Big Rock Energy
I’m absolutely delighted about this - planet Earth just pancaked a spaceship into an asteroid so we’d never have to watch another of those movies where oil surrogate macho men do something heroic to an inbound dinosaur killer in the name of patriarchy, virginity and beer.
Because of those movies, I hadn’t really expected us to test a system like this in advance. Real sciencers, of course, test things. Isn’t it good?
Anyway, we now have, I guess, 20% more superpowers if we detect incoming Astrogeology Behaving Badly, which is kind of awesome.
Meanwhile
The UK is absolutely falling through financial space at speeds hitherto unknown, boldly seeking out alien financial instruments and uncovering new cryptozoology of the econocosmos. Sadly it’s either going to pancake across Planet Parity With The Dollar or find it’s swallowed an egg sac, with all the icky mortality that entails. Liz Truss and her team of alternative geniuses on the starship Clueless are heading into a tricky conference season.
Starmer, meanwhile, is in his element. After a torrid month of the rock n roll Conservatives’ Hayek tattoos and financial cocaine binges, his Volvo-branded politics of tedious competence is starting to look like marriage material even to habitual Tory voters.
Although
Labour supporters need to recognise how contextual this is. Truss et al may have tanked the party’s standing, but a lot of that could be reversed - electorally, if not in terms of reputation abroad - in a few weeks by some charismatic, sure-footed moderate in the Rory Stewart mode. This is not “smashing the Tories”. This is a shift in the wind. We do well to sail it rather than pretend we own it.
Editing
This weird, time-shifted book is fun. I’m nearly done, which is right - it needs to be off my desk and in the swirl, trying to find a publisher. Is it literary or thrillerish? It’s a coherent story that is nonetheless fragmentary or composed of orthogonal incidents because that’s life. Is it satisfying? I hope so, but I really have no idea. We’ll see.