ETERNITY CAN WAIT

About the Book

THE PLANET THERA is so severly overpopulatd the World Coalition Government has decreed that the older generation must accept voluntary euthanasia at the purpose-built eternity clinics. They suggest those past childbearing age be the ones to make the supreme sacrifice in favour of the younger generation. Every person is issued with a Death Order, but the time and the selection of clinic is left to the individual’s own choice and discretion—within reason. Special eternity trains are provided to carry each citizen to their final destination where clinic staff will assist them to obtain “everlasting sleep.” Once the ticket to eternity has been issued, there is no going back. Nobody seems to know what happens to the body. JOHN MASON JUNIOR was eight years old when he accessed Thera’s governmental database, Central Archives, and discovers the Death Order issued to his name when he was just six weeks old. His dream from then on is to establish a new society on Thera where every person can live out their life with dignity and without the Damoclean sword of the Death Order hanging over their collective heads. When he reaches his legal majority at the age of twelve, Junior begins a systematic but passive resistance to the Death Order culture. He challenges the government and meets them on their own ground. He also balks the Class Distinctions Law that separates the executive from the worker. Worker-born Jorig Przewalski becomes Junior’s greatest friend and ally in his resistance of the restrictive laws that are choking the freedom of the people. John Mason Junior is a man with a vision and the will to make it happen. This is the first book in a two-volume story, which begins with “Eternity Can Wait” and concludes in “The Death Trains of Thera.”

About the Author

“I’m a sixty four year old recycled teenager with a passion for writing, a zest for living and the most magnificent set of invisible teeth you have ever seen in your whole life!” “Yes, I’m 84% disabled, and in a wheelchair that I have named: ‘El Butelbumtrinkét’. But I don’t consider it a drawback to living! It certainly allows me to live my life to the full!” Hobbies include my two cats Mitchkin and Misha, as well as painting, graphic art, illustrating and photography. And, of course, writing science fiction. I was born in 1948 in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) in the city of Bulawayo. I was raised and educated in Bristol, UK, and moved to the Balearic Islands in 1965 where I started working as a proof reader and journalist for the Majorca Daily Bulletin. In 1982 I was back in Bristol and working as a journalist and correspondent for the South Bristol Observer. But that came to an 340 end when my family decided we were moving to London. Life has never been the same again. Since then I have freelanced and have had several articles published as well as short stories such as “The Ghostly Goat” written for the African field and aimed at children aged from 12 to 15. It became such a raging success that Otilia, the head librarian at Bulawayo library, told me that children were coming in every day for almost a year afterwards to ask for photocopies of that printed story! It was published in the Bulawayo Sunday News in 1999. “ETERNITY CAN WAIT” is the first novel in a set of eight books that I call “The Chronicles of Thera”. The story of John Mason Junior and his fight against the Death Order continues in the sequel “The Death Trains of Thera”.