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|  | | Engineering Paradise
Semi-autobiographical novel about growing up in Belfast in the 1960s and trying to set up an idealistic commune in Wales.
A novel set mainly in Belfast in the 1960s, during the beginning of the last round of Troubles that ended (at least in theory) with the Good Friday agreement of 1998. The title comes from a Stafford Beer quote:
"The Holocaust has shown us that the creation of hell on earth is just a matter of engineering. The creation of an earthly paradise is an engineering problem also."
Essentially a love story and rites of passage story set against a background of religious bigotry, sexual liberation, communes, folk music, pirate radio and armed revolution.
Available from Amazon, | |  | | SIRAT
Within the information systems that mankind has created for quite different purposes, the next stage of consciousness is emerging right now. It is already too late to prevent it. When it does, the human era is over.
We have already created machines that can travel faster than we can. Machines that can lift weights that we cannot. Machines that can perform calculations that would take us a hundred lifetimes. But will we be able to accept a machine that can understand things that we cannot? A machine to whom we shall be little more than domestic pets?
Deliberately low-key and anti-sensational, this novel attempts to take the prospect seriously and to imagine what it will be like for ordinary people when we have a god for a neighbor. | |  | | The Other End of the Rainbow
25 of my short stories, linked together by the utterances of the wandering Rainbow Man, talking to his voices and telling his stories.
The stories span a large range of subjects and styles, often with an Irish setting or connection. They range from outright comedy to the very dark. They have beginnings, middles and ends, like I believe stories should. | |  | | The Rainbow Man and Other Stories
Originally wenty-three, now twenty-five stories linked by the apocryphal utterances of the Rainbow Man, a strange misunderstood figure who shows the children of his town how to live in their dreams and nurture their imaginations.
The original edition published in 2002 by Bluechrome/Boho is no longer available, but the book has been reissued in a new and expanded edition published by Merilang Press in 2010.
...As children we were able to get to know the Rainbow Man a lot better than the adults, and to listen in to the complex one-sided conversations that he carried on with his ever-present invisible companions.
"Oh, youse won't be laughing tomorrow, when they crown me king," he would tell them, or "Only one of youse is coming with me when I go to Mars" or "I know youse have got my son's head in a bucket, but I don't care, what did that boy ever do for me?" and so on. The mere contingencies of reality were never allowed to impinge on the conversations between the Rainbow Man and his voice |
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