• Visitors can check out the Forum FAQ by clicking this link. You have to register before you can post: click the REGISTER link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below. View our Forum Privacy Policy.
  • Want to receive the latest contracting news and advice straight to your inbox? Sign up to the ContractorUK newsletter here. Every sign up will also be entered into a draw to WIN £100 Amazon vouchers!

Science Fiction

Collapse
X
  •  
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    Science Fiction

    THE MASTER OF TIME AND MOTIONS
    by Ferne J. Welles

    An extract from a hitherto-lost Victorian Science Fiction Romance

    My heart pounded as I fled from the baying mob of grey-suited 'Poltax'
    officials, with their coarse and brutal cries of 'Unregistered!',
    'Ineligible for benefit!', and 'Defenestrate him!' ringing in my ears.



    Rounding the corner past a barred and shuttered ex-hospital, I at last
    came upon my time-sphere, standing amidst the waste ground where I had
    left it. Where once, in my own era, had rose a proud and thriving
    whalebone corset factory, now was only desolation, with a large and
    garish sign reading:


    Site for new
    McBurgers Vom-O-Rama Multiplex
    1-Stop Shop-'n-Eat


    I knew not what this cabbalistic gibberish meant, but I was sure it
    foretold a development that would make decent men sick to their
    stomachs.



    I hastily ingressed into my vehicle, and slammed the portal behind
    me. As I manipulated the controls of the Temporal Throbulator and donned
    the throbbing purple Helmet of Transdimensional Intercourse, my mind flew
    back over the horrific sights I had seen since I had landed in this
    hateful epoch - the strange daily propaganda sheets filled with ladies'
    bosoms (well, pictures of them) and preaching worship of the Sky God
    Mur Dok...hideous tribes of 'Yups' with their cordless communications
    devices, childless marriages, and brainless dinner parties...the travesty
    of the Royal Family, loved by a Prince who loved vegetables (at least he
    had the sense to pick a suitable wife)...the hordes of shambling,
    aimless, unemployed, under-educated, loutish, ill-mannered, drunken
    boors I had met at a 'Coming-Out' party...the sick, the dying, the
    helpless, the hopeless, the feeble, the flatulent, and the one or two
    other members of the Political Opposition...the screeching dictator
    Twatcher and her husband Pennis, selling their countrymen into the
    demons Mammon, Max-Well and Mac-Don-Ald...



    The 'Poltaxers' were hammering on the door of my time-sphere, joined
    now by a savage tribe of 'Es-Tate Agents', crying: "Sell us this bijou
    luxury one room spherette!"



    I yanked on the glistening knob of my Durational Vibrator and adjusted
    my Epochal Orifices. Everything span round, I felt nauseous and dizzy. I
    regretted eating the raw egg and Camembert curry I had purchased from
    Edwina Salmonella's takeaway that morning.


    Then, with a lurch, a groan, and an expulsion of gas from the sphincters
    of my time-engine, I slipped once more into the Fourth Dimension. I
    praised the Lord that I was heading back to my own era, where Victorian
    Values still held sway. I prayed that my trip to the future had been
    naught but a nightmare, and that my vision of 1989 would never come to
    pass. I couldn't believe that the British people would be so stupid to
    let it happen.
    Brexit is having a wee in the middle of the room at a house party because nobody is talking to you, and then complaining about the smell.

Working...
X