The Blindboy Podcast - The strange English dystopian Sci Fi Novel about Ireland

Episode Date: May 4, 2022

Ossians Ride is an unintentionally hilarious paranoid English novel written in 1959 about a futuristic Ireland that can obtain nuclear weapons from Turf. I pick it apart and contrast it with other Dystopian fiction. Long Hot Takes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Boola bus you fussy Duncans, welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. Let's begin this week's episode with a short piece of prose by Hollywood actor Pierce Brasnan. He sent me this poem using his mind and it's called Topless in Queensworth. Topless in Queensworth got caught shoplifting a box full of tapeworms. I adopted a racehorse, I bought him some space clothes. I ate pastry and nace once while I was topless in Queensworth. That was

Topless in Queensworth by Hollywood actor Pierce Brosnan. Haven't heard much from him lately. Oh Pierce Brosnan. Can never get my head around Pierce Brosnan. I once missed a bus while thinking about Pierce Brosnan. Cause I can't while thinking about Pierce Brosnan because I can't quite you can't place him

I know that Pierce Brosnan is from Drogheda I think we know that he's Irish but he's not really Irish though is he he's mid-Atlantic he's mid-Atlantic that strange

strange situation that befalls a small amount of Irish actors he's mid-Atlantic so Pierce Brosnan is definitely mid-Atlantic Liam Neeson tries his best and then you've got fucking Daniel Day-Lewis

man, Daniel Day-Lewis Daniel Day-Lewis is English he's English but he's kind of Irish we don't know why, like we don't we don't call him Irish he doesn't call himself Irish and we're not

like claiming him the way that the English do if an Irish actor becomes suddenly successful no one's claiming him it's just, Daniel Day-Lewis is Irish. Like the way a goat is a male sheep. It's not. It's not at all.

But a goat is a male sheep. Or an owl is a cat with wings. It's not. But it's okay. It feels right. I think sometime around 1991, after his performance in Christy Brown and In the Name of the Father

Daniel DeLewis just moved to Wicklow and just said I'm Irish and then we all said okay and since then he's kind of just been Irish but he involuntarily drifts out into the mid-Atlantic I don't know where the mid-Atlantic is

it's in the middle of the ocean between America and Ireland. I don't, like, it could be the ancient island of High Brazil. Where the fuck are these mid-Atlantic actors from? And it's always actors. It's always male actors. It's never actress.

Um, there's a few Welsh actors who are mid-Atlantic. Anthony Hopkins. Like we all know that Anthony Hopkins is Welsh but he's mid-Atlantic. He's just there drifting in the middle of the ocean. You can see sometimes Brendan Gleeson tries to have a little crack at being mid-Atlantic. And he can try his best but Brendan Gleeson is afflicted with what we call big Irish head. Brendan Gleeson has a big Irish head. And I don't mean that as an insult. It's just a thing that we have.

Big Irish head. It sounds terrible, but it's a very useful thing. Especially if you're in like an airport in Thailand and there's no signs that you can understand. You just look around and you see a big Irish head and you walk over and you go, what's the crack? I don't know where gate 13 is. And then they go, oh, it's yourself. It's over there.

I think you become mid-Atlantic. It's when your accent is a bit difficult. So if you have an Irish accent or a Welsh accent or a Scottish accent and you find yourself becoming famous in America, your voice ends up getting this middle ground, and we call that Mid-Atlantic. Who else was Mid-Atlantic? Sean Connery is Mid-Atlantic. He's from Scotland. Fucking Sting, man. Sting. You ever heard Sting talking? And Sting's English, but he's from Newcastle. Which is a very, very difficult accent for an American to understand.

So Sting is Mid-Atlantic. The fucking Newcastle accent, man. What is that accent? Don't look at me. I don't even like macaroons. Your man Liam Payne from One Direction tried to have a very public and unashamed

bash at being mid-Atlantic recently. He was interviewed at the Oscars after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock into the face and they interviewed Liam Payne from One Direction and he just had this incredible accent.

What the fuck was that? Because he's Welsh you see. So he went bollock first into the mid-Atlantic but it was too performative no one believed it he might have had a nostril foot of the devil's dandruff we won't know

but he fucking man he got on a boat he got on a boat and went off off the coast to Kerry and tried to stake a claim tried to put a Welsh flag down into the middle

of the Atlantic Ocean. And Pierce Brosnan and Anthony Hopkins politely told him to fuck off back to Wales. You don't get to choose Mid-Atlantic. It chooses you. It's a thing that happens to you. Like finding your first grey pube. And watch your man from One Direction, Niall Horan. He's too Irish. He could never attend never if he even tried Mid-Atlantic he wouldn't be allowed and Niall Horan knows that he can't

because Niall he doesn't have big Irish head but he will have big Irish head you can see that about Niall Horan that

like at the moment he's like in the cocoon phase of big Irish head but one day when he gets to about 32 he will emerge into a beautiful butterfly of big Irish Head but one day, when he gets to about 32, he will emerge into a beautiful butterfly of Big Irish Head. I like Niall Horan, he's a bit of an odd bastard.

He's very unapologetic about who he is and I admire that. He once tried to cancel a One Direction tour so that he could become Rory McIlroy's golf caddy. I'm not very good at seeing into the distance. I wear glasses when I'm in places like airports but I don't really need them but they're handy and when I noticed that my eyesight was getting a bit shit it was about five years ago

I have Niall Horan to thank because he came out with an album and the album was called Flicker Flicker Flicker and I was in like Tesco or somewhere and they were selling a load of

Niall Horan's Flicker album up by the tills and if you look at it from like six feet away it looks like fucker the L and the I joined together to form a u and i was just like yeah fucking man fair play niall horan i was full sure for like two minutes that niall horan had just bit

the bullet and said i'm after leaving one direction and my first album is going to be called fucker but it's not it's called flicker but because in my mind his album is actually called fucker it's now perpetually sexual and there's nothing i can do about it so even now that i know it's called flicker i sexualize that word now when i see it on niall horan's album i'm like flicking what niall fennies but yeah niall Horan's album Flickr is called Fucker in the same way that Daniel Day-Lewis is Irish

you're very welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast if this is your first Blind Boy Podcast I suggest going back to some earlier episodes to familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast

if you're a regular listener if you're a cruising Susan or an itchy Richard, you know the crack. Just a little update on my tour of England, Scotland and Wales. Yeah, I've got a tour of England, Scotland and Wales that's happening in June. The tickets went on sale there on Friday. I'm playing in London in the Troxy Cardiff in the Glee Club Manchester in the Academy too

although Manchester's nearly sold out so we're moving to a bigger venue and then I'm in Glasgow up in Scotland in the O2 Academy and you can get those tickets if you Google them online one thing I want to say about the London show

in the Troxy if you Google them online. One thing I want to say about the London show in the Troxy. If you booked tickets for my London gig in Logan Hall in 2020. Which I had to cancel due to the coronavirus. If you bought tickets for that gig in 2020. It was cancelled. You are allowed to go to that Troxy gig. So those tickets are completely transferable. And you should be getting, so if you bought tickets to my London gig in 2020,

that was cancelled, you should be getting an email from Ticketmaster. You might have it already, you might be getting it in the next week or two. But check your emails emails check your spam folder because what I've been told is that you'll be allocated new seats basically in the Troxy now two years has passed so you mightn't even be living in London in that case you're fully entitled to a refund no problem but I'm going to make sure that those emails go out um see it's not something that's entirely in my control because it's fucking ticket master you know and what are you gonna do i'd love to not work with ticket

master on certain gigs because they introduce fees and shit but sometimes you just have to because i don't organize the tours i just show up and another company organizes them but you will be getting an email check your spam folder and if you don't get it contact Ticketmaster yourself I'm gonna do my best to make sure those emails go out what I do have control over is reminding you in this podcast and using my social media and I look forward to coming over to all you delicious cracking tans and don't be worrying if in June I'm just coming to Cardiff and Glasgow and London and fucking Manchester I'll probably do a second leg with a tour where I'll come to places

like hopefully Bristol Sheffield Newcastle we'll see what the crack is I'm here now in my delicious office um it's after five o'clock that I'm recording this because it was a particularly noisy day in my office today as you know I've spoken in great detail about this office I'm in a shared office complex multiple different companies on my hallway they don't always show up to work because of work from home or whatever so often my corridor is fairly quiet, with the exception of course of the barefoot accountant. But the barefoot accountant situation

has been resolved. I spoke to him. He's no longer walking the hallways barefoot, howling in pain. So I generally have a quiet office space. But today everyone came into work everyone so it was chaos the barefoot accountant behaved himself he stayed in his office but now there was all these other fucking cunts doors wide open screaming and shouting zoom calls not being done with headphones which i don't understand i don't understand. If you're doing a Zoom call. Put on your headphones. I don't need to hear someone from Dublin. Being tinnily broadcasted all over the hallways.

So the noise was getting pretty extreme. So I was like. Fuck it I can't record now. I need to do something about this. Because that's in breach of the rules. You're not supposed to make the corridors noisy. so I'm entitled to tell people to stop so what I did today was so when I'm in my office like my actual office room first thing I do is I put on my office pants so I have outdoor pants and indoor pants my outdoor pants are

functional and fashionable but my indoor pants are just little grey tracksuits, little comfy baggy grey tracksuit that I like to wear inside my office but this is inappropriate attire for outside the office so I keep the pants on inside the office. Also what I do is I take my shoes off inside my office, I take my shoes off. So today I decided to wander out around the corridor to try and tell some people to close their doors but I forgot to put my shoes back on. And then I look down and it's like oh my god

now I'm in the fucking corridor barefoot. So now I'm the barefoot accountant. I've become the barefoot accountant. I was fucking barefoot in the hallways. I felt become the barefoot accountant. I was fucking barefoot in the hallways. I felt like I was going mad. So I ran back inside and put my shoes back on.

And then I didn't go and sort the issue because I was... Because I'd startled myself. I'd frightened myself that the barefoot accountant no longer walks around barefoot he stays in his office and unconsciously I had to redress the balance I had to create the chaos now so instead of addressing the issue I just waited until 5 p.m for everyone to go home and now I have the entire

office complex to myself so this week I have a sprawling hot take for you about a very strange and bizarre unknown book that I found. It's not a particularly good book but I'm fascinated by it. I'm really really fascinated by it and I want to speak about it and explore some of its themes. and I want to speak about it and explore some of its themes. First I want to speak a bit about post-colonial theory. Post-colonial theory is, it's a way to read society, culture, cultural artefacts, such as books, films, ideology, from the perspective of colonisation, specifically post-colonisation.

Now I speak about post-colonialism a lot, especially when I speak about Ireland and I look at Irish culture in terms of what Irish culture is having been colonised for 800 years. But post-colonialism can apply to any any culture that has been colonized or the cultural output of the country doing the colonizing one thing that fascinates me is orientalism as we call it the way that the west whether it be english-speaking countries whether it be america or britain the way that the west views the east or the area that would be referred to as the orient which is a colonial word so this weird thing happens in culture where once one society colonizes, dominates or brutalizes another, right? Let's just take, for example, Britain and China. So this is a huge area, so I'm going to simplify it as much as possible.

So Britain engaged in a massive war for a large part of the 19th century with China called the Opium Wars. And Britain basically wanted to trade with China because China had a shit ton of goods that Europe wanted. Mainly tea, silk, porcelain. Europe really, really wanted this shit. So that seemed fairly straightforward. It's like, okay, China's got a bunch of tea, silk and porcelain.

All right, Britain, just take a few ships over there and buy it. What's wrong with that? Well, Britain didn't really want to buy it. Britain wanted instead to trade. Because the Chinese were like, yeah, you can have all the tea and silk you want. Just give us gold. We want, you know, pay us money

and then you can buy it off us. But Britain wanted to trade and the things that Britain had to trade, the Chinese didn't really want. Like Britain was trying to trade things like furniture or wool and the Chinese were like, no, we don't really want that. Britain didn't like this because Britain was like we don't want to go buying your fucking

tea trade with us we don't want anything that you have well fuck you so what did Britain do Britain created a demand in China for opium okay so Britain got opium from India and basically flooded China with opium opium is it's heroin basically it's not heroin but it's what heroin comes from so Britain flooded China with opium created huge huge amounts of opium addicts China created huge, huge amounts of opium addicts. Now all of a sudden, China needed opium because there was opium addicts in China. So now the Brits were like, great, you need opium. You've got loads and loads of heroin addicts now essentially, and now you need this.

So you give us tea and silk and porcelain and we'll give you all the opium you want. Which is kind of shitty. Now China didn't like the fact that it had loads and loads of opium addicts now, because it was really impacting how society was running, because people were losing their lives to opium addiction. So China said, fuck that, we're going to try and ban the importation of opium, opium is now illegal, ban the importation of opium opium is now illegal and then the opium war started Britain kind of went to war with China to force them to trade opium so that's a really bad thing a really bad and evil thing that Britain did to China but then what happens in British culture around the end of the 19th century and in the early 20th century you start to see in books and on stage shows and in plays all of a sudden now Britain is portraying Chinese people as evil

opium addicts and they would have I think the character's name was Fu Manchu and Fu Manchu became like this stock character that would be used in English books and plays. And it was this evil Chinese mastermind who would come to London and then fill the place full of opium dens. And it's like the Chinese are coming to England with their opium

and are going to destroy our society. And this created what is known in post-colonial theory as the yellow peril this fear of East Asian people as being bringers of debauchery and drugs and they're going to destroy English society with their opium but it's really cruel and ironic because it was the brits who did that to china so what happens sometimes in when one society colonizes or brutalizes or commits violence against another that society then becomes unconsciously terrified that they will get revenge by doing the exact same thing and this then emerges in the popular culture

and it is propaganda like it is it's it's racist anti-anti-asian propaganda and it is propaganda but the driving force behind it is it's not as deliberate it's an unconscious fear i i refuse to acknowledge what i have done to you. I won't acknowledge it publicly. We don't speak about the opium wars. We don't talk about that England flooded China with opium. We don't mention that, but we know it. But because we don't mention it, it will unconsciously come back as a fear that we have towards you. America, similarly, has issues with what you'd call yellow peril.

America similarly has issues with what you'd call yellow peril. America dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan in World War II. The only time a nuclear bomb was ever dropped on anybody, America did it to Japan in the 1940s to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killed hundreds of thousands of people in one go. It's one of the worst single acts of war ever committed by one country against another. Also, when America and Japan went to war with each other in World War II, America just got a bunch of people who were Japanese on the West Coast. These were people who may have been from Japan, or even people who just had Japanese parents, American citizens with Japanese

parents. America got them all and sent them to internment camps. These people did nothing wrong, they just happened to be of Japanese ancestry. So that's a really bad thing that America did to Japan. So what you're left with in American culture is this deep unconscious fear of revenge. And you see this really evidently in the 1980s in particular with cyberpunk, the genre of cyberpunk. So if you think of a film like Blade Runner, for instance, Blade Runner was made in 1982. It was set in 2019. And it's a dystopian vision of the future.

And when you think of cyberpunk dystopia, right? The 1980s prediction of what the future will be like. That dystopian future is often quite Asian. It's often, it's Los Angeles or it's New York. And these cities are really, really dark. And no one really speaks English anymore. And all the signs are in Japanese or in Chinese. And this deep fear, when America was imagining its dystopia,

dystopia being what's a really depressing bad future. What's a bad terrifying vision of the future. In the 1980s the terrifying bad vision of the future for America. Is that it would become Asian. Because in the 1980s too. Japan had an economic boom. And this economic boom was caused by Japanese electronics. And Japanese cars. And Japan were so good by Japanese electronics and Japanese cars.

And Japan were so good at producing electronics and cars that, you know, American car factories shut down. And people feared, oh no, the Japanese are going to get their revenge. But they'll get their revenge through technology. And they will colonise America. And America won't be American anymore. It'll be Asian. Two huge examples of this are, like I said, Blade Runner.

You look at Blade Runner and you go, why is there so many Asian things, Japanese or Chinese things in the dark vision of the future? The other film is one called Black Rain which is also directed by Ridley Scott a year after Blade Runner and it looks quite like Blade Runner now Black Rain is a shit film but it's a visually beautiful film, it's very visually beautiful

but it's a terrible film Black Rain stars Michael Douglas and it's set in 1983 in New York and basically and it's set in 1983 in New York. And basically what it's about is Michael Douglas is a policeman. And while he's in New York, the Japanese mafia, who are the Yakuza, are taking over New York. And what's interesting there, it's the fear of Japan. It's the fear that Japan is going to get revenge on America.

But also what's interesting is the name of the film, Black Rain. Black Rain literally means the rain that falls on a society. The radioactive rain that falls after a nuclear bomb. But literally the title of that film means revenge for Nagasaki and Hiroshima that's what it means but it's not coming in the form of a nuclear bomb from Japan it's coming in the form of the Yakuza criminal organization who are going to bring their drugs and violence to the streets of New York. Another very very bad and incredibly racist film that was made around the same time and again this was a blockbuster 1985 a film called year of the dragon that stars mickey rourke and mickey rourke that film is basically the same plot as black rain except instead of the yakuza it's the chinese triads

so it's about mickey rourke is a no bullshit detective in fucking Chinatown in New York and the triads are taking over and it's quite racist and the central theme of the film is that the white saviour who represents American values is the last person fighting against these triad Chinese gangs

or against these Yakuza but really the underlying theme has nothing to do with crime. It has to do with, we're America and we're a superpower and we've done some bad shit to Japan and we're just kind of afraid that they're going to take over. And this film enacts as a metaphor for our fear. Now, another film that tackles these exact issues. From around the same time.

Is called Big Trouble in Little China. But the difference is with Big Trouble in Little China. This is a John Carpenter film. And John Carpenter is a very, very, very good director. Who's very smart. So Big Trouble in Little China is almost a parody, it's taken the

piss out of how fucking ridiculous and racist Black Rain and Year of the Dragon are Big Trouble in Little China stars Kurt Russell and Kurt Russell is a white American truck driver who drives this giant big American truck and he finds himself in Chinatown fighting the triad gangs.

sending up stereotypes in order to call out the ridiculous racism that is present at the time. Like it turns all the stereotypes up to 11. Like the fact that Kurt Russell drives this big American truck and this truck can't even fit down the alleyways of Chinatown. And it's very clear and blatant that Kurt Russell's character is this ridiculous metaphor for like a Rust Belt working class white American man. And then all the triad characters that he has to battle. They're so utterly ridiculous and they take from lots of stereotypes around Asian characters. I think there's a Fu Manchu character there. around Asian characters.

I think there's a Fu Manchu character there. There's a character who later became Raiden in Mortal Kombat. He has a traditional Chinese hat and can control lightning. But basically, Big Trouble in Little China on the surface looks like one of these yellow peril films, but it isn't.

It's, I think John, John Carpenter's context and intent was to call out how fucking ridiculous this was by turning everything up to 11. john carpenter is an incredible filmmaker very very intelligent filmmaker who's deeply unique in that john carpenter makes films that are fucking shit. They're really, really deliberately shit. But they're so clever. John Carpenter is like a gourmet chef who makes McDonald's. It's like if you went to a gourmet chef and said, make a Big Mac.

Now don't change anything. We don't want a brioche bun. We don't want any fancy coleslaw make a fucking Big Mac but make it the best Big Mac that you can possibly make that's what John Carpenter's films are he takes from Hollywood fucking trash and makes these deeply intelligent films

if you want to see some the two best John Carpenter films, in my opinion, are Big Trouble in Little China and also They Live. They Live is fucking incredible. I want to do a podcast on that film alone at some point. Look at They Live from 1986,

I believe. It's so stupid and so smart at the same time. But basically, what has me thinking about this shit is the tendency within the colonizing culture to produce cultural artifacts that represent this unconscious fear of revenge and it has to be unconscious it's not real deliberate propaganda it's something that the filmmaker is almost not consciously aware of because because they've they have bought into the lies and propaganda of their

own culture so much that they're not even really consciously aware of what they're doing they're churning it out as ideological fodder that they don't question. And it got me thinking, Jesus, has Britain ever done this with Ireland? Because I can't think of any examples. Has Britain ever created, because Britain colonised Ireland for 800 years, Britain did terrible, awful things to Ireland. The whole shebang. Fucking lost half our population in the famine. Murder. Genocide. Destroying our land. Extracting resources. Robbing us of our language. 800 years of it. Surely the Brits have made something that is like, what if the Irish do that to us? Up until this podcast today, the one example I could think of is there's a film from 1989 called Elephant.

Now, this is actually a beautiful film. Elephant as a piece of cinema is gorgeous. It's made in 1989. it was directed by Alan Clark produced by Danny Boyle who went on to make Trainspotting and what Elephant is Elephant has it's 45 minutes long

it has no plot no plot whatsoever it's set in the north of Ireland during the Troubles there's no dialogue there's no plot I think you'll get it on YouTube if you look for it

what Elephant is is I think it's 17 people being murdered that's all it is it's just 17 separate scenes of people being shot in the north of Ireland people

someone's in a shop someone's in a service station someone's sweeping the floor and all it does is it follows the assassin each time to just shoot someone in their daily life. Now the reason it's so beautiful is in my opinion the film Elephant invented how people get murdered in modern cinema. If you look at Elephant and you look at how each person is killed and then go and watch something like Reservoir Dogs 1991 or you go and watch something like Goodfellas by Martin Scorsese in 1991 the way that gangland murder

happens on cinema that exact that was invented by Elephant the way they followed the assassin with a steadicam and then someone shot

that template was invented by Elephant so for that reason i admire the film and i think it's very beautiful as a piece of cinema like before elephant murders as they happened on camera were it was very dramatic like you think of the godfather very dramatic cowboy films very dramatic old gangster films very dramatic murder was gangster films, very dramatic. Murder was this big, loud, dramatic thing. But what Elephant did is it made murder not dramatic.

Something that's done on an everyday level and is kind of quiet and silent and disposable. But Alan Clark and Danny Boyle who are English thought they were doing a good thing

what the film does is it portrays the everyday senseless violence and murder that was happening every fucking day in Belfast and in Derry and in Armagh it portrayed this violence

as it happens every single day and I bet you Alan Clark and Danny Boyle thought, this is great, this is a real compassionate piece of work. But the problem is, there's no plot, there's no dialogue, there's nothing. It's just murder. And that viewpoint is a very particular English colonial view. It portrays the problem in the North as purely sectarian, purely motivated by violence and viciousness alone and it removes all politics from it. It removes all politics

and it removes the responsibility of the British state in what happened in the North of Ireland. Like out of all the murders that happen in Elephant there's no like British soldier who decides to just cock his gun up and shoot a child for no reason because that shit happened there's no British soldier who is looking at a peaceful protest and decides to open fire on unarmed civilians

who are protesting for their civil rights there's no British soldier who shoots somebody in the back because they got freaked out by a checkpoint. These are things that actually happened, but it's not portrayed in the film at all. There's no soldiers in the fucking film. Like, we now know that the British Army had groups like the Military Reaction Force,

which were British soldiers in plain clothes who would deliberately shoot civilians, whether they be Unionist or Nationalist, Protestant or Catholic whatever the fuck, the British army in the early 70s used to do drive-by shootings and civilians

to start sectarian war because the dominant narrative of the British state during the period of the Troubles was the fucking paddies are killing each other. The fucking,

I don't know, the Protestants, the Catholics, I'm not sure, they're fucking mad, violent paddies and they're just killing each other, lads.

There's nothing we can do about it. They're violent people and they're just killing each other. And we're sending our soldiers over to keep the peace but there's nothing

we can do. These fucking paddies are killing each other. And that was the dominant British narrative. Portray the whole thing as uncontrollable, exclusively sectarian violence and chaos. And then the British state can wipe its hands and go, there's nothing we can do about it. We can send over some soldiers if you want, but that's it. It's out of our hands. We don't know why it's happening. So the film Elephant kind of reinforces that view a bit

by removing all politics from the film and just making it about murder, murder, murder, even though it's a beautiful film. Now, having said that, don't, like, kick up your feet and get some popcorn on a Friday night with your boyfriend and decide to watch elephant it's not one of those films watch elephant on your own if you're the type of person who's interested in making films or seriously interested in cinema if you want to watch something on a

Friday night I would suggest another film called elephant that was made in 2003 so there's a film made in 2003 by the director Gus Van Zandt and this is called Elephant and it's kind of about the Columbine Massacre it's similar to the Columbine Massacre

but it's fictional and I think Gus Van Zandt was like I've borrowed from the Danny Boyle film Elephant so heavily that I think I'm just going to have to call my film Elephant also. So Elephant the 2003 film is worth looking at because it's the same style. It's the same silence. There's a lot of silence. But Gus Van Zandt has introduced a sense of plot.

So it's a very brutal and sad film. But you could actually watch this because there's a plot involved. Very depressing film. Deeply, deeply depressing and disturbing film. But there's a plot. There's a story. But up until now, like I said, the 1989 film Elephant was what would come to mind when I would think, Jesus, what have the Brits made that kind of got things a bit wrong?

So I was doing some research for the podcast. And I was reading about the Big Bang. You know, the Big Bang, like how the universe was fucking created. This idea that there was nothing and then all of a sudden there was this explosion and the entire universe was born and it's ever expanding because i always thought jesus for something so important you know this is the accepted scientific theory about the origins of life and the universe and reality for something so fucking important. The Big Bang is a bit of a silly name. It's a bit of a stupid name.

How the fuck did we arrive at that? And the phrase was coined by an English astronomer by the name of Sir Fred Hyle. And Sir Fred Hyle actually didn't agree with the Big Bang at all. He thought it was a lot of horse shit. And when he was trying to take the piss out of this concept when it first emerged, he derisively referred to it as the Big Bang. As a joke, and then it stuck. So he ended up coining this phrase around a concept he completely disagreed with. Which is ironically kind of cruel.

Because what he believed in was what you'd call pansparmia, the idea that life has always been around and life was brought to Earth by comets that had bacteria on them or whatever. These comets landed on Earth, and that's where life comes from. And this Fred Heil fella, Sir Fred Heil, English astronomer born in 1915, he's a bit of a legend. He also, he's responsible for formulating the theory that

stars, such as the sun, like, create their energy from nuclear fusion and that this nuclear fusion creates all the chemical elements that we know. Fred Heil also had to, he was very instrumental in advancing modern radar equipment during World War II. So quite an impressive career. He died in 2001. But as I'm reading about fucking Fred Hoyle and all his massive scientific achievements as a scientist. There's like this other little section about science fiction that he wrote. So I'm like, oh yeah, fucking hell, fair play Fred. So you're an accomplished scientist and now you write science fiction as well.

So I'm reading along about all the different books that he wrote. And then I see one book that he wrote in 1959 called Ossian's Ride. So I go, wonder what Oisín's Ride is about. It's a book about the dystopian future of 1970, where Ireland has become an authoritarian police state and global superpower because of a secret source of energy that's being developed in Kerry. So of course I nearly shat my pants with excitement and immediately tried to get myself a copy of this book called Ossian's Ride from 1959 which

was very difficult to fucking find but I finally managed to get myself a hardback copy of it. It's not an original it's a second edition. It's not worth money because it's not a very popular book it was kind of forgotten but I'm like yes yes I would like the book written by Sir Fred Hoyle

about the dystopian future where Ireland has a secret source of fucking energy yes I would like to read that so that's what I'm going to do with this week's podcast even though I'm

40 minutes in now and I should have had the fucking ocarina pause about 15 minutes ago I'm going to do with this week's podcast even though I'm 40 minutes in now and I should have had the fucking ocarina pause about 15 minutes ago, I'm going to have the ocarina pause and the second half of the podcast I'm going to take you through the book Ossian's Ride

which is basically the British version of Blade Runner and it's shit it's a terrible book and my job is to try and summarise the plot in such a way that I can make it entertaining so let's have our ocarina pause now

I don't have the ocarina because I'm in my office what I do have is a partially drank glass of water and a board marker that I use to write on my whiteboard for my schedule for the week. So I think what I'll do is I'm going to tap the glass.

But as I tap it, I might take a little drink from it to change the pitch of the sound. And we'll see what that's like. So here's the board marker glass tapping. Drink water. Pause. And you're going to hear an advert. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th, when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre

in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. On April 5th, you must be very careful, Margaret. It's a girl.

Witness the birth. Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil. It's all for. Witness the birth. Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil. It's all for you. No, no, don't. The first omen. I believe the girl is to be the mother. Mother of what?

Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six. It's the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real. It's not real. It's not real.

Who said that? The first omen. in theaters April 5th. That didn't do much, to be honest. I was expecting a change in pitch. I don't know what's going on there. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page. Patreon.com forward slash TheBlindBoyPodcast. This podcast is my full-time job.

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and pushing small independent creators down. One thing I gotta mention this week too, this is an Acast podcast, so Acast is the network I put this podcast out on, but last week, Acast had to shut down their app, so the Acast app to listen to podcasts, doesn't exist anymore,

so if you are a listener, who used to subscribe to me on Acast app to listen to podcasts doesn't exist anymore. So if you are a listener who used to subscribe to me on Acast or whatever, please consider subscribing to me on whatever other app you listen to podcasts on. I don't know why the Acast app shut down. That's a negative thing. But I'm guessing because the big boys in podcasting, such as Spotify, are taking over the market. So that now makes it even more difficult for independent podcasters because when you listen to podcasts on Spotify, they just fucking promote their own podcasts to the top of the charts and independent podcasters get buried. So if you were listening to this on A cast and now the a cast app is gone please subscribe to this podcast and leave reviews on other podcast apps because that app being gone

is is a shitty thing for independent creators who were using a cast as their app i will be on twitch this thursday twitch.tv forward slash the blind Podcast, doing my never-ending video game musical. I haven't been on Twitch in two weeks because I'm an incredibly busy boy. The pandemic is over. I'm working on a new book. I'm not stuck at home all the time. Sometimes my Thursday nights are taken up by work. So I'm not as fully consistent every Thursday night as I was during the pandemic but I'm trying to be.

So this book, Oisín's Ride, written by Fred Hoyle in 1959, which depicts the dystopian future of 1970 in which Ireland has become a technological superpower but a secret source of energy. It's not a great book, It's not very well written. There's quite a lot of kind of schooled by errors in the mechanics of the fiction, basically. The ideas are there. There's some great ideas in there.

There's a good bit of creativity in there. But just simple things around storytelling aren't present. For instance, Fred Hoyle will introduce quite a lot of characters, but he'll just give the character's name and he won't. If you're writing a book and you're introducing a character in that book, you really have to make the reader feel and know that character. Your job as a writer is is when you introduce a character, your reader has to really see that character in their mind.

Really get a feeling for what they look like, how they sound, how they respond to things emotionally. The character has to live inside your head so you can care about him. This doesn't happen a lot in this book because he just introduced new names and says, here's a new character called Donal and he's got a Cork accent and that's it. When you do that a lot, your reader doesn't care about the character

that you're speaking about and they become forgettable. The pacing of the book is a bit off. know it speeds up it slows down it's hard to kind of predict what's going to happen which is an important part when you know when you're reading a book or watching anything the audience kind of wants a sense that they know what's going to happen next and you can either go with that or you can surprise them. But ultimately when you're reading a book you need to feel like the author knows what they're doing here and I'm willing to give over my sense of belief to them so they can take me on this journey.

You don't have that with this book. It was hard to read. You know a book is hard to read when you find yourself having to re-read pages over and over again just to see what the fuck is going on. Or wondering if you skipped a page when you haven't. So first off, the historical context of an English person writing a book about Ireland in 1959. What was Ireland like in 1959? Well in 1959, Ireland was what you'd call a developing country the official Republic of Ireland I think was less than 10 years old we were an incredibly poor

incredibly poor country that was recovering from 800 years of colonisation from the English the 26 counties of the Republic of Ireland down south. Incredibly poor. Huge amounts of emigration. Most young Irish people

weren't staying in the country. They were going to either England or to America. There would have been huge amounts of Irish emigration in England. There would have been massive amounts of anti-Irish racism and discrimination against Irish people in England.

So why in 1959 is the concept of a book where Ireland becomes an advanced technological superpower, why is that so preposterous an idea for a sci-fi book? Because the English viewed us as very, very stupid people they didn't view us as a country that they just canonized that they had removed culture from

language from that they had brutalized through war and terror they didn't view us as a country that they had damaged. They viewed us as thick, pig ignorant, stupid cunts who have a backwards poor country with zero infrastructure because we are thick, pig ignorant, stupid cunts. What if, in 11 years, the Paddies have better roads than us? What if the Paddies have more money than us? What if the Paddies become more advanced through science? What if the thick fuckers figure out science? That's what this book is. But I can tell by Fred Heil, as he's writing it, he doesn't actually think that he's being anti-Irish, that he's being racist. The book comes across as having quite a nice view of Ireland,

of it being a very beautiful place with a people that are deeply connected to the land. But the theme of it is the Irish become corrupted by money and technological advancement and it's a deeply offensive book. The word thug or thuggery is used quite frequently in the book to refer to the Irish. Ireland is seen as a violent, brutish land of very dumb thugs who have gotten their hands on some advanced shit they don't understand. The word thug is a particularly insidious word. The word thug is used today in US media to refer to African American people. Like if you hear the word thug used today on American media, and you see it in fucking Irish and English media too,

when you see the word thug, basically that's a journalist who wants to use the N word but they can't, so they use the word thug instead. But the word thug was also used against the Irish and it's present throughout this book in the 1950s. You also have to remember too you know what what would the so British people are just seeing loads and loads of these Irish immigrants. Irish immigrants in the 1950s would have been unskilled uneducated

labourers mainly they would have been working on building sites you would have had the trauma collective trauma of poverty and colonialism meaning that you would have had high rates of addiction with Irish people so the Irish people in London were frequently working on building sites getting drunk there'd have been a lot of huge amount of homeless people in England who were Irish who also had addiction struggles. This would have been reflected in the media, the English media about the Irish at the time as well. Also you had the IRA. Now the IRA of the 1950s they weren't the provisional IRA of the 1950s were a little bit more disorganised and not as threatening or dangerous. So the IRA of the 1950s, they used to plant bombs in England, but mainly what they would bomb would be like power lines and power stations. So the IRA hadn't, it hadn't been like,

it wasn't like the 1970s yet where you had the provisional IRA who were actually hitting civilian targets and creating terror. In the 1950s, the IRA were bombing train tracks and pylons and power stations.

They were attacking the modern infrastructure of Great Britain, which at best was annoying. So the Brits would have viewed the Irish as thick, dumb fucks who get too drunk and then they bomb our electricity stations out of jealousy because they haven't got any of their own like as an act of physical force republicanism bombing a pylon in fucking coventry isn't going to do much other than piss the brits off so that also contributed to a narrative

of they hate technology. They're like Luddites. Coupled with the fact too that Ireland in the 1950s wasn't particularly interested in international trade. We were recovering from colonialism. You had a dominant narrative in the country that modernity and modernisation was a little bit too British. So let's just focus on being an agrarian society that's deeply religious. We hadn't even, we hadn't joined the EU yet. So with that background in mind, writing an English person, Sir Fred Hoyle, an astronomer,

writing a science fiction book about Ireland becoming an advanced technological society, a superpower. This was fucking bonkers. And it was both serious science fiction and also probably considered to be not satire, but humorous to the middle class English audience that it was written for. Like, there's a big difference there. If it was satire, then it would be calling power into question. Satire would be the work of Flann O'Brien. If you read the work of Flann O'Brien, such as The Third Policeman, Flann O'Brien, and he was doing this in the 30s,

he would have rural Irish characters, like guards and farm laborers people who you wouldn't consider to be educated Flann O'Brien who was Irish would write these characters and then he would have them talking about advanced concepts scientific theories such as atomic theory now what Flann O'Brien was doing there is he was using satire. He was kind of, as an Irish person, asking the question, why can't Irish people talk about science? Who says we're stupid? And he was using that absurdity to create satire. What Fred Hoyle was doing is he was laughing at the Irish he was punching down this book is

isn't it hilarious but also kind of terrifying that Paddy has figured out something in science that the rest of the world doesn't know about like what this book Oceane's Ride is quite, what it reminds me of is the Marvel

comic Black Panther now I don't know a hell of a lot about fucking marvel or dc or any of that shit so i'm not going to go into it in depth but one thing i do know about black panther is it's centered around the fictional area known as wakanda which is in the middle of africa and in Wakanda, the people there have discovered this source of energy that makes them an incredibly advanced civilization. But what I don't like about that is it was written by two white American men. And what I don't like about it is that

the irony of Wakanda is that, oh my God, isn't it mad that in the middle of Africa which is a country that we see to be a developing country that isn't advanced at all isn't it mad that they have this advanced scientific discovery isn't that incredible it relies upon the assumption that Africa is backwards which I don't like because that negates and erases the harmful effects of colonization that creates trauma and poverty. So with the book Oisín's Ride it's basically Wakanda before Wakanda except it's in Kerry. First off why is the book called Oisín's Ride? Well Oisín is the anglicized version of the Irish name Oisín and within Irish mythology Oisín

was a mythical character who reached the land of Tir na nÓg, the land of eternal youth, a utopian land and this is it's a lovely concept within Irish mythology of there being this other world that's completely perfect and no one ages and no one is in need of food. It's like the Garden of Eden but it exists outside of time. It's like in the Bible the Garden of Eden is something that happened long ago but in Irish mythology Tir na nÓg isn't really long ago it's something outside of time which I find quite beautiful because it's mythology that's not limited by the concept of linear time

so Fred Hyde would have been very aware of the story of Oisín and the land of Tir na Nóil he would have been completely aware of this that's why he called his book Oisín's Ride Oisín's Ride so to an extent Fred Hyle admires Irish mythology

and he has an admiration of Ireland. Fred Hoyle thinks he's writing a nice book, but the thing is that he doesn't realise that his best intentions are actually horrendously racist and horrendously colonial in their views. So let's try and summarise the book for you. The book starts when a young scientist by the name of Thomas Sherwood is suddenly called in by, like, the British government.

The British government, he's a young scientist in Cambridge, I think, and the British government call him in and say here there's something happening over in fucking Ireland man they have some type of advanced technology the Yanks are interested in the Russians are interested we don't know what's going on but Paddy's after figuring out some shit and we need you to go on a mission to Ireland to find out what it is now what's interesting is that this central English character is called Thomas Sherwood. Sherwood is a very clear indication that represents Sherwood Forest. Sherwood Forest was where Robin Hood lived and Robin Hood is a character from British mythology. He robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. Robin Hood is a chivalrous character.

He is a good person in English mythology. Also, the book mentions that Thomas Sherwood comes from a yeoman stock, which is like landed farming people. It's like a medieval way to say middle class. Not a peasant, but not completely wealthy either. Robin Hood was also also yeoman stock so we know that the central character of this book he represents english anglo-saxon mythology and goodness so thomas sherwood is called in to a department let's call it mi5 i don't know what

the name of it is in the book and they say look Sherwood Wright here's the crack over in Ireland in the area around Cork and Kerry something's happening there right the Irish we think they're after figuring out how to get some type of advanced energy that comes from turf

so the Irish are after figuring this out they've also managed to make a type of contraceptive pill from turf now that bit goes nowhere in the book. They just mention at the start that the Irish have figured out an energy source and they're making contraceptive pills and the contraceptive pills are never mentioned at any point after that which is bad writing because you don't just throw that in there but I'm guessing it's for that's for the English audience to get a laugh

the Irish are backwards they have too many children they can't stop fucking each other they're Catholics isn't it hilarious that this country that's run by mad priests has now got the contraceptive pill and they're making it from tarf ha ha ha ha ha so that's a joke there for the English people but then it gets serious and the boss of mi5 says to sherwood look we think the irish are after discovering thermonuclear power we think they have a thermonuclear reactor now thermonuclear reactor is nuclear fusion nuclear fusion is a real a real thing that society is still trying to achieve. Now it's interesting that the writer Fred Hoyle because like I said this is a serious scientist

he formulated the theory that the sun the stars make its energy from nuclear fusion. So even today if you look up nuclear fusion reactor this is like society's hope of having unlimited power in real life right now. So for Fred Hoyle to be talking about nuclear fusion reactors in 1959, I gotta give him points for that. That's some seriously good, ahead of its time science fiction writing from the person who discovered that stars create power from nuclear fusion. Nuclear power that we have is nuclear fission. It smashes nuclear atoms together, but it creates a lot of nuclear waste. So that's why nuclear power right now that we use is kind of harmful and problematic. It's like, yes, we can use nuclear power, but it creates all this radioactive waste and we don't know where to put it. So nuclear power right

now isn't clean. The goal of humanity is to create nuclear fusion, or cold fusion as it's known, which is, how can we, in a nuclear reactor, create a tiny little sun? So you basically have massive, massive amounts of energy created, and not a lot of waste. We still haven't created nuclear fusion. We're a head of a lot closer to it than we were in the 1950s

if someone figures out how to do nuclear fusion that might solve the problem of energy in the world today but anyway in this book MI5 is going we think Ireland's after figuring out fucking nuclear fusion right and

we're worried that they're two steps away from inventing a fucking nuclear bomb so thomas sherwood is sent on this mission over to ireland to investigate how is paddy making all this power what they do know is that there's an organization called ice which is centred around Kerry and Cork, and it's the industrial corporation of Eire. So Thomas Sherwood has to infiltrate Ireland secretly and find out about the industrial corporation of Eire. But the thing is, Ireland is now an authoritarian police state, and British people aren't welcome.

So while Thomas Sherwood, who's this young cambridge scientist a lovely polite man he leaves england now and all of a sudden he finds himself in ireland and this is when it starts getting a bit offensive because the english character now has to go through the rigorous process of irish immigration where he's brutalized and interrogated and asked for his papers and made to feel terrified and this is like I mentioned this is the British writer unconsciously projecting onto the Irish the things that the British did to us. Fred Hoyle, the writer, was in the army in World War II. His da was in the army in World War I. So you can bet that Fred Hoyle, as a middle class English person,

grew up with stories from his da, his da's friends, or from other army people when he was in the British army. He grew up with all the stories about the British soldiers in Ireland in the 1920s. And I tell you how I know this, because of the very obscure and strange place names that Fred Hoyle uses throughout the book. So Fred Hoyle's character of Thomas Sherwood, he gets to Dublin. Now in Dublin, he's incredibly safe. Dublin is almost English. He spends time in Dublin. He plays cricket in Trinity College.

This is a safe place. But then outside of Dublin, this is beyond the pale. When you hear that phrase, beyond the pale, outside of Dublin and Kildare traditionally amongst English people was seen as the savage land. This is where an English person could get killed. This is where it was ungovernable where the savage monkey Paddy lived and when the character of Thomas Sherwood early in the book is describing the area where he needs to go to see where the Irish have this advanced turf nuclear fusion technology. The place names that he names, they're a little bit strange.

He names Coppin, Dunmanway and McCroom in Cork. Now these are very small, obscure places in West Cork. What fucking business does a British person in 1959, why would he even know about these places? I'll tell you why he knows about them. Because those place names struck utter fear and terror into the hearts of British soldiers who had to serve in Ireland during the 1920s.

Dun Manway, Macroom, Coppine, these were areas of West Cork where there was massive IRA guerrilla activity. These were the areas, like I mentioned, my grandfather was in the IRA, he was in Tom Barry's flying column. In 1921 they shot 17 British officers. 17 British officers were shot in West Cork. These are posh people who got shot. Posh British officers don't get killed in Ireland. They did in West Cork in 1921. So names such as McCroom, Dunmanway and Coppine resonated amongst the British officer class as terrifying places where officers meet their death. And that's why I think Fred Hoyle, who would have been speaking to his da who was in World War I,

all the fucking officers and admirals and whoever the fuck he was speaking to when he was in the army himself these names rang a bell this is terror land this is where the thugs are this is where the IRA are this is where British men of good stock go to die so it's no surprise to me that in the fucking book in the dystopian future of 1970 places like Coppin and Dunmanway are where the Irish have the nuclear reactor. So as the character of Thomas Sherwood now leaves the pale, he leaves the safety of Dublin to go down to the terrifying south of Ireland towards West Cork and Kerry. What he starts to describe are giant motorways.

Giant motorways that put the roads in England to shame. The concept and idea of the Irish having massive motorways as big as the ones in America was so terrifying and strange and odd to the British in 1959 that it merited science fiction. While he's on a bus and marvelling at the giant motorways of Ireland the bus is suddenly pulled over by the authoritarian Irish police force and he's dragged out of his bus and he's pushed around

and his papers are demanded. And when I read and when I read in this fucking book about this terrifying ordeal that the British character has to go through in this dystopian future, all I'm hearing is this is how the Black and Tans treated the Irish. This is what the Black and Tans did, the British soldiers did to the Irish when they were just going about their lives. You'd try and walk to the shop and you'd get stopped. You'd get stopped, you'd get asked for your papers, give the wrong answer and you're going to get shot. That was the reality that Irish people were living in.

That was the reality at the time in the north of Ireland too. But the writer Fred Hoyle isn't aware of that. He's not being satirical. What's happened is he has internalised the stories of the brutality of the British Empire in Ireland he knows them in the back of his mind but he hasn't taken

ownership or responsibility for it so now like in Blade Runner where the Americans are thinking of the future of oh Los Angeles is going to be full of fucking Chinese signs and Japanese writing and we'll be fucked. Fred Hoyle is doing the exact same.

He is saying, oh my God, imagine I went to Ireland and they treated me the way we treated them. But he doesn't know he's doing it. So the Irish police let Thomas Sherwood off. They don't know that he's a secret British agent trying to find out about where this nuclear reactor is in Kerry they leave him off and then he goes about his journey and then the plot is very bad now then all of a sudden he finds himself in the woods and he discovers the body of a dead boy no he discovers a lad of about 18 who's dying and he's been left there and he's been brutalised by the Irish police and he tries his best to save the boy but he dies. The boy's death doesn't seem to matter.

All it does is it serves to get us to care about the central character of Thomas Sherwood. It shows him to be a force for good because he cares about a dying boy. Five minutes later he meets an Irish woman called Kathleen and it turns out that she's the sister of the dead boy. And then the plot thickens. It turns out the dead boy had been smuggling secrets about the Irish nuclear

reactor and the hidden source of Irish power. He'd been smuggling these secrets out and trying to give them to his sister. Now Thomas Sherwood has to tell the sister oh no I found your brother dead in the woods. She gets hysterical. And then after he calms her down, she pulls out a load of papers. And these papers are basically secret research that her dead brother had given him.

Then, all of a sudden, they're chased by... All of a sudden they're chased by all of a sudden they're chased by police and priests and giant tractors so giant technologically advanced bogger tractors chase them all the way through the countryside and now because he's got the secret hidden documents and it's so fucking ridiculous because the thing is it's not presented as comedy at all but it is comedy he's got the secret hidden documents, and it's so fucking ridiculous, because the thing is, is it's not presented as comedy at all, but it is comedy. He's being chased by fucking priests and guards on a fucking tractor, because he can't imagine the Irish in anything else. And he escapes them anyway.

Oh wait, no, he doesn't. To confuse the tractors, he gets all the secret scientific papers that Kathleen's brother had smuggled, and he throws them at the tractors he gets all the secret scientific papers that Kathleen's brother had smuggled and he throws them at the tractors to confuse them

then Kathleen gets irrational again and says why did you do that why did you throw my brother's papers that he smuggled out at the tractors

and he goes because it was the clever thing to do they were either going to catch us and take the papers but now they're going to spend hours

looking for them because I spread them out over the field. And then she said why couldn't you just stay and fight like a man? And this hurt him deeply. This really hurt him because he sees himself as a civilized English Cambridge fucking mathematician and he won't reduce himself to the brutality of the Irish but this woman Kathleen is only impressed by violence because she's a paddy. So anyway, all of a sudden they're in Tipperary. It doesn't really explain how they got to Tipperary. Oh no, Kathleen leaves him and he goes to Tipperary on his own.

And while he's in Tipperary, he's terrified of the hostile countryside and all the Irish people around him. And he eventually finds a house to try and stay in so he goes to the house and he says I'm just a poor English student please let me stay in your house but the woman who owns the house says no we've no more room but then all of a sudden a very friendly priest turns up and says you can stay here don't worry you can stay here Thomas Sherwood but you're going to have to sleep up in the attic with Tiny so this is where things get deeply deeply offensive

so Thomas Sherwood now is staying in this house in Tipperary and suddenly he realises that this priest that's there that let him stay in the gaff he's able to have an intelligent conversation with this priest and he and the priest start speaking about the organisation known as ICE,

the Industrial Corporation of Eire, and what they're doing. And he engages in this intellectual discussion, where the priest is saying, it's a bad thing that Ireland has this new technological power and wealth. We were better off when we were poor and free. That's an exact quote. So the theme of the novel starts to emerge where Fred Hoyle, the writer,

who used to use Ireland as a holiday destination, he's basically saying that the subtext is Ireland was better when it was colonised, when the people were free and didn't have to look after themselves and they were more connected with the land and connected with their mythology. This was much better. He's basically suggesting that the Irish were more free as a people under British rule

because all we had to worry about was our land and that was it and the British looked after all the complicated stuff. Now to make things worse. The character of Thomas Sherwood starts to wonder. Fuck me. How am I able to have such a clear cognizant conversation with this priest? And then he goes. Ah.

He's Church of Ireland. He's a Protestant. Of course. It's a Protestant priest. That's why I can have an educated conversation with him. So then Thomas Sherwood goes up to the attic and that's where Tiny comes in.

Tiny is a gigantic man from Tipperary. Now this is the most racist shit in the entire book. Tiny is described throughout as a fucking gorilla. Now it's clearly a human because he smokes cigarettes all the time and he puts his hands in his pocket but the

character of Thomas Sherwood only refers to Tiny as a giant gorilla and now he has to sleep up there in the attic and we're subtly led to believe that Thomas Sherwood's fear is that the giant ape, Tiny, wants to rape him. Now this is a common trope that you will see in cinema and in books. You'll see this a lot in American media. When the white character gets sent to a prison in America, they use the trope of Bubba. Which is basically, you'll see it in a lot of films. at they use the trope of bubba which is basically you'll see it in a lot of films the white man is sent to jail and then he has to share a cell with a large black man and the subtext is male rape is going to occur or brutalization of some description you'll also see it in the film whitnail and i

where richard e grant is in the ir Irish pub and all of a sudden he's confronted by a gigantic Irish man. Now the reason the character of Tiny in this book is so offensive is historically the British caricatures and cartoons of Irish people were as apes. We were portrayed as monkeys, gorillas and apes. Brutal animals who know nothing other than violence and must be controlled. So the character of Tiny in this book who's just a large man from Tipperary is referred to consistently as a violent gorilla. Also the fact that the word gorilla is used. Gorilla has two meanings. There's gorilla referring to the ape. But there's also gorilla warfare. And he is in the land of gorilla warfare.

He is in the land of. Outside the pale. Where British soldiers. During the Irish war of independence. Were killed via gorilla warfare. So there's a double meaning going on. What makes it even more insidious then. Is it turns out.

The friendly priest, the Protestant priest that was in the house that appeared to be helping Thomas Sherwood along, turns out that he's actually a secret agent of ice and that this Protestant priest controls Tiny the gorilla. So the Protestant priest who's all smart and well able to talk at the click of his fingers he can set the dumb fuck paddy thick cunt gorilla on thomas sherwood at any time so there you have the underlying terrible racist colonial narrative and the narrative there is right here's the crack with the irish you've got the protestants, right? Now they're smart, they're smart, they're almost British, but they're fucking still paddies. So even though the

Protestant priest is well able to talk and he can speak English and he's well read, watch out for those cunts because they control the mad Irish Catholic apes who want to rip you to shreds. They fucking control them. That's the narrative that's been presented in the book. I'll read you some direct quotes about interactions between Thomas Sherwood and Tiny, the poor man from Tipperary. He's just a poor man from Tipperary who's six foot three. That's all he is. So Thomas Sherwood is sharing the attic with him and he goes, you bloody great ape, I yelled for it was Tiny. He had sneaked up absolutely silently behind me and had groped me with huge hands. Now he burst into bellows of laughter. So Tiny is this unpredictable, giant, violent ape of a man

that can be controlled at any moment by the Protestant priest. Here's how he describes sleeping in the room. The night was at best unpleasant and at worst terrifying. Eventually the gorilla decided to turn in. His bed came between mine and the door. I noticed. The light went out. I lay listening to his breathing to make sure that he didn't get out of bed. Nothing happened for maybe an hour. Then very stealthily he did get out. I heard him prowling almost silently about the room and I had the horrible certainty that he was going to seize me again.

So Thomas Sherwood is in bed, terrified of being assaulted by a fucking ape who's actually just a man from Tipperary. So the night goes on like that. Then they wake up in the morning and when Thomas Sherwood goes downstairs, the whole atmosphere changes and now he's being interrogated by the Protestant priest

and the Protestant priest is like what are you doing here what do you want to find out who are you and Thomas Sherwood is like I'm not talking I'm not talking and then the Protestant priest goes

we have ways of making you talk so then all of a sudden the Protestant priest arrives out with that Kathleen girl from earlier. And we're not told exactly what happens, but the Protestant priest says we have ways of making you talk. They drag Kathleen into a room. All the book describes is you hear her screams.

The priest has done something to Kathleen, I'm not going to mention what it is but it's horrendous so this has been used to try and get information out of Thomas Sherwood so Thomas Sherwood now he spent all his time being composed with the Irish you know trying to understand the Irish not being violent but now that they've turned on Kathleen he's now reduced to their level of violence now the British who don't want to interfere in any way

now he's reduced to their level so Thomas Sherwood punches Tiny into the throat and then bashes his head against the ground and kills him. Rescues Kathleen. And then. Throws two bottles of whiskey. Into the fucking house.

Sets them on fire and burns the priest to death. Which is the most ridiculous anti-Irish fantasy. So he's killed the Irish ape man by punching him in the throat and then he made a Molotov cocktail out of a bottle of whiskey and burnt the priest to death and what was the quote that would be the last cocktail the priest would ever drink burning Irish people with whiskey. So he escapes with Kathleen who is deeply, deeply traumatised because something awful has happened to her

in that room with the priest. Kathleen is traumatised. Thomas Sherwood doesn't really give a fuck. She's just a hysterical woman. He helps her overcome her trauma by continually feeding her sandwiches. Now what the fuck that's about? So Kathleen successfully overcomes the trauma of whatever happened by eating sandwiches.

Now both of them all of a sudden are driving around Ireland in a Chevrolet. Which again is, that's hilarious. The concept and idea of a Chevrolet being in Ireland, a big American car. Haha, isn't that mad? So they're driving up and down the vast motorways of the technologically advanced Ireland in their Chevrolet, trying to get down to Cork and Kerry

to infiltrate the technological area of Kerry, so he can get to the bottom of how the Irish people have got advanced nuclear technology Kathleen they finally get to the border of Kerry they have to cross over into the forbidden land

of the technological zone Cataline what does she do it's worth noting as well her name is Cataline but Cataline isn't too far removed from the word Colleen Colleen would be a word it's the Irish for girl but it's a word that

English and American people would use to refer to a beautiful Irish girl so her name Colleen and be a word, it's the Irish for girl, but it's a word that English and American people would use to refer to a beautiful Irish girl, so her name, Colleen and Kathleen, is similar. She ends up double-crossing him, because women are bitches in this universe. She kisses him and runs away in some type of double-cross. This is a horrendous book. All of a sudden he finds himself wandering around Clare.

The geography in this thing is fucking all over the gaff like it is in one minute he's in Tip then he's in Kerry now he's in Clare he's spent some time in Kilkee fucking bizarre the car is gone

I don't know where the car went and then he this is the bit in the book where he goes native so Thomas Sherwood the English middle class scientist after spending weeks walking around Clare in the mud

soon realises that he's so filthy and so dirty from muck and rain that he starts to pass for an Irish person he's gone native and this is how he infiltrates

the technological zone of Kerry by being a filthy dirty person and when Irish people see him they say assure tis yourself so I'm going to leave out a load of details because the story really is that bad that I don't want to I don't want to tell him because it's a bad book. So long story short he makes it to the advanced technological city of Kerry which he describes as a perfect utopia of science, more advanced than any city in the world and it's impossible to get into unless you look like a filthy dirty paddy then you can get into it nice and easily. Eventually he finds himself in a house with a load of scientists who work for this ice corporation. And when he's there, they think that he's Irish because he's so dirty, but he's in a predicament.

He wants to speak to the scientists about science. So how can he do this while also being Irish? And then he figures out he says it. Ah, I'm actually from Dublin. I'm actually from Dublin and I'm studying in Trinity College. So even though he's filthy and stinking and dirty, when they ask why his accent is English, he's like, well, I'm from Dublin. So that's kind of like the same as English anyway. So these people are all the scientists that control ice none of them are Irish they're all the main one is English so this is the worst part you get to the end of the

fucking book and you're kind of thinking well at least are there some smart Irish people and then you realize no the people who are causing this scientific advancement in Kerry, they're all international scientists, right? And these scientists have gathered in Kerry to create this scientific utopia because the rest of the world has too much rules and regulations. So they're here in Kerry creating loads and loads of employment, but it's ultimately not Irish people who are behind the ingenuity that's the shittest most insulting part of the whole book so long story

short they've figured out nuclear fusion they're making some type of fusion reactor the bit at the start of the book about contraceptive pills and turff. That doesn't go anywhere, which is really bad writing. That goes nowhere. They've figured out how to make nuclear fusion from the water around the coast of Kerry. He almost suddenly stops being a British agent at this point. And the scientists offer him a job

in Kerry. And he says, yeah. So now at the end of the book, the bit where he was like sent over on behalf of the British government to infiltrate Ireland that kind that bit's kind of gone and now he's like happily working as a scientist in Kerry in this technological utopia working on nuclear fusion. He kind of rationalizes that the police state in Ireland is okay if it means protecting the secrets of the advanced technology and then the book ends when it turns out that all these

this small group of international scientists who are based in Kerry who have discovered nuclear fusion the book ends by basically saying they're not humans at all they're an alien race who came from a dying planet and they figured out how to send their brains into the brains of human scientists

and they figured out eternal youth or some shit like that so you kind of get this there's this loose impression that it's somehow. That their civilization. Their alien civilization. That's off in the distant stars. You kind of get the impression. That it's somehow related to Tyr and Anog.

A little bit. But not really. Just as a way to tie up the story. So. It ends with him on a beach. Trying to fuck an alien called fanny and that's about it and a bunch of questions are left unanswered it takes a mad turn it's a poorly written book and the fact that it's set in ireland there's really no point or purpose to it

this could have been set anywhere it's just it really relied upon the post-colonial narrative that Irish people are so backward and stupid and the country is so backward that isn't it mad and preposterous and worthy of science fiction

that Ireland is the place where they have secret advanced technology but then you get to it and the Irish actually have nothing to do with it the Irish are just being given jobs by this advanced technological corporation of aliens the main one called

fanny who he tries to ride on a beach so that's the book ushians ride um not a good book having said that i would love to see john carpenter make it into a film 1980s john carpenter i would love to see him make that into a film there's John Carpenter I would love to see him make that into a film there's enough in there to save the plot and make something utterly bizarre I chose to read it as a comedy because it's fucking hilarious it's hilarious but it's not supposed to be hilarious in the way that I'm laughing at it. What makes it so grating is that you genuinely get the sense that Fred Heil was trying to write a good book. I don't think Fred Heil felt that he was being mean to the people of Ireland.

of Ireland. He just had a huge amount of racist, oppressive colonial ideas about Ireland and Irish people that were so ingrained in him, his way of thinking and his culture that he didn't question them. And he has the concept of the noble savage, that Ireland is a beautiful land, that the people of Ireland are kind of more animal than human and that they deserve to be connected with the land to let to be roam free like cattle. He believes that knowledge and wealth and technological advancement are a terrible burden for the Irish people to have, that they shouldn't concern themselves with these modern things. Forget about that. That's for us. That's for the

Great British Empire. There's a terrible fucking... One thing that made me put down the book out of anger is there's a conversation between Thomas Sherwood and that Protestant priest where the priest basically says this technology and wealth in Ireland is a terrible thing.

As soon as this wealth and technology came to Ireland, the police here became authoritarian. And he said, before this stuff, there were never any police patrols, there was never anyone getting checked for papers, there was never any brutality, the people were free. checked for papers, there was never any brutality. The people were free. That's deeply offensive because Fred Hyde genuinely is not realising that

he's describing what actually happened in Ireland. In Ireland, Ireland was a fucking police state. It was under martial law. The police were invented. The fucking constabulary. the first ever police in the world were invented by the British in Ireland the first ever constabulary before the concept of police you had soldiers and what the British found I think it was around 1830 the Brits were like, we can't have all these soldiers in Ireland. We need to create a new force. And this new force, they're kind of like soldiers, but they're not. They have guns

and they patrol, but they're not in the army. Let's make up a new word called constabulary. They're keepers of the peace. The modern police system was invented by the British in Ireland. The writer Fred Hoyle, who was in the army, whose da was in the army, who's a knight, Sir Fred Hoyle, a member of the British upper class, has no awareness of the history of brutality in Ireland whatsoever.

Even though he's been hearing all the stories from soldiers, he's chosen to hear it in a different way. And his narrative is, which is the colonial narrative, the Irish people are savage apes. They are vicious fucking animals that need to be herded and controlled and the British presence in Ireland was only there to control these wild animals and if you turn your back the Anglo Irish Protestants who are smart and intelligent because they're effectively British but they've gone

kind of native if you turn your back on the paddy ape then the protestant will rile him up they control him and throughout the book the Irish are presented as being deliberately confusing so we're at both we're both completely thick but also have the ability to use our stupidity to confuse. And this is one of the issues throughout the book that makes the character of Thomas Sherwood, when he's trying to get down to Kerry to figure out how we have this great nuclear reactor. One of the things that's continually in his way as a scientist is that the Irish have figured out a way to release misinformation about

their scientific technology. That the Irish are using their capacity and ability to be both stupid and to pretend to be stupid to confuse the British and that's an opinion that exists about the Irish by the British because of how we speak English and I've always maintained this we speak Hiberno English so English was a language that was forced upon us Gaelic was outlawed completely so Irish people speak English in a way that was forced upon us. So often, the way that we speak English, we have grammatical structures that are more related to Irish. So we end up saying sentences that don't really make sense in the Queen's English. We'll say something like, Are you going to the shop you are?

So we've asked and answered our own question. This is how we speak English, because it was forced upon us. But often, the British ear hears how we speak English as deliberately confusing so we get called either stupid or crafty so all of these prejudices the fact that Fred Hoyle considered it completely appropriate to have a the only character in that book like i mentioned that at the start of the podcast i said that one of the flaws of this book is that he continually introduces characters and just calls them by their name and then you can't keep track of the characters because you don't know what they look like and you don't care about them the only

fucking character in this book other than thomas Sherwood who's given any real depth is Tiny Tiny the gorilla who's like I said is just a man from Tipperary who's large his hatred and he uses the word hatred multiple times his hatred of Tiny the gorilla

his consistent descriptions of him as a large brute his attention to detail this character that he has reduced to an old Irish caricature of the savage ape, his hatred of him is so much that this is the only other character you care about because it's the only character he's spoken about in any detail. Tiny the gorilla is seen as in this book Thomas Sherwood is is terrified of Tiny the gorilla for two reasons. Number one he's afraid of being brutalized or sexually assaulted by him. Number two he's terrified of turning into him and at the end of the book when thomas sherwood commits acts of violence he's reminded of tiny it's like he thomas sherwood

can't take responsibility for his own acts of violence instead he caught violence off tiny and that there is a narrative that British forces have used in Ireland to justify colonialism for years. We're not violent, we didn't want to shoot, the Paddy's are just too violent what did you want us to do? We are a peacekeeping force, these people are animals and when they jump out of their cage we're in danger and we have to shoot in self-defence. Every single toxic narrative of colonialism is present in this book.

Unquestioning by a writer who thinks that he's doing a nice thing because he clearly has an interest in Irish mythology. He clearly loves the story of Oisín and Tiarna Nóit. He makes mention of the Fianna,

and I think he mentions Fionn MacCool. He's well-read on Irish mythology. He loves the countryside. He thinks he has a love of the people, but really he wants to control and subjugate them. Ultimately, it's a science fiction book about an absurd dystopian future where Ireland is technologically advanced and he doesn't even give us the credit of being the reason that that technological advancement exists it's aliens who've put their brains into English scientists so that's my review

of Ossian's Ride. Jesus Christ. That's a 98 minute podcast. So that was post-colonial analysis. I love doing post-colonial analysis. It's my favourite type of analysis. It helps me to understand the world. And power structures. And also.

And I hate that I have to fucking point this out. None of that is anti-British. Or anti-British people. Fucking none of it. British people. English people or anti-british people fucking none of it british people english people whatever the fuck you want to call them are my fellow human beings and i love them just as much as i love any other fucking human being what i'm calling out and speaking about there are the power structures of colonialism invented by very rich and powerful people to extract and control resources around the world and colonialism convinces the poor people of one country that the poor people

of another country are their enemy and that same toxicity is also directed from the upper class of england historically towards the working class class of England and the peasant class. Not as bad as the country that's being colonised, but yeah, that podcast there was not anti-British in any way. It was a deconstruction of colonial ideology. That's what it was. So I think Oisín's Ride, that's the British Blade Runner. That's it right there

it's the unconscious and ignorant fear of revenge projected onto the previously colonised people alright I'm going to say it dog bless that was a roaring hot take I thoroughly enjoyed doing that

that was a long hot take I hope you didn't mind the podcast being that long. I needed to get that one out because I haven't done a hot take podcast in three weeks. As you know, I got my autism diagnosis three weeks ago and it kind of, it threw my head a bit wobbly.

It threw my head a bit wobbly it threw my head a bit wobbly but now I'm absolutely grand it threw my head wobbly to the point that I wasn't able to think in a hot take way because I was reassessing my identity but now I'm grand I'm soldered again and I'm able to focus obsessively

on things that I adore and love. And that's what that hot take was. I'll catch you next week. Hopefully with another hot take. Enjoy the beautiful May weather. Enjoy all the fucking trees right now lads. The leaves are only just budding. Go out in the evening at about seven o'clock,

between seven and eight, and inhale the perfume and vitality of what nature has given us at this specific time in May. It's the smell of sap. It's the smell of life. It's the promise of existence. It's hanging in the air.

Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee

the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play come along for the ride and punch your ticket to rock city at torontorock.com