Peter O'Connor - Writer

'Civilization' is a story set in the near future where life has just got that bit harder for people. They live in smaller apartments, work longer hours for less pay. There are more rules which they must obey or face violence from stressed out guards. I like the fact that Marco, the main character has such a simple aim, to get to work, but it becomes nearly impossible to achieve. I also like Marco’s determination. So many things are going wrong for him but he just keeps going. So even though the world I’ve created is quite grim, it’s ultimately quite an uplifting story. Movies involving future dystopias are very popular these days with films like ‘The Hunger Games’, ‘Divergent’ and ‘Ender’s Game’ getting a lot of success. Each one of these has a discernible bad guy. That’s fine, movies don’t get much traction without the foe to be overcome but I’ve often wondered what if life just kept getting steadily worse and worse. If the pace of the decline was slow enough, humans wou...

I searched for ‘adventure’ and it said it was an unusual, exciting or daring experience. The searching wasn't that exciting. I was still sat in front of my computer.  I searched for inspiration and I decided that image of a lightbulb that was returned wasn't at all inspirational in and of itself. So I searched for ‘enlightenment’ and what do you know? I spent a whole hour finding out stuff around the subject of 'The enlightenment’.  But I still hadn't moved. I sat stock-still like a tree, roots reaching out into a world of facts and information, roots that stretched around the world sucking at the sap of our accumulated knowledge. What did I learn? Lots of stuff. I saw a million images as if I'd sprouted many extra sets of eyes that popped from my head and flew out into the world. Omniscience only eluded me because the shininess of each new fact dimmed so quickly when the next one came along. So I shutdown my computer and went out. It was cold. The...