SNOWFLAKES IN FIRE
`Once upon a time in a world of moral self-righteousness, nobody was seriously threatened by pain or death.’
These were the opening words of a podcast I’d stumbled across whilst trawling through the dark net one day last week. This initial sentence had made me seriously question my whole way of thinking. I felt a strange connection with this disembodied voice speaking to me of a world so different from my own here in Anticlockwise.
The podcast was presented as a fiction. But I was sure from the outset that that was not the case. There was a ring of authenticity in these spoken words that was palpable. The person uttering them was angry just like me at the life he was being forced to lead. But his world was nothing like mine. He did not live in a world of physical oppression. His was a world of public disgrace where failing to mouth the dominant social platitudes of the time would lead inevitably to public shame and humiliation.
The voice belonged to Itna Ekow and his podcast was entitled Snowflakes in Fire: The Bitter Tears of Reality.
Ekow had done a good job of covering his tracks. He’d recast the social groups of his world into five absurd categories: the Round Ears, the Pink Eyes, the Short Fingers, the Long Tongues and the Striped Faces – the various tribes of a place he’d named Poliwokia.
Snowflakes in Fire is a novel recounting the competing agendas of these five tribes – how each of them schemes to promote its own identity whilst proclaiming at all times that every social group is equally deserving of attention regardless of gender, ethnicity, merit, importance, size and social contribution. Everyone is equally deserving in the best of all possible worlds and anyone disagreeing with this should be called out for the public scandal that they are. `We live our lives in a state of indignation and moral outrage, ready to lend our support to all offended minorities,’ proclaimed a leading protagonist of the Striped Faces.
This internal bickering was eventually the source of their own downfall. The five tribes became so distracted by their petty internal disputes that they lost sight of the big picture. They failed to notice the presence of a looming and dangerous external threat that was about to destroy the very foundations of their sanitised existence.
I will leave you to read this fictitious offering at your leisure. Suffice it to say that Ekow concludes his savage satire in predictably brutal style. A belligerent and hostile neighbouring state, Pugnatia, decided to launch a merciless missile attack on Poliwokia in order to seize control of its vast mineral resources.
The various tribes of Poliwokia – Round Ears, Pink Eyes, Short Fingers, Long Tongues, Striped Faces – had spent so much time over the previous decades wallowing in their own self-righteousness that they had lost the capacity and the will to defend themselves. They shrieked and moaned at the affront to human decency and moral rectitude as the Pugnatians massacred them in their thousands. They wailed and whined and gnashed their teeth. They protested with empty words, but they had no ability to fight back.
Within a week Poliwokia had been colonised by the Pugnatians. The defeated tribes became unusually silent in the public arena. The sound of moral certitude was no longer ringing in everyone’s ears. The world had been turned upside down by an aggressive invading force that had proved to be not only militarily superior but strangely unwilling to listen to the idea that every group in society should have an equal crack of the whip. Foreign aggression was now not an abstract concept to be publicly denigrated. It was a violent oppressive force painfully present in the daily reality of everyone’s life.
Ekow finishes his fictitious tale in graphic style. He compares the Round Ears, Pink Eyes, Short Fingers, Long Tongues and Striped Faces to Snowflakes. The five tribes had prospered in a cold climate where an artificial eco-system had enabled delicate and fragile beings to survive. Yet when this fake world was disrupted by an alien force, its inner shortcomings were pitilessly revealed. The Pugnatians had pulled the closed world of Poliwokia apart and had revealed the social bankruptcy at its core.
When the Pugnatian missiles had rained down from the sky, the snowflakes had been cast into the fire and the bitter tears of pain and death had returned with a vengeance to the artificially constructed world of Poliwokia.
© Click Z Sol to view Solitanu’s World
Anticlockwise Journal – a compilation of Solitanu’s Blog posts – is on sale at Amazon
If you’re interested in discovering more about Solitanu’s favourite sci-fi books, films and TV series go to LOOKING OUTSIDE IN and DYSTOPIA
What does Solitanu read on Planet fibs? Fictitious Books
Follow Solitanu on X