2
um Fist.
When I breathed life into the sheets of wood-pulp and ink, I was also creating something written for the day, but waiting fallow for the future resonance that would beat in time to its own inner tempo.
I never set out to do that.
In fact, I am still sceptical that I did this in the first place.
But frequently, it's not the author that determines such things; the readers do that when they bring themselves to the words and read between the lines and add their own interpretations to the author's vision.
For me, Uranium Fist was an adventure and an experiment. Up until that time, I had never written a work of novel proportions. I had no idea if I even possessed the stamina for such an involved project. So, the misgivings coupled with the desire to make the attempt, played their part in the selection of the project chosen to be my first book.
There were other influences, of course, that played their part in the idea that would become Uranium Fist. And they are essential ingredients to the story of how I allegedly penned something ahead of its time.
In the early 90s, I was a student studying political theory at Liverpool University. I had only been a writer for a couple of years when I opted to begin my first book. Politically idealistic, and attracted to the hard Left I wanted to write something that expressed my politics as well as my literary aspirations.
When the First Gulf War ended, I longed to write a story that expressed my opposition to that war, but I could not come up with something that quite fitted that scenario. Instead, I changed track and came up with a working class revolution on a distant Earth colony world. I chose to write the story as a correspondent's article about the defeat and destruction of that revolution. A kind of John Reed in space.2
(Unbeknown to me at the time, my correspondent's surname was Reid. If that was deliberate, then it was only unconsciously so. I didn't see it until some time later.)
The short story