That Was... Then.

I keep re-watching episodes of that long-gone SF TV series, Space:1999. I wanted to be John Koenig. I think I've got my Helena Russell. And I wanted an Eagle of my own.

But what struck me was how beautiful and fragile the whole idea of humanity out among the stars was. The sets were lonely, the sense of community on the brink of disaster (but not quite over the edge) was palpable. Everyone was melancholic even if some small victories were celebrated.

Most realistically of all, everyone was reasonably fit, but not body-sculpted. People were lean, but not bulging with whipcord-like muscles. People had natural shapes, even on that sad, sad lunar landscape of Moonbase Alpha.

This helped make them more real as they wrestled their inner demons, engaged the unknown, survived the sorrow of likely never seeing Earth again. I wondered if there were Jews on the Moon — would they have remembered the keen sense of exile that their forefathers had felt when they wrote in the Psalms, "If I should forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its cunning; may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I do not exalt Jerusalem above my greatest joy!"

Sure, you can pick at the dated style and the sometimes wooden acting. But the sadness, that was real. And it made its viewers grow up faster.

Gravity

There are things that one wonders about all the time. Why is it that human minds, like resonators, transmit such grievous things? Whether ghosts (real or unreal or imaginary or actual or virtual) or ancient sadnesses, they continue to echo bizarrely across the history of the land. And death, while it may have no dominion or perhaps because of that, does not end the broadcast of the grave.

Decimation

It is the tenth month, but actually the twelfth; it is the day of the dead, and yet it is about sleep; it is cold, seen in frost and mirrors, and yet the warmth of fires and companionship. This is December, nor are we out of it. For every ten words, only one survives; for every ten pages of shattered sense, one will say something.

The new booklist is out, at Bookbinding. If I had had another 24 hours, I would have put a few words about Frank Beddor's The Looking Glass Wars in – it is as fantastic a retelling of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as Gregory Maguire's Wicked is of The Wizard of Oz.

I have grown old. It is no longer a world where one could rely on verity and be taken seriously. It is one where everybody invents their own truths, and so it is not one, but many. It is all Copenhagen writ large, with Einstein not taking Bohr's advice. And so I leave December to the burial of the dead, to the spirit of Phlebas the Phoenician, and to the bitter meetings of Titania with Oberon. What else can be done, when truth is fallen under the feet of the High King's horses in the granite of Babylon?

One

It is just one of those days.

It is not a very bad day. The humidity is tolerable, the actinic glare refracts slightly. You watch the other farewells. You hope they all fare well. You realise you don't know some of them and it is now too late for that. You realise you never really knew some of them you thought you did. It is too late for regrets. It might even be too late for egrets.

And yet it is a terrible day. You do your work. You realise your work, which you thought was commonplace and somewhat dreary and maybe unintelligent, is still about twice as much as some people's. Yes, but is it better? Unfortunately, it might be. Why should you work, then? You are just being made use of, perhaps? Maybe you are a tooth fairy. People discard their ivory and you reward their toothlessness.

It is just one of those days.

It is not a very bad day. But you find yourself slipping into the morass of malaise. You find yourself as crude and crass as the next man. And maybe as the previous one too. What the hell is wrong with you? There is nothing wrong with you: instead, you are playing out your God-disappointed role as pathetic sinner and perfectly normal lousy human being. What the wrong is hell with you, you ought to ask. Pathetic.

In fact, it is a hateful day. No sooner have you arrived at home, than the dark lord makes his presence felt upon the trembling of the telephone. You burn your candle at both ends, only to find that someone removed the burning cord from the middle and you have less time than you thought you had. Somewhat irrelevantly, all you can think of is crime and punishment: you've been wicked and you will pay the price. And so, your wax wanes and your wane waxes.

It is not just one of those days.

It is also one of those nights.

It is not a very bad night. There are actually some sensible people around to talk to. You love and respect a few of them. You think that some of them ought to just go away and stop consuming the spare oxygen that hasn't already been bonded to carbon and greenhoused. And you realise that that's a cruel and arrogant thing to think. And you want so very much not to care about how stupid and nasty you are being inside your head. But you do care, you ought to be better than that. But you're not.

It then becomes a horrendous night. You waste time, still knowing that you could kill time in worse ways but that this is not a good excuse. You type out a lot of good stuff, but you know it is only good because the rest is crap. You work your ass off, creating a fundamental deficit and a negative customer base. "All your base are belong to us," you remember. You have been debased. And at 1.30 am you realise, you are working this all wrong.

It is one of those nights.

You should be asleep. None of this is worth it. Why should you care if people are getting any sleep when you're not? But you care. It's just that you would be insane to show it. Nobody would understand that underneath it all, you might be better than you have shown so far today, that you might actually be a good person. But it is easy to hide. You can always take comfort in the fact that there is none righteous, no, not one. So you can't actually be a good person anyway.

All flesh is as grass, and the glory of man? It is as the flower of grass. The grass fades and the flower falls away. Oh yes, here you are, suspended, falling away in the very next exudation of the breath of God. Fall away. Fall away. Go to, go to, you have heard enough. Banquo will not come out on his grave. There is something rotten in the state of Denmark. There is a fourth. Who is that standing next to you?

It is one. Of those nights, it is one.