Christopher Douglas

Two physicists, Kerry and Leon, are working in the underground laboratory of the ALICE complex of CERN in Switzerland when part of a routine experiment goes horribly wrong. Unbeknown to them, the experiment has inadvertently opened up a black hole that has not only affected our Earth, but every conceivable alternative reality. It is not until they go up to 'ground level' that they see the full extent of the devastation that has occurred. Minstor, Nyre, and thousands of others from alternate realities find themselves stranded in our world. Several of these Alternates form an alliance to help the scientists combat the problems caused by the disaster and to try and find a way home. With the arrival of the UN peacekeepers under Major Horst, the small group of scientists and Alternates are torn between keeping the true nature of the disaster from the outside world, as well as the UN peacekeepers. Meanwhile a ghostly rogue Alternate with significant mental abilities plans to escape through the Alps to create the life that he wants without realising the devastation it will cause. With the help of a UN ambassador, the small group of seemingly normal Alternates and Scientists evade the watchful eye of Major Horst, the media, and the rest of the civilisation. Not knowing of where to turn, or who to trust, they try and keep our world from finding out what really happened whilst pursuing and ultimately stopping the rogue Alternate from hurting himself, and the destruction of Earth as we know it. Both a team of soldiers under the command of Major Horst and the Alternates find themselves in Turin for a final and dramatic showdown.

The Alternates

Andrew Nickolds

Dave Podmore knows cricket inside out and isn't afraid to say his piece. A doughty county crusader who has missed several England call-ups through celebration-related injury niggles, Pod is also a plain-speaking commentator whose Guardian columns have covered subjects as diverse as match-fixing and umpiring scandals, England's Test performance and 2001's whitewash of the Aussies (at the post-match fancy dress night, that is, largely due to Marcus Trescothick's unbeaten Scary Spice). Now The Word of Pod preserves the cream of Pod's salty wisdom in handy book form for cricketers, their fans and their fiancees everywhere. And there's even some exclusive advice for those ladies from the lovely Mrs Podmore.

Christopher Douglas and Andrew Nickolds

The Word of Pod

Nick Newman

The Autobiography of Dave Podmore

Pod Almighty!

Welcome to the world of Ed Reardon, writer and liver of life at the cutting edge. Above The Cutting Edge, to be accurate, a one-bedroom flat over a hairdresser's in Berkhamsted, where Ed has lived on his own since his wife and grown-up kids left him, forcing the sale of the London home. Ed's first (and to date last) published novel 'Who Would Fardels Bear?' was bought by Hollywood, relocated from Oldham to San Francisco and turned into a Sally Field movie ('Sister Mom') in the mid-70s. It was directed by Ed's best mate Jaz Milvane whose career has since gone stratospheric. Ed's broke up on re-entry; with the exception of his episode of Tenko in 1982, the royalties of which now amount to about £17 a year - but are anxiously awaited nonetheless. Ed has often been forced to do a spot of lowbrow work for the ever popular Christmas book market. Jane Seymour's Household Hints (1996) and The Brand's Hatch Story got him through a couple of winters, although sadly his own proposal for a Little Book of Publishers Rejections was turned down because it ran to over two thousand pages. Ed however remains bullishly optimistic, as the series reveals. He may have only one pair of trousers and a seven-figure Amazon sales ranking but no writer knows more about stealing his agent's stationery... and as a freeloader Ed Reardon is the acknowledged leader of his profession. ED REARDON'S WEEK tracks Ed's flawed attempts to escape poverty and gain the literary success that is surely his due...

Ed Reardon's Week

The rise of the Christian Right took many writers and literary critics by surprise, trained as we were to think that religions waned as societies became modern. In If God Meant to Interfere, Christopher Douglas shows that American writers struggled to understand and respond to this new social and political force. Religiously inflected literature since the 1970s must be understood in the context of this unforeseen resurgence of conservative Christianity, he argues, a resurgence that realigned the literary and cultural fields. Among the writers Douglas considers are Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, N. Scott Momaday, Gloria Anzaldúa, Philip Roth, Carl Sagan, and Dan Brown. Their fictions engaged a wide range of topics: religious conspiracies, faith and wonder, slavery and imperialism, evolution and extraterrestrial contact, alternate histories and ancestral spiritualities. But this is only part of the story. Liberal-leaning literary writers responding to the resurgence were sometimes confused by the Christian Right’s strange entanglement with the contemporary paradigms of multiculturalism and postmodernism —leading to complex emergent phenomena that Douglas terms "Christian multiculturalism" and "Christian postmodernism." Ultimately, If God Meant to Interfere shows the value of listening to our literature for its sometimes subterranean attention to the religious and social upheavals going on around it.

Christopher Douglas

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