Alien Queens
A fantastic and mouth-watering, 136,000 word, time-travel comedy that takes the Grandfather paradox and plays footsie with it before wringing its neck and throwing its carcass on a heap!
Alien Queens-Being the narration of Miss Molly Flaguline, is a farcical, profoundly irreverent, madcap comedy primarily intended for the older teenager and those in their twenties. Commencing in 2019, it is a gentle, tongue-in-cheek, fantasy comedy that never takes itself seriously. It concerns the activities of an ancient alien and his female sidekick as they attempt to procure the DNA of two of England’s most famous Queens; Anne Boleyn and her daughter, Elizabeth the First. Without this fresh supply of cells, which they intend to genetically modify for their own use, they risk infection from the modern world.
Assimilated into the unnecessarily elaborate and complicated events are two effeminate and bitchy gay men who are unwittingly drawn into the alien's scheme. Using a genetically altered life-form whose natural habitat is time travel, the aliens and the gay men chase each other back and forth along thirty-five different periods from 6000BC to an unknown time in the future until one of the queens is restored to her time and the alien receives an appropriate and very fitting punishment. However...this unique yarn then pushes further into the realms of absurdity by introducing luminaries such as John Fowles, Oscar Wilde, Douglas Adams, Agatha Christie (which is why she disappeared for eleven days in 1926 of course), Brooklyn Beckham who is Prime Minister in 2030, Shakespeare and myself, (not a luminary) a humble beggar with aspirations who once worked the streets of London in 1805. Joining this merry eclectic mix is The Spice Girls and HG Wells.
"Three hundred years ago, you betrayed me and I am not a forgiving man!"
Lord Glayva the Seventh
My uncensored opinion!
This was a terrible book to complete! My hardest ever in terms of sheer complexity. Taking a full six years to complete, the logic of the story-line tested my pea-size brain-power to its limits. To keep track of all the characters and where they were in both space and time, I had a length of plain wallpaper, some fifteen feet long, tacked around three walls of my living room and divided into all the time zones that the characters would occupy. And from it, hung ribbons, each colour representing one person.
The ribbons hung down and across, snaking their way from wall to wall turning my room into a complicated bad Monday wash day. Just to look at it gave me a headache! And the mistakes I found! Endless, endless errors where a character was where he or she should not have been. Rewrites? I know about rewrites!
Eventually, I came to my senses and tore the migraine-inducing kaleidoscope down, replacing it with a huge sheet of paper some six feet high by four feet wide upon which was divided again, the time zones. This time I replaced the ribbons with coloured pencils which at least proved to be easier. However, upon going through the story for the umpteenth time, the result looked like a chimp had been let loose on it. It was at that point that I began to feel sorry for the poor souls who were going to read it! Was I subconsciously getting my own back?
Parts of the story, even I didn't know what was going on! But that's the nature of time for you. Beware the grandfather paradox! I remember, in the fifth year of its development, a third attempt at simplification was made with the help of a high-tech solution; my Apple Mac. Now let me tell you something important. There does not exist a computer that can handle that sort of data without it crashing and burning every minute, no matter how much RAM memory it has! Microsoft Excel? The Leopard operating system? Huh! No match for the complexity of my Alien Queens!
But, bother! I've been thinking of a sequel now. Perhaps I'm subconsciously getting my own back on myself? Madness!