The Garden of the Galaxy
The vision of Abram the
Seer as told to David Pennant
How can you be a good
father to a fourteen-year-old boy when the world is kicking you
in the teeth?
That's the question facing
George the policeman as his space craft races off to investigate
strange goings on at the Big Gun.
George's life path has many
twists and turns, but in the end, despite all the treachery, the
sun will come out for him from behind the clouds.
Paperback, 224 pages, A5
size, 16mm thick, weight 315 grams.
ISBN 978-0-9550053-1-2,
published 15.01.2018. Cover by Sapphire Phillips, my great niece.
which continues the story.
Read the opening pages of
The Garden here . . . 
See also the exciting news
at the foot of this page.
or order a paperback copy
from me for £4-50 or
in Kindle format for £0.80.
-oOo-
The roots of this book had
been growing inside me since I first became aware of global
warming in 2004, when I began to wonder where humanity was
heading. Will we manage to get the planet back on track? Will our
exploding population drive us out into space, and if so how far?
I was excited to read a
hint about our future in space in Psalm eight of all places. (See
the part of my video Easy Access to Space six minutes ten seconds into the clip).
But how could humanity
communicate across vast astronomical distances? Only if there is
no upper speed limit for spaceships (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH2IyXNCAA8 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZ0I5KBZTiM ). Communicating at the speed of light would be far
too slow.
At church, I used to attend
a small meeting on Sunday mornings where we expect God to speak
to us in the silence, and more than once I found myself imagining
a gun with an immensely long barrel. This led at first to Isaiah
54 verse 17- "no weapon that is formed against you will
prosper," but later it became the seed idea for the story.
I decided to work out the
entire plot in my head before starting to write. This took five
months, from Septermber 2016. I began to write in late January
2017. Reader feedback from two friends and a publisher led to
major revisions, and the book was finished in September 2017.
Published January 2018, while I was in hospital. You can read
about that difficult time in my book 36 Days in Intensive Care: my struggle with delirium
Exciting News seven
years on
In The Garden of the Galaxy,
I imagined a network of tunnels linking the continents, journey
time from Antarctica to New York two hours. Imagine my delight on
reading in March 2025 that Elon Musk's The
Boring Company proposes building a
tunnel between New York and London, journey time one hour. I had
imagined that such a project might be centuries ahead. It's hard
to keep up with the pace of change these days.