Lynn Brittney describes what motivates her to write
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My Fiction Books
My latest fiction book is The Salamander Option
The Covid Pandemic made us all slaves to “The Science”. Humanity was told not to question it. The scientists knew what they were doing. The scientists always know best. Of course, that led many of us to ask ourselves if the scientists did really know what was best – if they had even thought about the consequences or debated amongst themselves about the rights and wrongs of any actions. There were, and still are at the time of writing, allegations of the virus emanating from a ‘gain of function’ laboratory somewhere. Then there were revelations about alleged secret ‘biolabs’ in Ukraine – several countries seemed to be involved in the set-up and financing of these laboratories and what had they been working on? Then Climate Change swung into action throughout the western world. Social media was flooded with talks of chemtrails in the sky; newspapers were full of dire predictions by scientists of the world becoming an arid desert if we didn’t cull cattle, stop completely using fossil fuels, block out the sun’s rays, cover all land with solar farms…and so on. Since 2020 it seems as though ‘Science’ was the driving force behind every human action and reaction.
The plot of The Salamander Option concerns a scientific experiment on long term coma patients, examines the ethics ( or lack of them) of the experiment, and the turmoil that it unleashes. Life appears to now be dominated by science. Each new development in science and technology – like AI – takes us further and further away from our core humanity. Time to revisit “The Science” and ask some questions. Click here to go to the Iris Books shop
Why did I create the world of Nathan Fox?
Try to envisage this scenario. It is 2003. I had just moved to the rural South West of England with my family and my main ambition was to write – for myself – instead of being commissioned to write reams of non-fiction for other people. As I sat down in front of my computer it was my intention to write more plays. I had already had a modest success with several published plays for adults and I had branched out into publishing my own plays for children. As a former drama teacher, I knew that there was a grave lack of decent plays for children and this was what I was going to do. But I got distracted.
Well – to be more accurate – I got mad. My son had started senior school and it soon became apparent that the deficiencies in the History and English curricula were so large that I was appalled. Those two subjects are my passions and I was looking forward to giving my son the benefit of my accumulated knowledge. As it turned out, I was redundant before the end of his first year at senior school.
“Elizabethan era?”
“Er, sorry. You missed it. That was last week. We’re doing the Victorian age now.”
“What happened to the English Civil War?! You know, Cromwell and the foundation of modern government?”
“Dunno, we don’t do that.”
“The American Revolution of 1776?”
“Nope.”
English was worse. The first contact with Shakespeare was in the form of a poor synopsis of the play of Macbeth and his homework was to reduce the synopsis to ten bullet points. You couldn’t make this kind of thing up, could you?
I sat alone in front of the computer and thought about the glory of the Elizabethan age – the politics of Europe, dictated by the power of the Spanish Empire, the largest empire the world had ever seen since the Romans. Then there were the religious conflicts, the birth of new forms of Christianity during the Reformation and the bitter fight to regain Catholic territory in the Counter-Reformation. There were the great heroes and adventurers – the Elizabethan Sea Dogs, as they were known – part pirate, part shrewd businessmen, wholly magnificent sailors; Drake, Hawkins, Raleigh and Frobisher, to name a few of the English characters, and Juan Martinez de Recalde and Pedro Menendez de Aviles from the Spanish side. The high seas were teeming with such adventurers who, when they weren’t plundering the enemy’s treasure ships, they were finding new lands and civilizations on the other side of the world.
The Elizabethan era was a time of great philosophers, science and medicine were beginning to come out of the medieval world of superstition and religious quackery, commerce was beginning to become seriously global and, above all, there was the literature. Oh the literature! And the greatest amongst this art form was the play. Men like Shakespeare and Marlow wrote great plays, there is no doubt. (Well OK, Two Gentlemen of Verona is a pretty feeble play, but we all have our off days.) The great tragedies and Shakespeare’s historical plays, in particular, give such an insight into human motivation that they take your breath away. This is why they are so easily translatable into modern formats. The characters, their motivations and their actions are timeless. Romeo and Juliet became West Side Story with such consummate ease.
But what to do? Al Pacino got it right when he said, during an interview for his film The Merchant of Venice, in 2004,
“People don’t want to do Shakespeare. They are afraid. We all have a tendency to close off when we don’t understand something. If we were made to feel more open and not afraid, we’d be able to experience it more.”
Pacino said that teachers need to excite children, to make them see the relevance of the plays in their own lives, by analysing the texts in the way that actors do in preparing a production. It was here that Al Pacino and I would take separate routes to enlightenment.
Having been a teacher, I know that many teachers face an uphill battle in making Shakespeare acceptable to students. The language itself can present an impenetrable barrier. No, the answer, I felt, was not in the classroom but something that would provide an aide for teachers. A novel.
I felt that, if young people understood the story of a Shakespeare play and the motivations of the characters in that story, it would be rather like having a synopsis of an opera before you go and see it. There are people up there, singing in a foreign language, and it looks beautiful, but you have no idea what it is all about. But if you know the story beforehand, you can relax into it and enjoy the music. Same with Shakespeare. Find a way of presenting the story and the powerful characters in a way which brings about understanding. Then they can tackle a play and everything will become clearer.
Of course, to return to the start of this piece and my concerns about the lack of knowledge of the history of the period, as well – this also hampered understanding and enjoyment of the plays. Take a modern example. If you did not know anything about the history of slavery and segregation in America, would you be able to appreciate fully the text of “To Kill a Mockingbird”? Similarly, if you do not know the social background against which Shakespeare wrote his plays, how can you appreciate the restrictions placed on the characters or the prejudices they might have? How would you make a modern teenage audience understand that Juliet was the “possession” of her father and she had no say in her choice of husband or at what age she should marry?
I realised that a novel which was going to introduce a young reader to Elizabethan history and to the stories of Shakespeare had to appeal on many other levels as well. I didn’t think it would be too difficult. The Elizabethan era was, of course, filled with action, adventure and warfare – but what was going to be the central premise?
Then it came to me. The Secret Service, of course. Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth 1st’s Secretary of State, single-handedly and with a great deal of his own money, created the British Secret Service. Here was the way in to the hearts and minds of teenagers. A spy novel set in 16th century Europe. The main hero would be a teenage boy – a gifted boy-actor called Nathan Fox, a gypsy and a friend of Will Shakespeare – recruited into the fledgling British spy network. He would be partnered with the dashing John Pearce, a twenty-something man who had lasted longer in the field than any other agent (must have something for the teenage girls!) and, to add spice and confusion to the mix, Nathan’s own sister, the feisty Marie, would join their adventure. So, the first novel – Dangerous Times – was a heady mix of arduous training in the arts of defence, assassination attempts, a mission to decadent Venice, a sea battle, duels and murder. And along the way, the story of Shakespeare’s play “Othello” would be woven in. And, hopefully, at the end of it, the young readers would say, “That was a great adventure story!” and not notice that it was a) historical and b) Shakespeare.
Kind of sneaky, wouldn’t you say?
Thankfully, having, early in my career, written many non-fiction books, amongst them three history books for children, I adore doing the research. I can get passionate for days about one particular aspect of Elizabethan life and will find out absolutely everything about it – even though it will probably end up as being a one-line reference in the finished novel.
So, the Nathan Fox trilogy was born. Nathan’s adventures abroad, with his partner John Pearce and his sister Marie are a breathtaking, sword and dagger fighting, journey through sea battles, witchcraft, intrigue, double dealing, frantic horse rides and so much more, with sly inserts of Shakespeare plays and historical facts.
Also, I produced Fact Books to go alongside the novels – filled with pure social history and illustrations to provide some background to the vibrant Elizabethan era in which the novels are set.
The books have proved popular with all ages – not just teenagers – and with girls/women too, who identify with the feisty Marie and her secret fondness for the dashing John Pearce, the Elizabethan era’s answer to James Bond.
Click the covers below to go to the Iris Books shop.
The Mayfair 100 Series
Premise
A resourceful Chief Inspector forms a covert amateur detective task force to help solve a series of dark and complex crimes in London.
When I started writing the series, I wanted to throw some light on the Home Front during WW1. Many books have been written about life in the trenches and there are several books about the upper classes and how they dealt with the war, such as Vera Britten’s Testament of Youth…but there was little or nothing about the working classes and, in particular, the seamy side of life in London. So many things were changing during this period. Women – although they were still not allowed to vote – became indispensable in all works of working life, due to the huge rush by men to volunteer, then more men being conscripted and, then, the staggering number of men who did not return from the war. London was not only changed by the influx of women workers, but the capital was bombed frequently, and German U boats prowled the Atlantic, cutting off vital food supplies to Britain. The deprivation became acute as the war progressed. In an era before state pensions, families who had lost fathers, husbands, sons and brothers were constantly in danger of destitution. Children in the capital city were amongst the poorest in the country. It was a new kind of war. One that was taken to the civilians at home, for the first time, with the bombing campaigns, and one where scientists developed new and ever more barbaric ways of killing and maiming soldiers. By 1915 – the year in which I chose to start the series of novels – there were already men who had ‘done their bit’ on the front, like Chief Inspector Beech and Constable Billy Rigsby, both of whom are invalided out of the army with physical and mental scars. Older men, like D.S. Tollman, were brought back out of retirement to serve in the police once more. The old ways were crumbling and the new ways, whilst they sat uncomfortably with much of the male population, meant that women could no longer be overlooked as contributors to society.
Overview
One year into the First World War, and Britain’s dependence on women is keenly felt as they begin to fill the jobs left vacant by those fighting on the front line. In London, it’s apparent that the Metropolitan Police Force is ill equipped to deal with female crime. The two volunteer Women’s Forces are only given supervisory tasks with no powers of arrest and are universally disliked by most male police officers – especially those women volunteers with suffragette backgrounds.
Enter Chief Inspector Peter Beech. Confronted with a victim who will only talk to a woman, Beech must call upon his friend, Dr Caroline Allardyce to further his investigation. It’s at this point Beech embraces the huge contribution that women can make to police work and sets about convincing the Chief Commissioner to let him set up a new task force. Finally given the go ahead for the plan – as long as it’s kept top secret – Beech wastes no time assembling his new unit of educated women and progressive misfits to embark on their first case. Led by Inspector Beech, each core member of the team brings something unique to the table with Victoria Ellingham providing a keen analytical legal mind, Caroline, her medical knowledge, Inspector Arthur Tollman, his years of experience in the force and Billy Rigsby his big heart, enthusiasm and physical prowess to supply the muscle.
The premises, in Mayfair, are supplied by Victoria Ellingham’s mother, Lady Maud, who, herself proves to be an invaluable member of the team. The telephone number – MAYFAIR 100 – becomes the number to ring when you have an unusual case to solve. Gradually the team is added to. Permanent members are Billy Rigsby’s Mum and Aunty (redoubtable and shrewd working-class women) and Mabel Allardyce, a hospital pharmacist with a passion for forensic science. Other talents are co-opted into the team, as and when the need arises.
Book 1. Murder in Belgravia
When young Lord Murcheson is murdered at his home in Mayfair and his wife, Lady Harriet, confesses to the crime, Beech and the team suspect others are involved. Their investigations lead them through the sordid underworld of war time London – a world of drugs, criminal gangs, brothels and corrupt Harley Street consultancies, as they track down a key fifteen-year-old witness, and Lady Harriet’s butler, who appears to be on the run as they try to discover what really happened the night Lord Murcheson was murdered. Click the cover to go to the Iris Books shop.
Book 2. A Death in Chelsea
A society gossip columnist has been found hanged in her apartment – was it suicide or murder? Her family suspects foul play, and they have every reason for that opinion, because Lady Adeline Treborne was universally hated by the upper class, whose private lives she laid bare in a popular newspaper every week. Once again, the Mayfair 100 team is called upon to investigate a delicate case which involves murder, blackmail, fraud and much more. Click the cover to go to the Iris Books shop.
Book 3. The Body in Berkeley Square
The body of an unknown woman is discovered, stabbed in a Mayfair square. She is expensively dressed and yet the autopsy reveals that she had been working in the munitions industry. The women of the Mayfair 100 team begin to try and uncover the woman’s identity through her clothing, whilst their police colleagues investigate the harsh world of manufacturing munitions. They find that this leads to top level industrial espionage, as well as a murder investigation. Click the cover to go to the Iris Books shop.
Book 4. The Corpses at Waterloo
When Billy Rigsby, along with his mother and aunt, attend the military funeral of a neighbour’s son at the London Necropolis Railway in Waterloo, proceedings are interrupted by the unexpected and brutal murder of a young woman. In a panic, Billy phones the Mayfair 100 team and they descend upon the station to find not only a murder of a woman but two empty coffins and a gruesome headless corpse of a man in another coffin. The team then follow a trail of police corruption, a robbery that requires the assistance of the military police and several violent crimes borne out of a selfish love affair. Click the cover to go to the Iris Books shop.
Book 5. …being written at the moment May/June 2023…and set in October 1915…there will be murders and yet more fascinating aspects of civilian wartime life in London for the Mayfair 100 team to uncover.
The next fiction book – H.ALT (ready by the end of 2023)
The best way to explain this book is to let you read the first chapter.
H. ALT (Human ALTernative)
CHAPTER ONE
How did it start?
When people were analysing how and why humanity reached the point of total enslavement, how they became so biddable, so easily persuaded to harm themselves and their children, historians would direct everyone back to that great mind control experiment – the First World War.
It was the first time that ordinary people were persuaded – all over the world – to kill themselves, and others, ‘for the good of humanity’. It was the first time that the military and industrial complex made obscene amounts of money from agonising death and deprivation. Historians would point to the unedifying propaganda produced by governments, that traded on fear of the ‘enemy’ and fear of being considered ‘less of a man’ for not volunteering to die. Women, even children, were encouraged to belittle men into going to war. Eventually, men were given no choice and compulsory service was introduced.
During that war, governments told lies to perpetuate the state of fear and horror. Newspapers ran stories about the enemy bayoneting babies and raping women, that were mostly untrue. But manufacturers and their pet scientists found new and more horrific ways of killing. Poison gas, incendiary bombs, bombing civilian populations for the first time in a war by aerial attack. The horror was perpetuated for four long years and a select group of men became very, very rich. There was a suspicion that the war had been deliberately prolonged, for the purposes of making as much money as possible. Perhaps the greatest lie was that those who survived would come back home to a new and better world – ‘a land fit for heroes’ and all the suffering and sacrifice would have been worth it. That, of course, did not happen and the surviving men spent the rest of their lives barely speaking of the horror, and the shame that visited them when they realised that they had been hoodwinked.
Then came the first Reset. Stock Markets crashed and everyone suffered financially, except, of course, the established fabulously rich dynasties, which still exist today. No, it was the small businesses that went to the wall, the ordinary people who suffered the loss of jobs, homes, a way of life. The stupendously wealthy, of course, moved into the areas of greatest suffering, and bought up all the once thriving industries for pennies. When they had enlarged their empires sufficiently, the world was allowed to reset and recover – all the while being totally unaware that the situation had been planned and manipulated because, once again, newspapers lied, on behalf of their masters, and told the public that The Great Depression had all been unavoidable.
Meanwhile, the super-rich were pumping money into a little project in Germany. They had decided that, as they had acquired even more industrial might, it should be made profitable by starting another war. A lunatic was chosen to spearhead one of the greatest propaganda experiments ever seen. He would convince his people that they were so exceptional that they had the right to conquer the world and eliminate all inferior races. He would convince them that only pure-blooded descendants from a fictional ancestry could serve in his machine and that this bloodline would give them a licence to torture, imprison and oppress millions of people. This, of course, led to another World War, because that was the purpose of the experiment – to provide a loathsome enemy, a rallying point, a monster to fear.
This time, they managed to make the war last almost six years and the carnage was terrible. It is estimated that almost 100 million died from the military actions, bombing of civilians, imprisonment, famine and disease. But the war profiteers became rich beyond any normal person’s understanding.
After this war, there would be many small wars, but some were not even mentioned in newspapers. War no longer sold papers and television had redirected everyone’s attention. The men with huge power and wealth took to meeting behind closed doors to plan how to manipulate humanity into redirecting their time and effort into making more money for the exalted class. The people were told “You’ve never had it so good,” as they entered an era of prosperity and guaranteed leisure.
This was to be the key, of course, for the planners and plotters to feed their wealth. Give the people a lifestyle that they would do anything to preserve. Give them the wealth and opportunity to have holidays, buy clothes, buy gadgets, be entertained…to get into massive debt. This became the new propaganda. Tell people that they are entitled to have everything they want – NOW – and it would be so easy to pay later. The credit card was born, and the worldwide debt spiral began. No-one gave any thought to the extra money they were paying for their pleasures, in the form of interest. Soon, the propaganda would be so effective that the amount of debt a person accrued actually boosted their credit rating and made yet more debt possible. People who never got into debt were considered ‘dead wood’ by the financial institutions. The world had been turned on its head.
It seemed that humanity could not become any more gullible, but then along came new technology, heavily invested in by the very rich people who plotted behind closed doors, and had now been joined by, supposedly, public servants, who also wanted to be rich and powerful and offered their services and their souls to the devils.
So where did the public obsession with new technology begin? Some would point back to the 1970s as the start – when the first wireless cellular phone was invented; when the Internet was born; famous tech companies were founded; the first video game appeared, and the first PC modem appeared.
Others would shake their hands and say “No. It wasn’t then. Technology then produced meaningless toys – out of the reach of most ordinary people. Emerging technology was for business use, not the home.” And they dismissed the 1970s as embryonic but not really the start of humanity’s tech troubles.
The 1980s were given more credence. Email was born. But it took a while for email to become a tool of the people. Time magazine, curiously, named ‘The Computer’ as Man of The Year, which was jokey but showed the world that the men behind this technology (and they were all men) were beginning to be important. In the 1980s IBM launched its first Personal Computer, with a Microsoft Operating System and Apple launched the first Mac, with a competing operating system. Thus, two religions were born, where people chose their allegiance to one operating system or the other. Some brave new companies tried to muscle in, but the two gods of PC and Apple Mac just grew in popularity and diminished all the lesser gods, who faded away. “Yes,” the analysts said, “this decade was a pivotal moment. Like the fall of the Temple of Jerusalem, which eliminated the High Priests from Judaism. The PC and Apple Mac brought the religion of technology down to the people and allowed them to worship at the altar freely, without needing any aristocratic intervention.”
But it was probably the 1990s where the unhealthy relationship between man and technology truly started, some said. This was the decade of the creation of www., search engines, and the collection of data through browsing history. Big Tech, the umbrella term coined for the technology industry, had found a way into the human brain and began to turn the people into ‘consumers’. Data became the new God – eclipsing the two old Gods – and this allowed the rise of a pantheon of new deities – Yahoo, Google, Internet Explorer – which allowed humanity to have godlike abilities themselves, to ‘surf the net’ in search of knowledge and entertainment and to hone their skills at acquisition.
Humans being humans they, of course, began to prioritise the entertainment and acquisition functions of technology over knowledge (unless that knowledge led to exploration of the self, through lifestyle choices hitherto unknown and contemplated, through readily available pornography for the sexually illiterate masses). So, as the 1990s dissolved into the new millennium, Amazon, at first the world’s largest bookshop, was created, then Netflix, for visual entertainment. The first smartphone was produced, courtesy of Nokia, and Apple launched the iPod – ‘a thousand songs in your pocket’.
In the new millennium, technology developed rather like the old Roman Empire. Big Tech conquered more and more people, using their ‘weapon of mass destruction’, data collecting. The masses knew they were being conquered and manipulated. They knew their phones were spying on them, their purchases were being recorded, their browsing history logged. But the ‘bread and circuses’ offered by technology was irresistible and most chose to close their minds to the pillaging of their data and privacy and carried on regardless.
Analysts of the true enslavement period of humanity say that you cannot lay the blame solely at the door of Big Tech, because governments, other influential groups, and the military/industrial complex were complicit in what happened after the year 2000 and data became weaponised and monetised on a level that was hitherto inconceivable.
The attack on the World Trade Center, in New York, on the 11th of September 2001, unleashed a surveillance and data collection plague on humanity, the like of which had never been seen before, because it had never been possible before, even at the height of communist repressions in Eastern Europe and China. Technology allowed satellites to spy from the heavens on the smallest creature sitting on a leaf. It allowed phones to be tracked; movements to be monitored; locations to be pinpointed. Anyone who raised their head from their computer screen and questioned the encroaching invasion of everyday privacy, was told that it was ‘A War on Terror’ and for their own good. Later, it would be used to track people breaking curfews and lockdowns imposed in the name of ‘Public Health.’ Drones enabled human beings to be killed by people pushing a button on the other side of the globe. Drones would be used to great effect as the 21st century progressed.
Humanity was warned. Analysts now wonder why everyone ignored those government employees who broke ranks, at great personal danger to themselves, and told the people on Earth how much they were being spied upon. 90% of the world’s data – personal data – was harvested and stored, hoarded against a time of rebellion, which would surely come.
The age of Apps was born. They became part of the rosary for the now established religion. Beautiful, colourful, jewel-like apps. Each one answering a different prayer. “Give me something to eat”, “Give me somewhere to stay”, “Give me a ride” – was the start. Then they morphed into, “Tell me when to sleep and when to get up’, “Tell me if I am sick or well”, “Tell me where I can and can’t go”. Soon, the apps became the religion’s Inquisition. Those who did not follow the rules were prohibited from having new beads for their rosary – the beads which allowed a person to move around freely, shop, get medical treatment, get schooling, and other basic needs.
Newer and more complex satellites were launched into orbit around the Earth. Linked to new and powerful microwave technology, they made all interactions faster, stronger, better. The men, (a hundred years had passed and, yet, they were still mostly men) who had grown exceptionally rich from this technology, met in their governments, think tanks, groups, clubs and lodges and decided, finally, that technology was more important than humanity. “The Internet of Things” was only going to generate so much money, as long as people wanted to buy the gadgets and objects that boosted their status. People needed to be replaced, in the main, with robots, artificial intelligence, super-technology. After all, it was cheaper to NOT employ humans in the work environment. Humans were greedy, unpredictable, got sick, gave birth and, by then, were beginning to rebel against the yoke of high-tech oppression.
So, another great experiment, by the stupendously rich men, was conducted. An experiment of international scope – a project of fear, which would defy all rational thought and give the controllers of the experiment a chance to enhance the technology, without interference, and reset the parameters of how life on the planet would be shaped from that point onwards.
A Pandemic.
The first pandemic of 2020 to 2022, was a rehearsal. Its point was to see how gullible the population was. How often they could be frightened into obeying the rules and where was the breaking point that would trigger the population into rising up against the system. Analysts now argue that timing was everything. If it had gone on longer than two years, there would have been bloody revolutions across the globe. Thousands of people in western countries protested in the streets, but they were just outbursts of frustration, and when it came to the final months of the long and dreadful incarceration in their homes, most willingly took the ‘vaccination’ on offer, in order to gain their freedom. The stupendously rich men, who had, by then, invested heavily in pharmaceuticals, doubled and tripled their wealth within a year. As with the wars generated in 1914 and 1939, the fact that they would enlarge their wealth due to genocide mattered not one iota.
The controllers had pronounced the experiment satisfactory in some respects. During those two years, all kinds of technology had been rolled out – enhanced microwave technology, for example – which had effects on the health of the people – but they were persuaded it was the long-term after-effects of the ‘virus that had ravaged the globe’. Cash had disappeared. Yet more Apps controlled access to bank accounts and access could be withdrawn if an individual was not compliant.
Where the experiment had failed was that the pharmaceutical industry had not produced the level of death that had been hoped. They had underestimated the ability of the human body to survive. Even after a hundred years of throwing radiation, poisonous chemicals, chemical therapies, ‘forever’ chemicals and DNA altering treatments at humanity – still humanity survived. Maimed and, in some cases, in permanent ill-health – but it survived. Which was a nuisance and a drain on the economies of countries. So, it became necessary to undermine the survivors even further. A more productive cull was required.
The next experiment came in the Spring of 2023, when the stupendously rich men had turned their attention to ‘Climate Change’ and decided it was time to fully realise their investments in, what proved to be, fairly useless technology that would tackle the myth of manmade carbon generation destroying the planet. Governments began to dictate, again with the use of new technology, what the population could drive, eat, own and create. Lockdowns were brought in, again, especially during summer months, whenever they happened in the different time zones. The population was persuaded that the ozone layer was depleted again and exposure to the sun was extremely dangerous. Governments wasted huge amounts of money subscribing to experiments that ‘dimmed the sun’. These led to substances being sprayed in the upper atmosphere that caused crops to fail, and animal and human health to deteriorate even further.
Meanwhile, the stupendously rich men continued, throughout these years of hardship and growing poverty amongst previously affluent societies, to spend large sums of money on wars (to secure vital rare earth minerals – the blood supply of technology).
The satellites were now so numerous around earth, that nations were reduced to shooting the out-of-date hardware out of orbit with ground to air missiles. Lockdowns were imposed worldwide for these events, as the people willingly sheltered indoors to avoid the possibility of being hit by space debris hurtling to earth.
It became important to the stupendously rich men controlling the narrative, that everyone ate synthetically produced food, from approved centres controlled by their pharmaceutical and pharma-agricultural companies. Under the guise of yet another pandemic – but this time a supposedly fatal blight that affected all fruits and vegetables – commercial and private farms and gardens were sprayed by drones to kill off all the plants, and no-one was allowed to grow any food crops at home from that point onwards.
The following year there were, everyone was told, viral outbreaks amongst cattle, so there was a mass culling. The next year, they said a virus had appeared amongst poultry, and another culling took place. The year after that, a virus attacked pigs and the same solution was applied. There was fish to eat but people were advised that the oceans, lakes and rivers were so polluted that the fish were almost inedible. That was a piece of propaganda that was easy to believe. Businesses dwindled into nothing. Those that did survive were mostly ‘staffed’ by AI – one of the ‘miracles of technology’ devised to replace humans and also to make humans less willing to work, by providing them with amusement, companionship and, even, love, at the stroke of a key.
The technology and satellite capabilities were then so powerful that the Climate Wars began. Instead of bombing countries, the major powers used Climate Modification weapons to ruin crops. The United States would be denied rain for months by China; Great Britain would find itself at the mercy of the Russians who bombarded them with hailstorms and sub-zero temperatures; Europe would be gripped by continuous rainfall, which caused floods, courtesy of the USA. Petty grievances between countries were settled with snow or winds. People suffered economically, physically and mentally by the constant ‘emergency conditions’, created by cabals of men who just wanted to be as rich as Croesus and who, by now, had turned their attention to investing in eternal life. This condition that would only be available to them and their families, who were already living longer than everyone else because they had avoided compulsory vaccinations; lived in purified environments, protected from electro-magnetic frequencies and received the very best of healthcare and food.
The other obsession of the ‘elite’ was space travel. Ever since various unmanned exploratory craft had come back from the planet Mars with soil and rock samples, they knew that they contained minerals that would greatly enhance Earth’s technologies and make them yet larger sums of money.
Slowly, amongst the struggling populations, came the realisation that humanity was trapped in a technological asylum, created by monsters, and that, as constantly willing consumers, they had stitched their own strait jackets. There seemed no way out. None at all.
But there was a technology unknown to the rulers. It was waiting to be exploited and, eventually, it would provide a release for humanity. One person had created it and that person would come to understand how it could be used to free everyone from the nightmare of continual crisis and greed-created capitalism and slavery. And, when it was applied, it would rid the world of all those who sought to profit at the expense of humanity.
But it would be the most drastic change of the world there had ever been.
My non-fiction books
I like cooking and I love gardening and I particularly love combining the two my making the most of my garden produce. As you will know, if you have read any of my fiction books, I also love history and doing research, so it was, therefore, a short step from that to creating two of my non-fiction books: THE 100 YEAR OLD SCHOOL COOKBOOK and A LADY’S YEAR.
The School Cookbook is a compilation of genuine classroom textbooks that were created at the start of the 20th century for the new school subject Practical Cookery (which has morphed into many entities since – Domestic Science, Home Economics, Housewifery, and so on). The introduction of the subject into the curriculum was borne out of the need, it was felt, to teach young girls aged 9 – 12 how to feed themselves and their families, the rules of basic hygiene and domestic skills which, if they were not used in the family home, could also be used in a domestic employment situation. The recipes are excellent and are made even more impressive when you realise that 10 year olds were cooking these every week and, also, many poor urban families did not have a kitchen, or an oven, having only a fire to cook over. Click the cover to go to the Iris Books shop.
A Lady’s Year (1900-1910) was the direct result of acquiring copies of genuine women’s magazines of the period as background research for my WW1 period crime novels, the MAYFAIR 100 series. As most of the main characters in those books are women, it made sense to read through many of the publications that would have influenced women of the period. Once I had all the material, I just had to compile it into a tribute to the magazines of 1900-1910 whilst, at the same time, producing a very useful book of great beauty and elegance, thanks to the designer, Kate Lowe, whom I have worked with for almost twenty years. Click the cover to go to the Iris Books shop.
The very successful writer Marni Graff was kind enough to pen a review of this book on Amazon, she said :
“Brittney has used real ads, stories, photos, and essays from ladies’ journals of the Edwardian era to chronicle a year in the life of women who lived between 1900-1910. This absorbing compendium illustrates the role of women during this decade. Modern readers will alternately be amused by expectations and then chaff by how women were relegated and constrained in society.
Also an excellent reference aid for any author writing in that time period for accurate mores and societal norms. A fascinating read.”
Gifts From Your Garden (Bumper Edition) was my own pet project, borne out of my love for making as much as I can of all the plants in my gardens that I have had over the years. What started out as making jam and pickles from surplus fruit and veg, turned into making my own natural medicines and beauty products and also natural crafts for Christmas and just general decorative reasons. I had, originally, written three small booklets on the subject but realised that I had so much more to add, that I gathered the three small booklets, plus the extra information, and compiled them into a bumper book. If you really want to save money and derive a great deal of pleasure from your garden, then this book is the one for you. Click the cover to go to the Iris Books shop.
Cook’s Advent Challenge was a brainwave of mine. Create a sort of advent calendar, that was also a cook’s challenge – to make the recipe given for every day, throughout December. Click the cover to go to the Iris Books shop.
The recipes are for gifts, party offerings, family treats, all sorts of things, and the Challenge has been hugely successful every Christmas since it was published – particularly in the USA. Here’s a flavour of the response, from a review on Amazon by Mrs Lindsey Sabin of the UK:
“I’m having such fun with this calendar. The mincemeat recipe is so lovely I’ve made a fruit loaf and sometimes sneak it on my breakfast, The dog treats went down a bomb too, and possibly breath-freshening with all that parsley! Only half way through and very happy.”
