The God Gamble

The God Gamble (was Playing Poker with God) manuscript is all finished and out there looking for a publisher .

It's fiction, dystopian I think it's genre is actually eco-fiction or green fiction) but not depressing. At least I don't think so. It's based on the simple fact that there are about three hundred and sixty thousand people born every day in the world. At the same time only about one hundred and fifty thousand die, which means that the world's population grows by about two hundred and ten thousand people every day, and that number increases exponentially with every minute that ticks by.

It is unsustainable.

The manuscript's finished in first draft form, but it has sat on my computer for the last year because the week before I finished it Covid hit, and suddenly it seemed in slightly poor taste. But everyone is used to Covid now, at least I think they are, so it's time to revive it, get it sorted and see if I can find a publisher. My current one isn't interested in fiction.

It's just over 81,600 words and tells the story of an innocent abroad, a religious nut and...
perhaps it's best just to go to the synopsis.

This document is the last testament of Zachariah Smith. It tells, in his own words, how he came to be almost the last living person on Earth. Zach was born and raised by a fundamentalist family in the deeply religious farming community of Sunshine. Life was basic but happy. Until he was 16, got his 14 year old cousin pregnant and was thrown out of family and ostracised from community. He was rescued by Kate, a high flying city lawyer, who educated him in the ways of the world. She introduced him to Max, her politician husband, who saw Zach's potential and took him on, first as an intern, then an aide, and introduced him to the seamier side of politics. At Max's side, Zach was destined for the pinnacles of power. He acquired a girlfriend, Sky, who drew him back into religion under the charismatic Reverend Pastor Richard Cole of the Church of the Reincarnate. Zach had landed butter-side-up on the carpet of life.But it couldn't last. Personal tragedy—the death of his estranged father, his sister's murder conviction and his mother's madness—combined with increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters, worsening environmental degradation at the hands of multinationals and dangerous political crises—pushed Zach deeper into the comforting but very dangerous arms of his church.Pastor Cole was obsessed by a belief that by 2032 the world's population would reach nine and a half billion, which, he calculated, to be equivalent to all the souls that had ever lived. All the dead would have risen, and unless the world's population could be drastically reduced, Armageddon would be triggered and the world would be cleansed. Before God's call, the Pastor had been one of the country's leading microbiologists and Sky was an up-and-coming geneticist. They combined their talents in a race against time and powerful forces arraigned against them to create a pandemic on a scale not seen since the great plague. After vaccinating the chosen they released the pathogens simultaneously across the world with devastating effect.But foiling God did not turn out to be quite that easy.The hastily developed vaccine failed. Then there was just Zach. Alone. Surviving in a world inhabited by the dead and the dangerous packs of dogs-gone-wild that lived off them. Except, unknown to him, for a small clan isolated by war and snow high in the mountains of Afghanistan.Then there was just the small clan. And the dogs

No one moved, silence stretched like a huge, cloying, sticky cobweb over the Chapel-yard. Dad lay silent in his coffin, maybe looking down and aware of the chain of events his death had begun, but beyond caring or commenting, waiting to be lowered into his grave, forgotten. The preacher abandoned his post beside the coffin and came to stand with my siblings, my other sisters, and glared silently at me. I don't know to this day if he was willing me to stay or go, only that I was doomed to his enmity forever and beyond.

Slowly a pulsing blue and red light penetrated the silence and, one by one, heads turned toward the road outside the gate. A police patrol car, lights flashing, had pulled up unnoticed and two policemen were walking slowly, warily, toward us followed by a man in jeans, a loose fitting shirt and sneakers. Kate stepped in front of them and asked what they wanted, but they brushed her almost gently aside. One went up to Marj, who looked suddenly very afraid.

"Margaret Fenton, I'm arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Brian Fenton. Could you put your hands behind your back, please?" She stared at him uncomprehending and he gently pulled each hand behind her and locked them in cuffs.

"Wait! She's in my custody!"

"Not any more, Mrs Stevens. The commissioner told us to ask you to call him,"

But Kate was already on her phone, the Commissioner's private number. She began to talk urgently then cut off and listened, then,

"At her father's funeral, for God's sake, Kevin? Her father's fucking funeral!" Then she put her phone in a pocket and drew a long breath, before she said to us, her group,

"They sent photos. When he saw those he couldn't delay an arrest. If it got out it would be his head. And it would get out because the press were there at almost the same time as the police. Someone ... "

I looked around, my mother and older sister stunned, my little sister and Grandma grim, my brother-in-law with a smirk.

I could very easily have killed him there and then.

It's an odd thing, and I'm not sure what it says about me, but in this book I discovered the joy of killing off characters. There's something satisfying about rounding off a life, although I was a little sad for a couple of them.

Perhaps I should see someone ...

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