HAVE YOU OVERLOOKED – JOHN CHRISTOPHER?

  • 3 January 2012

John Christopher (real name Christopher Samuel Youd) was born in Lancashire on April 16th 1922. His surname is of Dutch Origin. Writing as John Christopher, the British author is best known for his SF (adult and YA) novels which have won a number of awards. For completists – Youd has written under his own name, and under the following additional pseudonyms: Stanley Winchester, Hilary Ford, William Godfrey, William Vine, Peter Graaf, Peter Nichols, and Anthony Rye.
To my mind the great strengths of Christopher’s work are his backgrounds and characters. At a time when quite a number of authors were producing ‘end of the world’ novels, Christopher managed to come up with fresh background angles, and characters that were far from perfect but very believable.
In The Death of Grass he begins with two small boys taken to spend time on their grandfather’s farm after a long family estrangement. The grandfather considers both and makes an arbitrary decision to leave his money and land to one of the children only – as the child who wants to farm and will be good at the work. The boy, David, does inherit and settles to a solitary life as a farmer at Blind Gill, an extremely isolated and closed-in farm which can be easily fortified. The other brother, John, becomes a Civil Engineer, marries, fathers a girl and a boy and who – crucial to the story – has a good friend, Roger, who works for the Government.
In China a catastrophe is developing as a virus attacks the rice crop, and attempts to kill the virus only result in it becoming far worse, mutating into a new form that now kills grass, wheat, rice and other similar species. In a year patches of it are appearing in England, and rationing begins. Roger then comes to John and his family to say that there is a Government plan to kill a major portion of the big-cities’ populations so that the remainder of the people might survive, and that if they get out of London immediately to avoid the bombers they may be able to reach David’s farm.
It requires the addition of two people, a gunsmith and his wife, to the party so that they will have weapons, and killing is required to get them out of the city and retrieve their children who are in boarding schools outside London. As they trek across the country towards David and sanctuary at Blind Gill (acquiring hangers-on as they go) they realize that with civilization failing they must, when necessary, cast off their own civilized behaviour in order to survive. They reach the farm, find that the expected welcome is not there, and they have a brutal choice. To force entry, or leave and die.
This book has a number of characters, all diverse, and each fully-rounded as a person. In places it was savage or as savage as a book published in 1956 was permitted to be. And while not graphic, Christopher certainly managed to make such events as theft, murder, rape, (including that of a child,) and the characters’ choice of abandoning children to die, clear to a reader.
I was caught through the book by the characters’ growth and changes, and by the alterations in character as those who had been decent men and women were worn down to elemental animals fighting to live and protect their families. The author also holds up the suggested shape of the future for those who survive, and I found that shape was believable, even likely. This book is a fine piece of writing and I re-read it regularly.
The World in Winter was another solid book. And it did what none of the others in the sub-genre had done, (or none that I know of) it had the refugees from much of Europe and Britain fleeing to Africa, with some excellent and unpleasantly clear-eyed chapters on what it would be like to be despised refugees in the countries there. Towards the end of this book a group of Nigerian soldiers and a TV producer, with the main white character, are on an expedition back to England, and detour (after mechanical problems with their hovercraft) to one of the Channel islands. (I have often wondered if this chapter was not the spark behind Christopher’s book written three years later, A Wrinkle in the Skin.)
In that book – A Wrinkle in the Skin – a massive earthquake occurs which produces dry land between Britain and France, and leaves the Channel islands high and dry. Most of the population are killed in their homes, and while never specifically covered, the definite impression is made that this quake has ben worldwide and has wrecked the whole of civilization.
However the story is about one man, the boy he rescues, and finally several small groups and single people they encounter. By restricting most of the events to small numbers and a comparatively small area, Christopher makes the book intimate, and while you aren’t always certain that you like the main character, Matthew Cotter, you do understand him.
This ability to show you a person, his/her backgrounds and motivations, was one of the author’s great strengths, and he tends too, to take a theme angle that isn’t what you expected. I recommend in particular The Death of Grass, and A Wrinkle in the Skin.

Bibliography

The 21st Century (1954) (short story collection)
The Year of the Comet (US title Planet in Peril, 1955)
The Death of Grass (1956), Michael Joseph (UK) US title – No Blade of Grass (1957), Simon & Schuster (US)
The Caves of Night (1958)
A Scent of White Poppies (1959)
The Long Voyage (US title The White Voyage, 1960)
The World in Winter (US title The Long Winter, 1962)
Cloud on Silver (US title Sweeney’s Island, 1964)
The Possessors (1964)
A Wrinkle in the Skin (US title The Ragged Edge, 1965)
The Little People (1966)
The Tripods trilogy (expanded to quatrology, 1988)
The White Mountains (1967) Macmillan (US); Hamish Hamilton (UK)
35th anniversary edition, with revised text and preface by author, Simon & Schuster, ISBN 9780689855047 (2003)
The City of Gold and Lead (1967) Macmillan (US); Hamish Hamilton (UK)
The Pool of Fire (1968) Macmillan (US); Hamish Hamilton (UK)
When the Tripods Came (prequel) (1988)
Pendulum (1968)
The Lotus Caves (1969) Macmillan (US); Hamish Hamilton (UK) ISBN 0-241-01729-7
The Guardians (1970)
The Sword of the Spirits trilogy
The Prince In Waiting (1970)
Beyond the Burning Lands (1971)
The Sword of the Spirits (1972)
In the Beginning Longman (1972) ISBN 0-582-53726-6
Dom and Va (1973)
Wild Jack (1974)
Empty World (1977)
The Fireball trilogy
Fireball (1981), E. P. Dutton, ISBN 0-525-29738-3
New Found Land (1983) Dutton (US) ISBN 0-525-44049-6. Gollancz (UK),
ISBN 0-575-03222-7 (1986) Dutton (US) ISBN 0-525-44227-8; Viking Kestrel (UK), ISBN 0-670-81030-4
A Dusk of Demons (1993)
Bad Dream (2003)

Film and television adaptions
The Death of Grass was made into a film, No Blade of Grass, in 1970, by Cornel Wilde.
The Tripods was partially developed into a British TV series.
Empty World was developed into a 1987 TV movie in Germany, Leere Welt.
The Guardians was made into a 1986 TV series in Germany, Die Wahter.

Post-Disaster Sexism.

  • 3 January 2012

Yup, interesting title, isn’t it? But I’ve come to the conclusion that it exists. Possibly not in real life – although I’m taking no bets on it – but certainly in the publishing of disaster novels. I’ve always enjoyed a good disaster novel of the SF type. Death of Grass, Day of the Triffids, A Wrinkle in the Skin, Tomorrow When the War Began, One Second After… I have a three-foot shelf of them, and last year I was re-reading the collection for the umpteenth time.
It was then that the full realization of something occurred to me. What I like to read, I tend to write. Thus my work has been published in everything from genre (SF, fantasy, alternate history) to a Western, non-fiction humor, and YA books with a farming background. But I haven’t sold a disaster novel. I’ve written three of them, so why not? All were set in New Zealand, which could be a reasonable explanation for USA publishers rejecting them, but not for New Zealand publishers turning them down.
And I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s sexism. Not against me, (frankly the average publisher doesn’t care if you’re black, white, bright purple with green spots, male, female, transgender, or tripedal Martian) but against the main characters. If you look at almost all published disaster novels, the main character, the one who drives the action or narration, you’ll find that it’s a man. Usually too, he’s a family man, with a wife, two or three children, and sometimes a pet. So, most of those books were written in the 1950s to 1970s, but even most of the more modern ones fall into that category. I’m not saying that the authors should have made their main character a woman, but I am saying that very predominantly those books with a main male character are the works that publishers buy and publish.
This would be helped in that it is mostly men who write this sort of book – and male writers mostly have male main characters in this sub-genre, so the outcome is self-fulfilling. As in, men – the majority of whom who are more comfortable with a male main character – write 90% of disaster books. If the other 10% of disaster books are written by women, some of whom will use a male main character too – while those who use a main female character have their work rejected – that means that only around 5% of disaster books offered to publishers have a main female character. And if they’re rejected they are so few that no one notices this. Here and there one may sneak through, and if it does, it’s more likely to be YA, rather than adult.
I might have wondered why, once I’d come to this conclusion, but I don’t. Because male publishers think that when the chips are down, when everything falls apart and people are dying, killing, and most of civilization is going down the tubes at warp speed, women won’t be leaders, they’ll be the ones needing to be rescued.
The problem was, that when I sat down to write, I wrote three SF/F disaster novels, in the first one of which the main characters were two women who saved each other and a number of other people. Found sanctuary, founded a new settlement and eventually a new civilization. (The other two books also had female main characters.)
So why do I think that there may be publisher prejudice? Two reasons. One is that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. Where are the disaster books written by women and featuring strong female characters? See? Duck!
And the other reason is a lot more personal. I wrote draft one of the first of my three disaster books about fifteen years ago. I offered it to several of our larger New Zealand publishers who without exception praised the writing – but felt that it wasn’t for them. Okay, genre didn’t sell well to NZ Publishers at that time (and still doesn’t sell that well even now) but what nails it for me is the memory of a phone call. I won’t mention the publisher, and I suspect it was a phone call because they didn’t want anything on record. But what he said was, that they liked the book, but felt it would be – ah – of more interest to them if the older character was male. If I did a re-write with that in mind they’d be happy to look at the work again. I said nicely that I’d think about it, thank you for the feedback, hung up – and recited all the Anglo-Saxon I could think of while kicking the desk.
The book had two main female characters because in my opinion women react and deal with massive and widespread disasters differently to men. They have different priorities. I wanted to tell the story of two young women whose world was dying around them and what they did to survive – which did not include turning to a big strong man to protect them. And that was what the publishers didn’t want to buy. Currently we are seeing more strong, dominant (and very well armed) women in the ‘Romantic Suspense’ genre published in America, Eve Krenin’s Driven, and Hidden for instance. It may be that the tide is turning, and in a few years we’ll be seeing disaster novels featuring female main characters that survive on their own. I’m just not so sure we’ll be seeing them here in New Zealand for a fair while as yet.

City of Whispers by Marcia Muller.

  • 3 January 2012

Hardcover – Grand Central publishing – October 2011. Reviewed by Lyn McConchie.

The next few reviews that I’ll be putting up have something extra. Recently I was talking to a friend who gaped at my personal library (about 7,500 books) and asked if I’d bought them all? How could I afford them? The answer to that is a) they come from a lot of places, and b) they’re the collection of a lifetime, some are gifts, and some I literally paid pennies for. So I decided that the next few reviews would also include the book’s history – and how I came to be reading it.
I first read a book by Marcia Muller in 1991. I was staying with an American friend in New Jersey who reviewed books, (had a library of similar size to mine) and introduced me to books by this author. I read a couple of his copies of her early work during my week’s stay and fell for her characters. The rest of the trip to several other US cities, I dived into used-books shops and raided, to return home on that and subsequent trips in 1995 and 2001, with all of her work to date before starting to acquire it new in mostly hardcover from then on. I never much liked her stand-alone books, but I love her series detective, Sharon McCone. The copy of this book, the latest in her series, was (as about the last half dozen have been) a Christmas present from my friend (and gifted artist, the fox at the head of the reviews section is her work) Sharman Horwood.
So, on with show… City Of Whispers is a furthering of McCone’s background. Several books ago she found that she’d been adopted, that by birth she was Native American, and she met both of her birth parents, discovering as she did so, that she had other half-siblings from her mother’s later marriage. Now one of them, Darcy Blackhawk, has sent her an email, “Help me. I’m in SF.” (That’s San Francisco, not Science Fiction.)
Mildly concerned since the brother in question is a notorious screw-up, Sharon asks around the family, checks a few spots…to find nothing, and it isn’t until she ties the discovery of a dead girl to Darcy’s possible involvement that Sharon begins seriously to hunt him down. Then she receives another message. “Real trouble now. Help me.” But every step of the way she’s a step behind him, and then there’s another murder.
This series has been one that has grown and developed with every book. We’ve watched Sharon go from wrong man to wrong man, to the right one, and for that relationship to become solid, caring, and with an interesting professional crossover. We’ve watched her devastated to discover that the family she’d always believed were hers by blood, weren’t, and find that it really doesn’t matter. Love can be just as strong as DNA. We’ve seen her family expand as she finds her birth parents, makes connections with them, comes to care for them, and discovers that there’s always more heart room when you love.
This has become a series that isn’t just about a private detective, it’s about the damage relationships and family can do, and the healing they can bring. It’s about people, and places, and activities and hobbies, and life in general – and sometimes in the dangerously particular. And all I can say is that I hope Marcia Muller lives a very long life and writes and has published at least one Sharon McCone book every year of it. I recommend this series, and I also recommend that you buy it all and read it from the start. That way you get the full impact and all the nuances – because it’s seriously good work.

Baby Creatures

  • 24 December 2011

The single gosling the gaggle have managed to produce this year continues healthy. Visitors aren’t doing quite so well, my gander doesn’t like them at the best of times, and when he has a gosling it becomes the worst of times. A friend had to skip quite fast three days ago, and I’m expecting several visitors in the next 2-3 days – something that should provide exercise for all concerned.
Gold Neck the bantam appeared for breakfast this morning with three tiny chicks in tow, and another hen has one. She had two, one has since disappeared,) and as my hens and geese are all free-range, it’s possible other small feathery creatures will appear in the next few weeks
This is certainly the theme about fifty feet up in the shelterbelt trees where the white-backed magpies are nesting enthusiastically, and down in all the crevices of suitable (and sometimes quite UNsuiitable) out-buildings starlings are energetically raising broods. In the cat-park bamboo-clump the finches and sparrows are at it, and Thunder is spending a lot of time in his park – keeping an eye on the raspberries, and on the starlings that like them as much as I do. However, thanks to Thunder I get the larger share usually.

Paperback of The Questing Road

  • 24 December 2011

is due out at the end of january. I’m looking forward to seeing my copies and having them available at our 2012 natcon and seeing them available at the Oz natcon (Continuum 8)- which I hope to attend as well (baring acts of Ghod.) I’ve also been clearing short work submissions off the table this past two weeks. I wanted them away by Christmas so I could concentrate on the day. 12 short stories out, plus a true life animal tale which has already been accepted, and an article ditto. Now if only some of the editors like the stories it’ll be an excellent start to 2012…

One Out of Four IS Bad

  • 17 December 2011

A sad event two days ago. Sister One the goose has been brooding four eggs, and they hatched. I spotted her strutting across the lawn for dinner with a single gosling in tow and was disappointed. I presumed that the terrible thunderstorms we’d had a week or so earlier might be to blame, (the massive changes in air pressure caused by heavy thunder can kill embryos developing in eggs) fed her, her twin (Sister two) and Stroppy the gander, and watched as everyone dabbled in the water-trough, ate the wheat given them, and wandered about.
Then, yesterday, I decided to check the abandoned nest and was annoyed to discover that the eggs – all four – had hatched. But putting things together I think what happened was – the first gosling hatched, a strong healthy baby, and the next day his mum took him off to the far side of my large lawn to find food. While she was gone the other eggs started hatching, but the day was cool and very wet, and with no mum to shelter them, the other three hatched alone and died before she returned.
At least it does mean that the eight eggs Senior Goose is sitting on at the moment – and which are due to hatch in a week or so – may be fertile and I could get more goslings very shortly. I’d be pleased if more appear – and so would Stroppy the gander who loves to have goslings. Right now he’s marching about, a foot behind his chest, and an ‘alone I did it’ look on his face.

HAVE YOU OVERLOOKED – SANDRA MIESEL?

  • 17 December 2011

Ms Miesel, born in 1941, holds Master’s degrees in Biochemistry and Medieval History. She is predominantly a non-fiction writer who has produced a number of very valuable works examining the writings of others both in and out of the SF field – and I do recommend most of them. However in one way she had been a great disappointment to me as a reader.
In 1982 Ace produced a book entitled DREAMRIDER. This was a brilliant shamanistic fantasy set in a number of alternate worlds. It featured a 10 page Introduction by Gordon Dickson, saying what a wonderful writer Miesel was and how this was only the first of what he expected to be many works of fiction. I watched for her name for years and was furious when in 1989 a book (Shaman) appeared from a different publisher, with a different cover, and different title – which book I bought thinking that it was a sequel to Dreamrider, only to find that it was the same book. It claimed to be an expanded and improved version, but I didn’t find it so and I wasn’t pleased. I do recommend either version, (but I preferred the original and retained that copy) but be aware that they’re the same book.
Dreamrider’s main character is Ria, a woman who lives in a far more repressive version of our own world. She has the ability to become a shaman and this becomes reality when her dreams lead her into a far different version of Earth, where giant otters exist as comrades and fellow citizens to humans. Kara, an aged human shaman and her friend and colleague, Lute, one of the Mac(ro)Otters, begin to teach Ria in dreams. But the PSI, the government agency in Ria’s world that oversees social conformity had been alerted to Ria’s odd behavior and she is faced with possible rehabilitation, something that can amount to the loss of personality and reduction of intelligence to a moronic level, and she must fight to retain her individuality. (The brief scene where Ria recognizes her old schoolteacher and hails her, to find that the woman has been reduced to this level by the PSI is chilling.) Ria learns, grows, and changes, and by the end of the book it looks likely that she will be a nexus point for possible changes to her world as well. This, for me, has been a book that has stood up to regular re-reading for almost thirty years, and I find the richness of the two main worlds and their offshoots, engaging every time. I only wish that Meisel had written other books that continued Ria and Lute’s story and showed what changes to her world Ria managed to make and where they would lead.
Sandra Miesel is Catholic and her views have stirred up some controversy over the years. A letter to Life Site News, her critiquing of an earlier letter by Michael D. O’Brien on LoTR and Harry Potter, received a stinging rebuttal from the author (frankly I thought Miesel was right.). Her consideration of Philip Pullman in “The Pied Piper of Atheism” is trenchant and her very reasonable point, made on a website (http://www.zenit.org/article-21008?l=english) – that the character Dr. Mary Malone, an ex-nun, and now an advocate of sex and science, who ends in this third book by engaging in occult practices to lead two twelve-year-old children to sleep in the same bed and indulge in sexual foreplay is not exactly a role-model for young children reading this trilogy – is well made.
The book she co-authored, The Da Vinci Hoax is a scholarly piece of work, but may suffer slightly from a fixed point of view. Both writers are devout Catholics unable to accept that the Church may, over the centuries, have deliberately suppressed certain writings and histories, particularly those of women. However they do very successfully deconstruct the Da Vinci Code, pointing out that while all the background on which it rests is supposedly true, much of what is cited is inaccurate or incorrect. The result of both books to me was a decision that I will probably never have sufficient time to read both side by side while looking up and verifying all references given to decide the truth and accuracy of each for myself – but I really wish I did. I think it would be a wonderful project that would expand my knowledge of history considerably.
Many of Sandra Miesel’s works are available on Amazon and other books sites, all are recommended.
(Partial) Bibliography there are other non-fiction books in which Ms Meisel is part-author and two fiction collections of Rudyard Kipling stories.
Exploring Cordwainer Smith by Arthur Burns, John Foyster, Sandra Meisel, and Alice Bangsund. (1975)
Dreamrider 1982 Ace. 
SHAMAN. 1989 Baen – an earlier version of this was published in 1982 as Dreamrider NOTE: this is essentially the same book.
Miesel, Sandra (1978). Against Time’s Arrow: The High Crusade of Poul Anderson. Borgo Press 
Miesel, Sandra (1973). Myth, symbol, and religion in The Lord of the Rings. T-K Graphics.
Olson, Carl E.; Sandra Miesel (2004). The Da Vinci Hoax: Exposing the Errors in The Da Vinci Code. Ignatius Press.
The Pied Piper of Atheism: Philip Pullman and Children’s Fantasy. by Pete Devere, Sandra Meisel, and Carl Olson. Paperback Jan 2008 Ignatius Press.

Collections

Forward! (1985) (with Gordon R Dickson)
Mindspan (1986) (with Gordon R Dickson)

Anthologies containing stories by Sandra Miesel

Catfantastic V (1999)

Short stories
a number appeared in Amazing Stories, Amazing SF, etc over the 1980s. But I haven’t listed them here

The Disappeared by Kristine Katherine Rusch.

  • 11 December 2011

published softcover (this WMG edition in 2011, previously in 2002)
Reviewed by Lyn McConchie.

The trouble with this book is that it’s too good. And if that sounds odd, bear with me. The book was a gift, I scanned the blurb and thought that it should be a good read because a) the author writes well, and b) it’s a very intriguing plot. Both items were right and thereby was the problem.
In this universe humans and aliens have made agreements relating to what is and isn’t legal in their various spheres of influence. And the trouble is, that on Earth the Government has accepted that alien laws should supercede ours.
Case One. A human, female, lawyer, sentenced to the rest of her life – and it’ll be short – performing brutal hard labour because she won her client’s case. It’s more complicated than that, but no one explained it to her and now she’s on the run.
Case Two. a terrified traumatized human, male, child of eight. Kidnapped legally because aliens are entitled under their own laws to visit the sins of the father upon the child. He’ll be mentally broken beyond ever being put together by what they’ll do, and our Government says that’s okay, it’s legal. He’s been returned for the moment – and now the family is on the run.
Case Three, four, five, et al – more of the same, and those that the aliens haven’t caught up with are The Disappeared. Those who’ve gone deep under cover, walked away from everything they know, from all friends and family, from every single possession – to put themselves in the hands of experts who specialize in ‘disappearing’ humans hunted by alien legal systems.
Yes, this book is very well-written, yes, the background and characters are compelling, yes, it’s one of a series, so if you like it there’s more already out and others coming. And no. I won’t be re-reading this book, no, I won’t ever be buying others in the series, and no, from now on I’ll check any book by this author twice before buying – or accepting.
Why? because it was too effective. I too am a writer and as such I have imagination and empathy. I could imagine myself unwittingly caught in a similar situation and suffering those punishments.
(one alien species disembowels the humans it catches who break their laws – and the laws can be very easily broken. Here a 17 year old dies that way because as a ten year old he taught his best (alien) friend next door to speak English. Best friend developed to be a neuter and it’s retrospectively forbidden. So after running for seven years, the boy is caught and left to die in agony for a sin he committed without knowledge or intention – as a child.)
And it distressed me. I finished the book, laid it down and felt disgusted and physically slightly nauseated. I know ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’, but when that sort of punishment is routine, when the perpetrator is a child, ignorance should be a valid defence. Nor should aliens be legally allowed to kidnap and mentally shatter an eight-year-old, because twenty years ago his father broke one of their laws.
This book is compelling, all too believable, and strikes out into new territory – for all of which reasons, the author has lost me. I could too easily put myself in the characters’ places, and I’d rather not be there. If it sounds like a book you’d enjoy then buy it. For me, it was too good – and that was the problem.

Subconscious still out-speeding trains

  • 11 December 2011

And in the last week I’ve done another three stories. Finally however, I seem to have caught up – temporarily anyway. But while I have other work done/to do over the last 3, and next 3, days, I get the feeling that my ability to produce a short story fountain is only briefly in abeyance. I’m still getting that niggle at the back of the mind that says more new story plots will be presented and watch this space. Not that I’m complaining. So far for 2012 I have publications listed as – twelve articles, four books, and short stories in 7 theme anthologies.

A Bad Case of the “Mysteries.”

  • 7 December 2011

I was happily doing a few blog entries when, just as I finished the ‘Cuckoos’ one, an email signalled arrival and I turned to check who was contacting me. According to the email it was from the Department of Internal Affairs and they’d just deposited a sum of money into my bank account. I considered that information doubtfully. It was a nice thought, but so far as I knew they didn’t owe me anything and what was it for? There was no information as to that in the email or on the attached payment note. When this sort of thing happens I tend to be suspicious, usually it’s either an error or a scam. Well, they had a phone number on the email…so I phoned. A nice lady at the other end assured me that they had already received a number of calls, and that they knew nothing at all of this.
Had I done anything of recent months that might have led to a payment? Hummm. Citizenship? I’m a born and bred kiwi. Births, deaths and marriages? I’ve been neither hatched, matched or dispatched lately. Raffles? Well, I don’t run them, and I didn’t think that winning $20 from one of my competitions last month would attract other payments. Passport? Yes – ah, well – no. Yes, I got a new one this year , but I’d received it. Why would the Department be reimbursing me the cost? If they’d decided out of the blue that I was a terrorist or something and shouldn’t have got the passport I didn’t think they be sending me a repayment – more likely the Armed Offenders Squad. I should check with my bank, the lady said, and if money hadn’t been deposited then it was probably a scam since the email email said clearly that “the money HAS been deposited…”
My question was, that if it was a scam how had the scammers known my bank account number and feeling a bit insecure over that, I phoned my bank. They checked my account – after a prolonged and rigorous check that I was who I said I was. Things almost fell over right there since starting to feel more paranoid I wasn’t happy about giving them some of the details they wanted. Yes, I knew I’d rung their number, yes, I knew they were the xxx bank. But they themselves had been telling me for years not to give out those details and…I was persuaded – to discover that no, that amount had not been deposited in my account. Therefore the bank said, it was almost certainly a scam and I should email the email to their scam-alert people. As for the bank account number, that was worrying. I should go back to the Department of Internal Affairs and ask them to check further.
But now my paranoia level was so high it had bypassed the stratosphere and was on a straight-line trajectory for the outer planets. Fearing that the phone number given in the email might actually be connecting me to the possible scam-artists, I looked up an alternative in the phone book. Phoned General Inquiries, and talked to a pleasant guy there who was sounding just a trifle weary. I listened to his explanation and smothered a fit of the giggles. The money was the annual payment sent to writers who have a book or books in the library – The Public Lending Right. A writer who has his/her books in public libraries receives x amount as compensation for all the readers who read the work without buying it. I get this each year, however… it normally arrives as a letter, listing the eligible books and adding all sorts of details. It can’t be mistaken for anything but what it is.
This year those who do this, had apparently decided to save trees and postage by sending everything as an email. They’d omitted anything ON the email to say why you were getting the money, AND there was nothing on the attachment that said so either. Nor apparently, had they thought to tell those who answered the phone whose number was IN the email what they’d done, so they were just as baffled as anyone when they began to get all these phone calls. I get the impression that paying the PLR this year will be a steep learning curve for the Department of Internal Affairs. A large percentage of New Zealand writers will have been phoning them (as well as their banks and probably Netsafe too.) And the apprehension and confusion caused has been considerable.
I told the chap that he should enlighten whoever was on the (emailed) phone number before things spread further. He said he’d do that. I phoned my bank back to explain and to add that if others called they could check ‘these’ points and if they agreed, then this is what the payment would be for. They were grateful. And I sat down to write this, contemplating that old saying that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. I’m sure you get the allusion.