Icejacked

Foreword

With a fascinating premise, Adrian Hawkes’s first novel makes its presence felt. Through the eyes of Gerhardt Shynder, a Swiss PhD student, we get up close and personal with Leddicus, a 2,030-year-old man. Has society really changed since Roman times? Of course, there’s an overwhelming difference in our standard of living, but human beings, what is in us, and our capacity for love, joy, beauty, hatred, destruction, and selfishness seem to straddle all the centuries. So in ’s story, he is able to talk passionately about some of the ills of our society: slavery, detention centres, and the use and abuse meted out to an unprecedented one person every minute who is being trafficked. Adrian obviously delights in history, and his story has many interesting facts about the ancient world and the one in which we live. Implicit in the story is a challenge. Are we frozen icemen needing to melt and wake up and, in doing so, perhaps help change a little of the world where we live?

Ann Clifford, film writer and producer

Preface

When you begin writing a book, I always think you have to ask yourself the following question: “Why am I doing this?” With this book, the answer is, “Just because I wanted to.” Will that do as an answer?

To give you a little background, how we all react to change fascinates me. We live in a time of rapid change that sometimes makes life difficult. The older you get, the harder it is to cope with change. But it is not just about the aging process. It is also about firsts. Here is a simple example. Have you ever been on a flight with someone who is flying for the first time? I have, and it’s great fun watching his reactions. Have you ever watched people arriving at an airport? I recently watched a group of young girls who were obviously experiencing a moving walkway for the first time. It was hilarious to watch their little dance steps as they tried to deal with the idea of stepping onto a moving walkway. Have you ever been to a supermarket with someone for the first time? I accompanied a young lady from a small third-world village who was just astounded that you could buy ready-cooked chickens and you could sometimes “buy one get one free.” She told me that, for her to cook chicken, it was a full day’s work. She had to collect the firewood and then catch, kill, pluck, and finally cook the chicken in water, the collection of which involved a walk of six miles there and back. Observing these things makes you think.

Ferania, a fourteen-year-old young lady who lived with my wife and me for many years, amused me. For my wife, I bought one of those old black telephones from the late 1950s. A sales company had homed in on the nostalgia for these old phones and manufactured them with modern technology on the inside. I showed Ferania my wife’s present.

She said, “What is it?”

I said, “It’s an old-fashioned telephone.”

She replied, “It couldn’t be a phone.”

That response left me confused, so I said, “Why couldn’t it be?”

She responded, “Look, it hasn’t got any buttons on it.”

I plugged the phone into the wall and showed her how to dial a number, put your finger in the hole, and twirl the device round.

Ferania looked disgusted. “I could never use that. It would break my nails!”

When my children were younger, they were fascinated that I might have remembered sixpence pieces. I didn’t like to tell them that I could remember silver threepenny (thrupenny) bits and went shopping for sweets with a farthing.

One day, I was watching one of my ten grandchildren, a three-year-old, who was working hard on his father’s computer.

I said, “What are you doing?”

“Well,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone, “I am building a city.”

I looked at the screen, and sure enough, he was, designating areas for schools, playgrounds, houses, and factories. He couldn’t read yet, but he could type in “www,” click his favourite sites from the computer history list, and build a virtual city. It’s science fiction, isn’t it? Or is it?

My friend Ferania asked me one day, “What TV did you watch when you were fourteen?”

It was hard to explain that, when I was fourteen, there was only one channel, and it came on a black-and-white screen. TV was only just beginning, and many people did not have one, my family included. To a modern teenager, that is almost unbelievable. These innovations we take for granted become so normal that we cannot imagine a time when they did not exist. The mobile phone I now use has as much computer power as the computers used to land the first spaceship on the moon. How times change.

Times change, and technology certainly does, but what about our values? Should they change with the technology? Some people believe there is no such thing as a God or spirituality and everything is about our neurons and chemical structure or those selfish genes. A bunch of miseries—love, peace, joy, righteousness, justice, and responsibility—are all meaningless. Just the result of chemical reactions. Errm!

So I thought my friend Leddicus might help us to look again at what is out there. Perhaps he will help us appreciate it—if we don’t already—and maybe question if we need to and ask ourselves, “Have I got sight of a good value package?”