NOVEL
IN PREPARATION: The
Grand Oligarchs of Qinsatorix
Author: Thomas Hoskyns Leonard Literary Assistant: Stephen Maver
In collaboration with members of
the Edinburgh All Comers Writers Club
Genre: Political satire/Science
Fiction
Proposed readership: Intellectually
minded adults of a humorous
disposition
Projected length: 80,000 words
Projected completion date: 1st
November 2016
Please contact me for sample chapters on
E-mail:
leonardthomas70@googlemail.com
EXCERPT
CHAPTER 1: THE FISH ROT
FROM THE TOP DOWN
I, the Nameless Ghost, have
recently
started
writing
a dead serious scholarly
treatise which recounts
a mind shattering
saga of yore. While
I am no longer of religious persuasion,
I am living, in
Anno Domini 2523,
in comfortable
penury with Saint Zebedee Seagull and his barking cat
Apocalypse on my rocky early
retirement islet in the Sea
of the Marmalade Dogs in Central Europe. My
story begins over a century ago in Trystonia, the main landmass on
our sister planet Qinsatorix:
The sixteen-year old Prince Adam of Eden stuck another pin into his
dead sea trout.
I must have missed the plot, he
mused. Please tell me, unholy Messiah! What is the plot of
my miserable life? And why are the reeking fish still swirling around
my head?
Adam, the Prince Infanta, was the splutteringly handsome,
Anglo-Icarian younger son of the King Emperor and Queen Empress of
Qinsatorix, a planet in the Aton star system. While intensive
simulations on the Gatarmass pseudo-random number generator indicate
that this planet is in some parallel universe in another dimension,
the location in hyperspace of this universe relative to ours is still
unclear to astrologers and astrophysicists on Planet Earth. Indeed,
the pilots of European mega-ships travelling from Earth through the
Shepherd of Orion black hole remain totally confused (after they've
negotiated the Black Hole of the Thinking Sphinx at the far end of
the Wittgenstein wormhole) until they are beamed in by the Star Nav
invigilators on Qinsatorix.
During the last two hundred thousand years or so, numerous
Icarians have space-warped to Earth and back, without the benefit of
mega-ships, by transposing via the Mankowitz-Teller waves. During
their trips to Planet Earth, the Icarians gleaned and utilised a huge
amount of knowledge, captured thousands of well-educated humans, and
space-warped them back to Qinsatorix.
The various transpositions and mega-ship voyages over the ages
between Qinsatorix and Planet Earth were only made possible by the
trifestium metal lining of the Wittgenstein wormhole, which
was, according to legend, installed at the behest of the mighty Aleph
Two. This gravity-resistant layer significantly reduces the mass of
people or mega-ships travelling through the wormhole at velocities
exceeding the speed of light.
During the month of Julius of Anno Domini 2418 the
Inner and Outer Moons of Qinsatorix rotated in 'opposing confluence'
on opposite sides of the planet. During this period, the
golden-skinned Prince Infanta behaved even more childishly than
usual, for example by ruffling his curly ginger hair extremely
compulsively, repeatedly sniffing under his right armpit, and
tickling his obloid much more frequently than was considered
courteous among the aristocracy.
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR: Thomas
Hoskyns Leonard (the Bayesian
statistician Tom Leonard) is
a well-published retired Professor
of Statistics who
has taught at the Universities of Warwick, Wisconsin-Madison and
Edinburgh and is best known
for his treatise A
Personal History of Bayesian Statistics, which
was named John Wiley's hot article of the week during February 2014,
and for Bayesian
Methods, An Analysis for Statisticians and
Interdisciplinary Researchers
(with John Hsu, Cambridge University Press, 1999), one
of his two advanced text books. In
April 2014, Statslife,
an online publication of the
Royal Statistical Society,
published an illustrated
version of his invited talk
to the Society about
Bayesian
history, and John
Wiley published an interview with him subtitled The Life of
a Bayesian Boy in
Statistics Views during May
2014.
In 2012 and 2013, Dr. Leonard
self-published two novels on his website, entitled Grand
Schemes on Qinsatorix
and In the Shadows of Calton Hill. As
a co-founder with the
Scottish poets Scott Forster and James L.S. Carter
of the Edinburgh All-Comers Writers Club, he has , since 2011,
composed about eighty poems and written a collection
of short stories, as well as
encouraging a number of successful writers and poets.
He enjoys performance poetry,
and sometimes reads his poems to the Blind Poetics group
in Edinburgh
Dr. Leonard is also a public
health campaigner, and the
administrator of the Facebook group
Mental Health Discussions Edinburgh which
boasts over
1000 members worldwide.
His blog averages over 14000
views a month, and addresses many diverse topics
and issues. These
include treatments for mental
health conditions,
social issues,
Statistics, Eugenics,
Psychiatry, mind
control and MK Ultra, the
oligarchs who may or may not rule the world, science fiction, poetry,
literature, flash
fiction, spirituality,
chess, history,
politics, Scottish
crime, and Scottish places of
interest. Dr. Leonard
averages over
1500 games of international blitz
chess a year on Chess.com,
and actively debates social,
political and spiritual issues as
part of an advocacy group in
his church.
