Paul Leonard Hinder

As Paul Leonard I used to write books for the UK BBC Series ‘Doctor Who’, filling in the missing bits between the televised adventures. Some of the books were better than others, and re-reading some of them now it’s clear that the better ones dealt with the topics that really interested me: the distant past, the distant future, the sheer massiveness of time and space. I’m still very interested in all that, but…

Right now there’s the immediate future: it’s fairly clear that our great civilisation and all its achievements – arts, sciences, engineering, culture – is very likely to go the way of the mastodon, leaving little but bones. I don’t expect our clever species will go entirely extinct, but there will be a vast amount of misery and cruelty, war, famine, disease and starvation, and at the end those who do survive will probably wish they hadn’t.

All of this is preventable, if only we are able to use our (recently evolved) rationality to guide our progress instead of our ancestral heritage of fear and short-term greed. If only we are able to live with the truth, which is wonderful, vast, and beyond our full comprehension, rather than believing the lies we invent to make ourselves comfortable, which are tiny, distorted and often malign.

In this series I will go back to what I have spent a lifetime thinking about: what we could have had, what we still could have. Because we are the people who can make anything, can remodel the vast spaces and energies which are all around us into any set of shapes we want – but only if we elect to believe that we are better than a bunch of rats fighting in a sack, drowning in our own wastes.