Brief History of the Future
What if teleportation was really possible? Englishman Richie Fisher is about to find out ...
Richie and his wife Clara have won a weekend in New York in a newspaper competition. While Clara is off blowing their spending money, Richie wanders aimlessly, chewing on a veggie-burger, ending up in a gift-shop where he finds himself standing in front of an instant transporter machine. It looks nothing like the open-plan teleporter on Captain Kirk's Starship Enterprise; in fact, it seems more like a glorified microwave oven.
Richie places his burger inside, hits the return key on the linked-up computer - and the burger disappears. But if he can teleport a half-eaten veggie-burger, what else could you do with the machine? For criminals, the possibilities are endless. Who could catch you if you beamed drugs into nostrils a hundred miles away? And how much would illegal immigrants pay to be teleported into the rich host country of their choice?
Richie buys a teleporter and takes it back to England, where the chaos begins ...
Stephen Clarke lives in Paris, where he divides his time between writing and not writing.
His Merde novels have been bestsellers all over the world, including France. His non-fiction books include Talk to the Snail, an insider's guide to understanding the French; How the French Won Waterloo (or Think They Did), an amused look at France's continuing obsession with Napoleon; Dirty Bertie: An English King Made in France, a biography of Edward VII; and 1000 Years of Annoying the French, which was a number one bestseller in Britain.
Research for The French Revolution and What Went Wrong took him deep into French archives in search of the actual words, thoughts and deeds of the revolutionaries and royalists of 1789. He has now re-emerged to ask modern Parisians why they have forgotten some of the true democratic heroes of the period, and opted to idolize certain maniacs.
Follow Stephen on @SClarkeWriter and www.stephenclarkewriter.com