The Author

Benjamin Benedict lived in Los Angeles and wrote a number of short stories in the late seventies and early eighties. These were thought lost until some manuscripts were recently found in a garage near Van Nuys.

‘Glue’ is the first of these, and was written in 1978 and 1979. This outlandish myth would never again see the light of day but for The Internet, a media, which ‘Glue’, with all its quixotic sexuality uncannily predicts. The story is an easy-read with no dark side to it but for all the froth, Mr Benedict’s fantasy steers us close to a shockingly delicious truth.

‘Duet’ was written between 1980 and 82. It is divorced from its forerunner ‘Glue’ in style and content but there is a ‘geo-political’ element to both stories. The author regarded them both (and the final saga) as ‘speculative fiction’, by which he meant fiction set in the very near future, not ‘science fiction’. ‘Duet’s prophesy of American Football in the UK came true a year or two later, and Margaret Thatcher (as currently, Tony Blair) made a partial reality of the Anglo-American pact that the character, Adrian Moorehead MP dreamt of.

The third and last fantasy, written between 1982 and 1983 is called ‘&’. Again the style and content are dramatically different from the other two. Linguistically, it is baroque and over the top, but again it has a geo-political theme. The characters and plot border on farce and are exotic in the extreme. Like all these works it never stops for breath and never fails to provoke and entertain. The question is whether its speculation is as absurd as it first seems.

Mr Benedict saw these stories as a trilogy which he called ‘Eggs Benedict’. They would loosely define the boundaries of ‘speculative fiction’ and would also indulge his fascination with the media. ‘Glue’ was apparently written with a movie in mind, ‘Duet’ would translate into an eight part TV series, and the third fable, ‘&’ has its eye on the stage.

At the end of 2003, some so-called ‘short-hands’, entitled ‘Smoke in the Air’ were sent in the name of Benjamin Benedict from an Internet café in Mexico City, and were subsequently published on www.benjaminbenedict.com.
More recently, some articles were sent from public use Internet terminals located in Lima, Peru and La Paz, Bolivia, in Mr Benedict’s name. These are to be featured in a monthly column entitled ‘Loose Talk’ on www.netlistings.com.