Once upon a time our ancestors dreamt of life on Mars, that the lines that appeared on its surface were canals for travel or irrigation. This was us taking the world around us and transposing it to a barren rock. I suspect even today that Mars has life on a bacterial level and that once it may have contained life. We are too obsessed with it, as if there is some kind of tribal memory. There have been many ideas that Mars and the Ark go hand in hand but we have no proof to say whether we came from Mars or came to this planet on an asteroid, mere soup in its hold. Therein lies the idea that all writing is a body of something. I started with Mars as a child, thrilled by Bradbury and Burroughs, I sailed on their seas, walked in their deserts and conversed with their aliens but as I grew I started to recognise the idea of the ‘other’. The alien in our society from how we treat the displaced, to how we act with one another. As a writer I was always destined to be somewhat of an outsider, an observer, a voyeur. I am driven. I still like to sit and watch. Listen to other people gossip. Gossip myself. The simple interaction of day to day life that reveals so much about an individual. Often cruelty is fear. Love is so easily hatred. Life is so close to death. We measure the world by money and we should learn that greed is dangerous. The concept of wealth so idiotic when the world we stand on has always tried to shake us off like a fox with fleas. I am not interested in the apocalypse, or even how climate change will alter the world, I am interested in how we will respond and we only have to look to history for that, and how we once dreamt of canals on Mars. I wonder what body of work we will leave behind for those to come.
Andrew Oldham's Boneyard 