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The Ministry of Truth
In Orwell’s dystopian world of 1984, the role of the Ministry of Truth is to reinterpret or delete facts and redefine words so that the citizen his/herself alters their memories and opinions to glorify Big Brother. A word is hijacked to mean its opposite - like ‘diversity and inclusion’ nowadays. And the Indian variant has been renamed the Delta variant, so that over time we forget its origin and, more importantly, Big Boris’s role in importing it to Britain (see May newsletter). The mere mention of ‘Indian variant’ and ‘Chinese virus’ have been classed as hate crimes (though they are factually accurate, unlike the ‘Spanish Flu’ pandemic name. In 1918 wartime governments censored news of the death toll in their own countries, so the only reports published came from Spain, a neutral country in the Great War).
Read moreThe Boris Variant
With the latest testimony from Dominic Cummings, the public and the media in the UK are finally realising they were lied to by government earlier in the pandemic. But the goverment’s defence is always that they are ‘being guided by the science’. And the scientific advice is always ‘based on the evidence’. Sounds reasonable. But suppose you were to read tomorrow that “to pay for the cost of the pandemic, the government has decided to disband the country’s armed forces, and sell off all military bases and equipment. However, a government spokesman reassured the public that ‘we will keep the situation under constant review, and we will not hesitate to recruit a new Air Force if we have clear evidence that the country is being bombed. Our focus is always on protecting the country and saving lives’.” That is the Evidence-Based (EB) approach we are seeing over and over again - the same sequence of excuses for inaction being parroted: “There is no evidence for…” “The evidence is ambiguous…” “Such measures would now have only a limited impact, and might actually be counter-productive…” until “We will introduce these measures on a precautionary basis…” and finally “Of course it’s very easy for people to complain with hindsight that we should have acted earlier…”
Read moreMonthly Pentacle Papers newsletters
My Pentacle Papers newsletters are now available on my Facebook author page: https://www.facebook.com/MBReedAuthor.
Read morePentacle Papers newsletter - July 2020
Hello,
Read moretest post
A test blog post
Read moreMy new website
I now have a fancy new website, on GitHub. So many thanks to Sunny for developing this!
Read moreUnveiling my novel to the world!
It’s been a steep learning curve, discovering how to use canva, draft2digital, bookfunnel, hostinger and campayn, but I’ve finally produced a marketing campaign for my yet-to-be-published novel The Hammond Conjecture. It should be out in the summer. Please click on the link on the main page, to get your free download of the first six chapters.
Read moreResponses
I submitted it to 8 agents, researched from the WAY. No response at all from most of them. Two sent personal responses. The major agent for sci-fi novels wrote that “I can see the imagination and intelligence at work here, but I can’t honestly say I loved it. The entry level for a new novelist now is ‘special’, not ‘good’.”
Read moreJericho Writers
I found jerichowriters.com from a google search. Signed up for their newsletter. In response I received links to three one-hour videos on 3 consecutive days. The first, a panel of female literary agents looking at slushpile submissions and giving their reactions, would have been interesting if not for the atrocious sound and unorganised presentation.
Read moreTo set the record straight
When I discovered my late father’s diaries and papers in 2016, I realised that the public deserved to know the suppressed facts about Operation Pentacle. A friend put me in touch with MB Reed. After reading all the documents, he persuaded me that publishers would not be willing to touch it (and it would probably be banned under the Official Secrets Act). Instead, he should present it as a work of fiction. I now wonder if I should have agreed to this. The ‘humourous’ episodes in the story are MB Reed’s invention.
Read moreWhy this novel?
I started the novel “The Hammond Conjecture” as a change from the alternate-history novels such as “SS-GB”, “Fatherland”, “Dominion” et al, which all depict Britain after Germany had won the War as an unremittingly bleak and hellish, ‘1984’-style dystopia. It is also a reaction to the hagiography of Winston Churchill in those novels.
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