Part 58
As we all sit in our little boxes called homes and wish for a Christmas without tiers, as in the British tier system of lockdowns for COVID-19, our sense of space has been severely restricted. There was a time, not long ago when one could look up at the sky and wonder. What’s up there? Are there other inhabited planets? Just how vast is space? I have had the pleasure of viewing the staggering array of stars seen in the Southern hemisphere. In particular, the crystal-clear skies above the Namib desert, where I was inevitably in awe of our magnificent universe seen from a small planet third from a sun, on the edge of a minor galaxy known as the Milky Way. It was both an aesthetic and spiritual experience.
Even though we don’t have the definitive answer to our questions, the very act of stretching our minds into space is a healthy thing. Conversely, looking gloomily at the confines of our home, big or small, and reducing our space to the finite limits of brick and mortar, reduces our ability to reach for bigger and better things. This has a depressing effect on many of us, unless we can retain our vision of the bigger picture.
As a child, I started to enjoy reading books like the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransom. These were wonderful tales of a bunch of kids living on the edge of the Norfolk Broads, a large body of water in South East England, where yachting and dinghy sailing is the major attraction of the area.
The children in the books were always involved in some form of sailing adventure or other. Growing up in landlocked Weybridge Surrey, before leaving for South Africa, the stories stretched my imagination and my sense of space to new dimensions.
I then discovered science fiction and, in fact it provided me with that continuing sense of stretching my space to ever-new limits. As I reached my teens, my major sources of reading were novels by names like A. E. van Vogt, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, E. E. “Doc” Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, Frank Herbert, Kurt Vonnegut, Roger Zelazny, and many others. My first attempts at writing were almost entirely SciFi until I was in my twenties. Then a strange thing happened. I began to find that the more recent authors lacked the swashbuckling, grandiose adventures of those that I later discovered were known as writers of the Golden Age of Science Fiction which lasted more or less to the 1950s.
I eventually asked myself what it was that I did not enjoy about SciFi books from that time onwards. I didn’t have the answer right away, but it eventually dawned on me. The writers of the Golden Age, and even going back to people like Jules Verne, were writing about things to come, whereas the modern SciFi writers were writing about scientific things that had already happened or were being developed. As result, they tended to become much more technically oriented, leaving far too little for the imagination to create its own vision of space, other worlds and other civilizations.
Of course, this is somewhat of a generality. There obviously were still some modern writers of the old school but, in the main, the Golden Age had passed. From a writing point of view, my interests became more varied and I began to enjoy anything from the great 20th century authors such as Lawrence Durrell, a rather whacky James Joyce to adventure writers such as Neville Shute, Len Deighton, John le Carré, Alistair MacLean, Vladimir Nabakov and Frederick Forsyth.
Today I’ve graduated, or perhaps you could say degenerated, to mostly crime thrillers and detective novels: Baldacci, James Patterson, Lee Child, et al. It occurs to me that perhaps I’ve allowed my reading space to grow smaller along with the crazy restrictions imposed upon us.
One thing that does expand my universe happens when I am writing. These blogs have been a wonderful therapy for me. I sit down, open up the laptop and suddenly I’m in a world that I can control. Better still, I’m writing a novel in addition to all the things I’m doing for ExoBrain and my space goes right out to where the story is set. In this case, the location is the Magaliesberg mountains north of Johannesburg, the second oldest mountain range on Earth after the Himalayas.
Another thing that has continued to fascinate me, is all the tales about things like flying saucers, other worlds and other civilizations. I don’t mean SciFi here, I mean events that have purportedly actually happened, like Roswell and the endless reports of UFO sightings all over the planet. Even my old friend Credo Mutwa, the legendary African Sangoma (traditional healer) with his stories about the history of the Zulu people that includes many UFO sightings. They call them “Lightning Birds.” Or how about Elizabeth Klarer who claimed to have been taken aboard a spaceship that had landed in the Drakensberg mountains near the farm where she grew up? She was completely sincere and believable. She showed my wife and I curious plants that she claimed to have brought back with her.
I know, I know, there will be readers here who are saying “What a lot of codswallop!” It all sounds too fantastic unless…unless one is prepared to accept that we are a tiny part of a universe that has endless possibilities but unfortunately little actual proof, as yet.
There are a series of non-fiction books that have really impinged and have a ring of truth to them as far as I’m concerned. These are the writings of Zecharias Sitchen, who died three or four years ago. Born in Russia, he went to Israel as a Hebrew scholar and then had the opportunity to see the Babylonian tablets. He taught himself how to translate the hieroglyphics on the tablet, and his books are his findings of what was written over 400,000 years ago.
You should read them for yourself but, in brief, it tells how the planet Nibiru that moves along an elliptical orbit. enters our solar system every 3,500 years, causing havoc with our planets, including Earth and Mars in particular. It is a planet inhabited by a race called the Anunnaki, who urgently needed to find gold which was in short supply on their planet. It was used to sprinkle gold dust into the planet’s ozone layer, which, like Earth, had been badly damaged by pollution.
They landed on Earth establishing a base in the Mesopotamia region (today’s Iraq) which at the time was lush and fertile but lacked traces of gold. They explored our planet and discovered gold in Southern Africa. Now here’s the part you will either regard as real or go ,”Oh no, I don’t believe it!” The Anunnaki were an advanced civilization unused to physical labor. Four thousand years ago there were no humans on Earth, only hominids (ape men), so they experimented with genetic engineering, then inseminated an Annunaki female with hominid sperm and finally produced a slave species. Guess what, that’s us! The slaves worked the mines and produced the gold. They regarded the Annunaki as gods from the heavens which led to early religious beliefs.
Believe it or not, it does make fascinating reading. “The Twelfth Planet” and the “The Last Book of Enki” are probably the best books to read to get a sense of our early history – unless it’s fiction, of course! Read it and make up your own mind.
ExoBrain will not transport us to other worlds, not yet at least, but it does offer all of us a new vista and vision of a level of communication that today’s computers promised but failed to deliver. Please keep a sense of space, no matter what our present circumstances are and very soon we will allow ExoTech to take us to new infinite horizons, undreamed of until now.
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.