Finally The Navigator returns to smashwords having been through the Amazon exclusive promotion, the ebook costs 99cents and the new version has been roughly proofed and also comes with the newer book cover that will be on the printed version, coming soon.

The Awash in starlight series of stories will have other titles added to the list over the next few months so keep your eyes open for those folks……

Cheers

Steve Merrick

This is the Link for smashwords.com

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/67309

This is the link for amazon.com

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Navigator-Awash-Starlight-ebook/dp/B0085UMBAY

http://www.amazon.com/The-Navigator-Awash-Starlight-ebook/dp/B0085UMBAY/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1338209034&sr=1-1

Hooray,

Finally Kego O’grady has arrived at Amazon and is part of the Kindle lending library scheme, which Steve Merrick thinks is really cool! LOL

Just click the photo to go to the page for it and meet Kego O’Grady the oddest hero ever and the weirdest narrator you could ever meet….

Steve

As a self publishing author I am sure there will be the remaining odd typo in the finished product but what I can say is this. I love the Narrator, and I am particularly proud of the hero, he seems like someone real, the concepts and the whole logic and feel of this future universe, it is the frame that these particular stories hang in. The second book in the series Ignorantia Felicitas is out soon and is set before the Navigator. I am enjoying the writing of the story and hope that I have learned more than a bit from my mistakes.

All in all I feel that this book is an original and different spin on the future and  what impressed me about re-reading it was that the story works on so many different levels. Some of which genuinely didn’t occur to me when I was writing it.

The Navigator and all of my following work will always be available at smashwords.com, if you copy and paste the link below it will take you straight to the new version of the book.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/67309

Mostly though I hope you enjoy this little rocket ride and look forward to reading more from this alternate reality experiment called The Awash in Starlight series.

Cheers

Steve Merrick

03/05/2012

Survival of the fittest. Define fittest. What is fittest. I know that I am the very last representative of a species and I would love to maintain the illusion that I am on top of the food chain but after Munich it does seem like hollow boasting. So what if I am clutching at straws and reading about our halcyon days back when we ruled the roost, I am not writing about that old mythical bird the halcyon because she could charm those prehistorical wind and waves into calm, whereas I obviously cant. In fact when I read the histories I can only point out the falsehoods of our belief that we were the dominant species at any time. In fact they were down right lies, dominant my arse.

Lets talk ants for a moment, they were everywhere and they outnumbered us by a zillion to one, or maybe the historic battle twixt Homo Sapiens and the common rat, guess what we lost that one despite all of the technology. Cockroaches have traditionally given us a run for our money, whilst seagulls have regularly taken the piss out of us. Oh yeah we extincted the sharks and most of their seabed cousins, but we did that completely blindly, IE; whoops. Although we were obviously superior to a cow, or as we managed to kill them off too our Gorilla relatives. However I can hand on heart proudly state that we were definitely better than the Dodo.  Yes a large and docile flightless bird that made the fatal mistake of being tasty meat to my ancestors.  So great Granddad O’Gradywould have been running amok with a baseball bat as he was fed up of the ships supply of salted meat. Granddad+Baseball bat + Dodo = Dinner.

Sadly the fittest I am not. Last night I could have been mistaken for the dominant Alpha male aboard the Solstice but not today. No I am on an equal footing with my Lemur buddies but I have yet again been outclassed by a fucking Squirrel. I have spent my whole life casually looking out for them, I have had epic battles with my escaping rodent buddies, I have found them on almost every level of the ship, I have even tried to improve there somewhat spacious accommodation but enough is enough. I woke up and there he was, eating my breakfast on the Nav Com. I can hear him lurking around the bridge somewhere and Jenny thinks its funny. It’s a good job she’s a robot or I would shoot her with the tranquilliser gun.

Actually I am outnumbered by the robots, I know they all talk about me behind my back but even they are evolving. So I sit trapped in a bubble unable to evolve in any real way or protect my own breakfast. Even the dogs seem to be able to outrun me, which begs the question of how the hell my ancestors overcame all the tooth and tail wildlife they were competing with. Fittest. Fit in my environment would seem to have an opportunistic streak eight parsecs long and a big bushy red tail. The son of bitches or whatever you call a female squirrel. I don’t mind them taking little holidays but just not on my bridge and not with my breakfast.

Take the woman Joan of Arc, forget her skills as a warrior, focus on her epileptic delusions, or as they were called at the time her visions. Joan was a deeply religious lady, so when a vision comes her way the mind translated it in the symbology of her time. It was called Christianity back then, the weapon of choice in her time was the sword, it’s no wonder she heard her own thoughts and imagining’s and retranslated them into a conversation with the God guy, the Virgin Mary, the symbols of power and the future. When I was a child I actually saw an older me, we absorbed ourselves into one being, lacking any religious zeal I take it for what it is, a dream, a fractured wish that I had at the time, or as you would be right in saying a delusion. So lets say I believe my delusion, that me and me makes one, why? A tear in space time, a simultaneous break in everything, or maybe a god of some kind or even something godlike showing me that there is a future to be grasped. Possibly that wrinkled old fart version has worked out how to make a time machine, please don’t make me laugh as the possibilities are endless. I can tell a delusion a mile off if I choose to, it’s just a dream that focusses on me, my delusional times are all about me, where as reality is blindly indifferent to me. Ergo delusion=ego.

I can hazard another of many guesses as to where the organised god thing started, that point where people left the spiders web that evolution had been happily spinning. There was a time before writing and in caves we can see our hunter gathering ancestors eloquently visual linguistics, they were a part of everything else and I find it really hard to see them not taking their place with the rest of the animal kingdom. The pictures like most art reflect the world that they lived in, their jewellery was airy too, until they stopped moving. The moment that we started farming was the moment that things got more organised, the villages grew, the fields were watered, the structures that we built changed. In rural England are two such holy sites, one is older than the other, that is Wood Henge, a small probably decorated wooden circle. The newer one is Stone Henge, a genuine architectural monument, or a shot at some kind of eternity but it is a perfect illustration of that massive level of change that our ancestors went through. So as Farmer O’Gradylooked at his fields that he had arranged and organised, inevitably he would look at the stars differently and ask a question of them. If I am organising all this then who is organising all of that?

It would be here that the first of the non random gods would have been born, in that flash of a thought from the human mind. So almost inevitably the idea would have spiralled out of control as it was tribally played with, until the last man in the universe was forced to ask about those little chapels.

Worthless Words. K O’Grady.

The Silent Fairy-tale.

Once upon a time there was a little deaf boy who lived in a beautiful rain forest. In his own little head he built his world. Alone and free from all the shapes of speech and words, he made his own private language but because he was unable to speak, the nastier animals in the forest would hurt him again and again. So without a voice he was unable to say “STOP.”

The nicer creatures heard the little boy cry a lot again and again but because they couldn’t talk to each other they could not say “Stop!” either. In fact nobody in the whole forest could talk to anyone who was different. The Squirrels couldn’t talk to the Monkeys, even nasty Mr Fox couldn’t talk to the grumpy Eagle. So in the end they wasted a lot of their days screaming at each other. Except for the little boy, he had been given a gift from the old witch in the middle of the forest, the gift was so special that it made him cry but also it made him very happy.

The gift was called imagination.

Every night the little boy would curl up in his favourite tree and sleep in his feather blanket.

BUT!

Every night he would have the same horrible dream and every morning he would fly awake terrified that his forest would all be gone. You see what he had been dreaming was that a GIGANTIC MACHINE was carpeting the whole world over.

It would unroll a massive red and black carpet that even flattened entire herds of elephants. Squish. Squish. Squish. Even the mighty oceans of the small planet were coated with this horrible and ugly carpet. So finally one morning the exasperated and scared little deaf boy waved bye bye to his squirrel friends and went to see the very very very old witch who was the only other person who was nice to him. She was also the wisest character in the whole of the rain forest. When he arrived she was cooking a snake and banana pie on her campfire which was delicious. YUM YUM

The little boy and the old woman had an ENORMOUS obstacle. It was a very big problem. You remember that he could not hear and that meant that he couldn’t speak either. So when the very old witch realised that he needed to tell her something she decided to teach him to read and write. It took a very long time but the witches shop was very quiet as most of her customers couldn’t talk either. It took so long that he wasn’t a little boy any more he was a young man.  In fact he had even changed colour. The first word that he learned was her name.

She was called Dolphin.

Dolphin knew that he didn’t have a name so the second word he learned was his own name. She called him River. He had never had a name before and it made him feel very special. Finally he explained his awful dream and how it had forced him to come to see her because he was sure that there was the gravest of dangers for all who lived in the little paradise. River was very surprised when she had told him she knew it was happening but that it was “The Civilised People.” They dwelled in  massive places called cities and had little time or use for a forest. Apparently his dream was a pictorial translation of something that the people of the cities called pavement and roads. The cities grew by gobbling up everything that was around them and then the young man got very scared.

Even though some of the animals had been nasty to him River loved his beautiful home, He would wash in the morning in the waterfall and every evening he would watch all the animals yelling at each other but now as he had a language he felt sad for them slightly, even nasty Mr Fox. So as he watched the sun go to sleep he knew that he would have to talk to the city people.

When he packed his fishing rod and his feather blanket, Dolphin made him promise to come back home then she hugged him and gave him a pie to eat on the long walk. He walked until he came to the rocklike surface of the what he thought was a road. The next day he came to a house, there was nobody in, then there were more houses and a young woman screamed and ran away. River’s first thought was that they had no words either and he wondered if Dolphin was the cleverest person in the world. Then very strong men in blue clothes put him in chains and into a very fast smelly thing that growled loudly as it moved. They put River in a dungeon and he sat thinking of his home because these people were insane. The sun had gone to sleep three times and their food was not recognisable to River but just before the moon woke up a lady who was not in blue wrote her name and told him she was a doctor.

River discovered that he was a survivor of something called a war, he had been lost in the rain forest as a tiny child, apparently soldiers had broken his ears and his mom and dad had been killed.   The strange civilised people did not care about his home but the doctor wrote one word for him. Spacers.

It took a long time o meet them and he became sort of famous with the civilised people, River got very confused by them and finally he went to his forest and waited for a spacer to come. One day as he watched the sunlight reflect through the leafs that made up the roof of his cottage he felt an incredibly loud roaring noise. A white streamlined ship came down from the sky and sat in his potato patch,  he was furious until the old woman jumped from the ship and smiled to him.

As they stripped the forest from him he was shocked and almost ran away until one day river was strapped into a chair and they flew into the great nothing, which is what the spacer people called the place between planets. The crew Blindfolded the deaf young man and he felt the floor harden beneath his feet, then he felt the grass, it was also funny to be lighter, almost like he could float. It was a relief to know that all his friends and his home was safe from the pavement but he was very nervous about it all. Then  he took the blindfold off and they were all smiling as he ran to his water fall, everyone even nasty Mr fox was there eating with Dolphin and she was teaching them all to speak one language, so in the holds of the mighty Asterio ship, River lived happily and safely ever after. The end.

They are all awesome, take our old friend the common cold, it can mutate very subtly every hour, given a very small opportunity it will attach itself to most organic matter but once it has entered a host it will breed, replicating itself yet at the same time it can at the drop of a hat communicate mutations by contact and with a speed bordering on the instantaneous change the whole colony. Impressive but it doesn’t just stop there, it is everywhere, in different shapes and form but if it’s alive then within it’s foundations will be a virus.

When I shave and look at my face I know that this Homo-sapiens came about because of a combination of DNA. Deoxy Rib-one Nucleic Acid, roll that one around your tongue for a bit it’s a lovely set of words. Yet what is it, is it a bit of a dead virus that is entrapped with a living virus. This is how I am pretty sure it came about though. Back just after the BIG BANG, there was a swirling dance of freshly created or reformed matter, then my old friend gravity started to work, inevitably and inexorably the matter was pulled together by its own mass. Molecules collided and over a vast period of time they formed into amino acid’s which with more time formed into chains, then with all that space and all that time to play with those chains collided and formed into rib-ones, ribbons, that is an oddly lovely word to but remember it it is important.

The ribbons were pulled two and fro by the conflicting forces around them, and there in that swirling mass of matter the ribbons collided, the virus was unwittingly born then and there. Randomly it came into existence as Rib-one nucleic acid, one by one they would have formed and if you like they may have danced together  in that breathing space before intelligent life’s measurements. Eventually during those dances one of them died whilst it was till attached to another and DNA came about, it’s phosphate back bone was nought more than a dead deoxinated virus. Knowing their proclivities as well as I do I wonder if  one of the pair killed the other deliberately, it isn’t important though as eventually they would die and still attached a crippled virus would meet another crippled virus and POOOOF.. Our old double helix would form.

The rest as they say is history, yet knowing physics as well as I can, it does seem inevitable that it should result in me writing this on a keyboard that was made in china and attached to a French Opus unit, whilst pondering my awe-struck ancestors, I understand their awe but I am also in awe of the subtleties of our own evolution. So I will return to me shaving, that reflection is a virus at some point too, maybe I could only exist because of them………….

I have been reading about funny couple Mr and Mrs H Sapiens. They are something I cannot understand. They are not animals or vegetables and they have this god guy that their children call their father but they are not animals. I am an animal, I am a product of evolution, I am the dream of a thousand O’Grady’s past. I am a part of this universe, this is my home but where are they from? Where did their dream go wrong? Why do they deny that which is truly beautiful? I see the same stars they do but I can’t see this god. Just a warm cold process, life is just a part of it all and it is at the heart of me that I love this process, it gives my life meaning, it is light and dark. Everything. Yet since I am struggling to understand my own species I must ask the question. Am I broken, do I need to be repaired?

I am not scared of them or angry with them, just confused by the weights that their writers bare. If I ever meet one I must ask them about money and also good and evil, nationality, colour, genes and intelligence. They place so much importance on knowledge, but it seems to me that the more I know the more questions I create. The most difficult ones being about this couple. I have no question about what it is to be human, I know that I am a human and my experiences here alone are valid, my questions are legitimate. My life is after all only one of a zillion plus expressions of living, yet maybe being alone allows identity to overcome insanity, solitude creating an untouched example of a person, maybe my questions are all just answers.

Oh but I will always have the process, I will always be predetermined just as I will always be questioning my questions and what of it, what of me? I am 32 today, I am slightly drunk and staring at my universe, my home. I know that by the standards of my parents I am a mad man but I find it all so simple here. The stars. The ship. It is peace. Is that the problem, is that why I don’t understand, are we not meant to be a part of the tapestry of existence or is it my fellow monkey’s that are quite mad.  I don’t care to criticise that which makes others happy, I just can’t feel it. I respond to the cold of space with a chuckle as it seems the universe is watching out for me. It gave me light. It gave me a mind and it also gave me love. I admit it regularly takes all those things away from me but sometimes I can feel it, or just a small part of it all at the back of my retina  or is that just the flavour of this peach schnapps. I guess it is better to have lived and died than to have never lived at all…….

I love watching her though, the stars scattered like grains of salt that have been accidentally spilled on a mirrored floor, the gaseous clouds drifting like thoughts whisping through a spiders web and I have an adventure ahead. There is a man-ship adrift in those clouds, so I shall shuttle to it and raid it but what I am searching for will be another private diary to read. Another life to taste and balance this expression that I am becoming. That I am.

Sweet dreams frozen ones. Sweet dreams universe. Oh and sweet dreams Kego.