ECOPUNKS
Image by Maurice Burns
Ecopunks is the title of my new novel due out soon.
Below are a couple of extracts featuring two of the main characters Wolf Cliss and Lorcan O’Malley.
WOLF
This section describes a campaign in the Pacific Ocean that ecowarriror Wolf Cliss was involved in.
Although he had come close to death on a number of occasions Wolf rarely allowed himself to contemplate it, however, the two weeks he spend drifting at sea in the middle of a nuclear testing zone left him with little option. The French government had planned to explode a nuclear device over an isolated area of the Pacific Ocean and all shipping had been diverted from the zone, its perimeter was heavily patrolled by the French navy, with some tacit but unspoken support from its military allies. Never-the-less a number of small vessels managed to slip through, including a small yacht called El Acorde Perdido owned by a Californian business woman called Cathy Ovenbeck. As well as Cathy and Wolf the crew consisted of a Jamaican music producer called Francis and a Jordanian environmental activist called Ibrn. At lest 10 other boats planned to break through the cordon, each of them crewed with people from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australasia and Europe to ensure as much global coverage as possible. There had been no contact with the various vessels before they sailed into the testing zone with each agreeing to keep their strategies and eventual destinations secret from one another to ensure they were not compromised. Seven were eventually apprehended, but four, including the boat on which Wolf was sailing, made it through.
The initial exhilaration at managing to sneak past the French cordon and into the exclusion zone was quickly replaced by a stark realisation of the horrendous implications for those who were on board. The French government had made it quite clear that it intended to proceed with its nuclear test regardless of any protesters who entered the area. While it was easy to convince themselves that this was pure bluff the activists now had to consider the harsh reality that the French, backed by their military allies, might carry out their test. Ovenbeck and her crew sailed to a random coordinate, well into the exclusion zone but far enough off centre so as not to be obvious, and simply let the boat drift. All radio communication was banned and the four-man crew found themselves cooped-up on the tiny vessel with stale water and limited rations in sweltering heat, contemplating their probable extinction.
For the first couple of days they could hear and occasionally see aircraft in the distance which they presumed were searching for them and any other vessels which had made it through. There were four French activists scattered among the various crews to maximise opposition in their homeland but Wolf and his companions had no way of knowing if they had made it through. For all they knew they might be the only boat in the exclusion zone.
On the third day they could not see nor hear any aerial activity and Wolf concluded that that the French government had abandoned any further searches and were now preparing to go ahead with the nuclear test, regardless of the presence of any protesters. They could simply argue that those who had sailed into the exclusion zone had done so of their own volition, in the full knowledge that the nuclear device was going to be detonated there.
Kei had told Wolf of the devastation that her grandmother had witnessed in Nagasaki following the detonation of an atomic bomb by the US military in 1945 to force a surrender by Japan. She had seen people still walking as their skin peeled from them and on the pavement had seen outlines of human forms, people who had simply been vaporised into a film of dust, flash-burnt onto the ground, shadows of what had once been sentient beings blitzed into oblivion without even a millisecond to come to terms with their imminent demise. Now Wolf had plenty of time to contemplate his.
He had half hoped that they would be apprehended before breaking through the cordon or else spotted and dragged away by the French military. Although he did not voice any such hope he suspected that the others had felt the same. He suspected that the French were playing a psychological game with them and would give them time to crack and flee before detonating their device. It was down to a game of chicken. Would they sail from the test zone after a token few days there in the full knowledge that they had done their best and that their noble protest had failed, that it was better to live and fight for another day? Once again Wolf half-hoped that someone else would say it, for he was sure they were all thinking it, but all remained steadfast.
Wolf wondered if, when the explosion came, he would have time to gather himself together and prepare for his own destruction. Would he see a flash in the sky as the bomb exploded, hear the boom and then wait for the force of the blast to shred the fibres of his body into a billion pieces and disperse them across the bubbling stretches of ocean whose surface had been vaporised at the same instant as Wolf and his companions, the boat and even the surrounding atmosphere? The thought was terrifying and as Wolf stared at the sky he was afraid to even blink in case he should miss his own death.
Once out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of a sudden flash and he dared hardly breath as he waited to hear the crash of a nuclear explosion. It took him several seconds to realise that a flash of sun had simply caught in the silver frame of someone’s sunglasses. Even if they managed to survive the force of the blast they would quickly be bombarded by radioactive fallout that would either quickly burn their flesh from them or else initiate a slightly slower, but never-the-less inevitable process of decay.
Despite the possibility that the four of them would die together there was no camaraderie between the crew members, no black banter as there had been on other missions. But while some of those had entailed an element of risk, none had been as deadly as this one. Each of them sat in silence and tried to come to terms with the decision they had made. Ovenbeck was a practising Buddhist and spent a lot of time meditating, while Ibrn used his prayer mat to communicate with Allah. Francis had proclaimed himself to be a Rastafarian but did not seem to openly pray or undertake any communication with his god. Wolf had not been brought up in any particular faith and if asked would have declared himself an atheist but when death seemed so inevitable and so imminent he could not help considering if there was an alternative to oblivion. Was it not possible that some elemental spark that existed within his psyche and gave him the ability to perceive himself as an individual would continue to exist after the death of his body?
LORCAN
Lorcan O’Malley is a burnt out Irish hippy and the following scene describes the drug experience that tipped him into the fringes of insanity. It takes place in Berlin in the early 1970s.
One night, when Mandy had gone off to work in the strip club Lorcan sat staring out from their apartment window towards the [Berlin] wall and he promised himself that the next day he would try to muddle his way through the bureaucratic process necessary to obtain a visa to visit the east of the city. He wanted to stand in the street on the other side of the wall and look back over to where he lived. He was impatient and began to pace around the apartment, eager to be doing something but disinclined to go out to the bar where he played and his usual cronies hung out. He picked up an ornamental box he had bought in Morocco the previous summer and where he kept his stash of dope and cigarette papers. Although he had cut back his intake from the time he had spend in Morocco he still smoked every day, although he tried to restrict himself to smoking in the evenings. He was about to roll himself a joint when he noticed a small cellophane package that he had forgotten about among the various bits and pieces. He had bought the LSD from a doorman at the strip club and intended to take it one night when he and Mandy where at home so that she could talk him down if need be. But now he was eager for new experiences and with impatient dexterity pulled the wrapping from the LSD-soaked paper and let it dissolve on his tongue. Lorcan made himself coffee and sat back in his armchair gazing out the window towards the wall and tried to define the moment when his mind moved from contemplative sobriety into chemical enhanced perception. Just as he thought he had paid for a dud he notice that the walls of the room were starting to undulate, barely perceptibly at first but then more and more pronounced until he was sure he could see them warping towards him before twisting away again – then it was not just the walls but also furniture and carpet, even Lorcan’s legs which were stretched out before him that seemed to pulsate.
He found a grain of salt nestling in the fabric of his armchair and nervously began to roll it between his finger and thumb. He could define its contours, dips and rises - it was as if he had a tiny planet in his hand, complete with mountains and valleys strewn over continents and separated by expanses of dried-out ocean. He imagined the earth reduced to such a size and yet still able to contain all life upon it. In the vastness of the universe the earth was just such a speck and perhaps even the universe itself was the size of a grain of salt in a different dimension. Perhaps the universe was like a single cell in a human body, made up of billions of galaxies that in turn contained billions of planets some of which were home to intelligent life in which beings like himself were contemplating the exact same scenarios as he was now - telescoping inwards each component of their body into infinity only to be repeated in an even more impossibly smaller scale until it came full circle - all that existed contained within itself. The vastness of the idea appalled him, but he could not let it go. The tinyness of the grain of salt horrified him but as he rolled it he could feel it begin to expand until it was the size of a football and then into an earth-sized planet, yet still rolling between his finger and thumb. When he looked at it was still the same size but it rested planet-sized among the contours of his thumbprint. Something in his psyche ruptured as it struggled and failed to contain the idea and he felt himself collapsing onto the floor and rolling himself into a ball as he tried to protect himself from the vastness of the universe. He tried talking to himself and to set mathematical problems to distract his mind, at least for as long as the effects of the LSD continued, but he kept coming back to it. It felt as if the idea had shredded his mind and that he could no longer see a rational pattern in the world in which he lived. Every time he closed his eyes he could see explosions of light streaking between galaxies, pillars of fire across millennia.