery x 2. Armed robbery x 1. Sentences: 2 years probation. 6 months suspended sentence. 6 months. 1 year. 18 months. 18 months. 18 months. Remarks: Ex-Salisbury. Unable to adjust. Loner. Recidivist.' The train about to arrive is an express, will have stopped at mainline stations only. Tickets will have been collected before arrival. In the confusion of disembarkation Henry hopes to snatch a handbag (aggravated robbery), lift a wallet (daylight robbery). He waits at the far end of the platform in order that he can walk with the alighting passengers towards the exits. A young couple, their black labrador between them, sit on the bench under the clock. There used to be a poster on either side of the clock. (His official biographers remarked upon Soper's uncanny resemblance to Cromwell: although in France it was Marat, in Italy Garibaldi, in Germany Luther.) A man with receding hair keeps pushing himself off his seat by the toilets to peep over the sill of the buffet window. At the far end, by the toilets, are two Blues. They have baggage with them, are off duty. None of the other men waiting here have the marks of the police about them - civilian clothes buttoned as correctly as a uniform. People disfigured by weighty suitcases come through the arrivals arch, swing lopsidedly like hunchbacks to the ticket office. Soon after the occupation the Blues ran free skin-grafting surgeries to remove the telltale tattoos. The lack of response surprised them. 'Keeping their stigmata to keep their grudge alive, we ex-detainees wear our tattoos as a continuing reproach to our fellow countrymen and women - our country's conscience at the end of our sleeves...' Mike Davidson. (Lest We Forget. Off-World Press.)

We Need Madmen, review by Stu Carter in Vector
I say it as a piece of high praise that the only give-away that We Need Madmen isn’t a professionally edited and produced title is its unorthodox format: it is perhaps just one-third the size of a conventional paperback. But if its physical dimensions - length, breadth and width – are Lilliputian, then its literary depth certainly isn’t.

We Need Madmen follows Henry Bethune, a petty criminal and, not coincidentally, survivor of Soper’s camps. It’s the near future and most of Europe is occupied by UN forces following the defeat of Soper – an English analogue of Hitler, that “common-sense”, populist demagogue - who took control of the EU as part of an almost-realised plan to take over the world. Fortunately, the rest of planet earth was not convinced by Soper’s Daily Mail-esque appeals, and the resultant alliance of necessity has spawned a new world order of sorts that, we are told in one of the quotes that regularly punctuate the main story, is a marked improvement upon previous such efforts. But for the most part We Need Madmen is not an armchair analysis of Soper’s strategy, or a breathless narration of the battles he won and lost, edgy with second-hand adrenaline reinforced by hindsight. We Need Madmen is a far better book than that, and Soper is a character we meet only through his remaining writings.

Henry Bethune – a nobody, one of many forgotten victims – is suddenly blessed with a large sum of money of questionable provenance. The money empowers Henry, giving him the confidence and wherewithal to conduct his own solo Nuremberg trials against those who aided and collaborated with Soper. Because, as the included quotes from one of Soper’s prosecutors points out, 'We cannot punish an entire subcontinent. We shall have to believe that many were honestly misled.' Henry knows this for a convenient fiction and rejects it. He sees that so many of Soper’s followers who escaped prosecution are now seeking to escape any sense of guilt or shame, and their hypocrisy drives him to take action.

Soper’s deeds, it is provocatively suggested, indeed other such ‘Sopers’ themselves (e.g., Stalin, Hitler or Pol Pot) are necessary to orient our moral compass – without evil there can be no good, etc. – so that much as we may despise these madmen they do allow us to define precisely where our own moral standards lie. We can see what we do not want, and by doing so better understand what we do want. It is, at least, a way of seeing a positive in an otherwise overwhelming negative.

Interestingly, of course, Henry himself is a madman (albeit, a not entirely unsympathetic one), carrying out evil acts for a supposed noble end – that of revealing and punishing those guilty yet still at large. And, to confuse our already spinning moral compass even further, the author gives a potted background of a number of Henry’s victims, all of whom turn out not to be ‘evil’ at all, but possess very human reasons and motivations for the crimes they committed under Soper.

We Need Madmen is a truly fascinating, though brief, exploration of ideas; a deliberately leading and questioning book that may make you feel a little uncomfortable – one that will leave you pondering for a length of time in inverse proportion to its own short length.