[Sticks]

Notes on Episode 1

This story first appeared on the college computer of the Robert Gordon’s Institute of Technology in Aberdeen in the autumn of 1988, and the original episode one was one page in length. I am not sure I had even mapped out the plot when I started, almost like when I started Season Three of the Mystical Realms Saga’s. Incidentally, the original story title was “Return of the Sticks”, so you can trace the name of my user ID back to the late to mid 1980’s

This was written in a text editor on a Honeywell PDP 11/34. (A text editor being sort of like the program, Notebook)

Later I was to rework this first story into a novel in 1993, but I never published it.

The stories were set around Aberdeen, where I did my first degree, in a future where there had been an economic collapse and an unprecedented environmental decay, coupled with a break down in law and order, with a further breakdown in morality.

We do not have the “white slave trade” as envisaged, but we do have an equivalent, today with young woman from eastern Europe, being forced into the sex industry

With the world wide credit crunch coming in 2007 / 2008, it seems very prescient, especially as later stories I was to do, were actually set in 2005 onwards.

In the original, the character of Katharine was not present, but in later stories, the white slave trade did show up, so in the 1993 rework, she was added, to help set the scene of this depressing vision of the future, to which we seem to have come almost close to realising.