(From the book "Solar Wind")By :
Deborah Susan Jones :
Editor One
of the pioneering illustrations from the 90's series of
short Dark Science
Fiction stories that appeared on the web a decade or so
ago that formed
a prototype electronic commerce project with Barclays Bank
in the UK.
At that time, it was impossible to trade in small amounts
of money
electronically over the web and the Bank was experimenting
with the
idea of a downloadable electronic wallet for use with a
credit card.
Peter wrote and illustrated the stories that were
encrypted web pages
synced to the "Barclaycoin" technology, and it worked!At the end of the project the
stories lay dormant until recently, when
we decided to assemble them into a book."The
stories are set in a post-consumer boom
environment (the Artist
correctly predicted the financial crisis triggered in
2008) and revolve around
the emotional traumas experienced by ordinary people
suddenly finding
themselves cut-off from their daily fix of "urban
adrenalin rush" and
how the personalities and behavior of inhabitants of the
consumer
citadel become extended, enlarged, and balloon to
grotesque levels."The
idea came to me one morning as I cut through my small
local shopping
centre in Wimbledon to the station to go to a meeting. A
lady with a
child in a baby-buggy, who was the only other occupant of
the ground
floor we were on, as it was very early, just after opening
tine, was SO
fixated on the ATM machine I was passing, she cut
diagonally
across the concourse, from her position totally on the
opposite side of
it to me, and accelerated at speed, pushing the buggy,
collided with
the wall on my side of the concourse, turned to almost
run, with the
buggy, parallel to the wall and I just knew, knew, what
she was going
to do next, which was to mow me down, on her
panic-stricken race to
reach the ATM machine close to where I was walking. As she
aggressively
attempted to drive the buggy up the front of my body and
scalp me with
the axles I extricated myself at speed, sideways, but the
closely
following utterance of "Sowwy, sowwy, sowwy, so sowwy" was
actually
quite amusing because I could tell she wasn't an assassin
and really
had only one thing exclusively on her mind, the ATM, and I
was
invisible, screened-out of her consciousness by fear, so
desperate was
her plight for cash. "As
it happened, the ATM denied her the cash and she spun
'round, heading
for the exit shrieking "it's not fair, it's not fair", her
dream of
morning Cappuccino dashed by her bank's denial of credit,
I assumed."I
sat on the train a little while later, pondering how much
stress
ordinary people can carry, and what might happen if there
were
absolutely no limits to how it might affect their
behavior."Killer Robots who hunt down
people over their credit limits.Aliens who invade Earth, because we'd unwittingly
used their decedents to build our lifestyles.Revengeful
gangs of giant insects that ride motorcycles,
super-bugs, evolved from
those left to fend for themselves in abandoned
Californian pools of
sub-prime mortgaged houses left abandoned by fleeing
mortgage debtors.The
"real world" starts to take revenge on the inhabitants of
the consumer
citadel who failed to see the consequences of oversize
pizzas . . . . .
. ."Dark and bleak though the
stories are, they do have a bit of a twist of humour."12 short stories = "12 screams
from the near future" (that finally arrived . . . . )Deborah Susan Jones
