The Picklock Lane Stories

The nineteen satirical stories in this volume first appeared in Gavin Chappell's monthly Schlock! Webzine, a product of Rogue Planet Press in the UK. These tales document the challenges, horrors, vexation and hilarity of managing the integration of extra-terrestrial aliens into daily human life on earth. The focus for this comic exploration is the character Fatty Millstone, the moon-faced, single-tentacle sheriff who holds forth from his table towards the rear of the Cracked Bell pub on Picklock Lane. The sheriff, a card-carrying member of the new Transparency political party, cloaks the fact that he is an alien though he must use his tentacle to perform his enforcement duties and signs of his reproduction by fission are also sometimes difficult to hide. The tenement where Sheriff Fatty Millstone lodges on Picklock Lane is full of his clones conducting larceny as well as voluminous record keeping about crime in the city. As Millstone is constantly exercising his curiosity and intelligence and requires little sleep, he often spends his nights wandering foggy Picklock Lane and its adjacent city park with its octopus-filled river and Butterfly Paradise. Millstone's friends are a mix of aliens and humans, including MP Sir Douglas and Lady Lucille Hudibras, who sponsor pro-alien attitudes in Parliament and at the Hudibras estate, just off Picklock Lane. Naturally, the host, tapsters and numerous waitresses at the Cracked Bell pub play continual roles, as do rabidly intrusive tabloid reporters like Straight and Crenshaw, who alternately stoke fear of aliens and support the heroism of rogue tentacles through the yellow press. The tabloid press with its faux news and sensationalism is a major butt of satire, but the people's credulity is an inseparable part of its success and therefore a target for satire as well. Medicine for the alien population is administered quietly by Dr. Erblik, an alien who must keep her patients' conditions strictly private. More than one romance buds and flourishes though one or both partners know nothing of the alien background of the other. These tales have a rich literary heritage, and they are allusive. Politics and the political process are also prime subjects for ridicule in the vein of Clive James' Britannia Bright's Bewilderment in the Wilderness of Westminster (1976), only without the rhyming couplets. Some readers may savour the literary heritage, for example, behind the name 'Hudibras, ' which is taken from Samuel Butler's long octosyllabic rhyming couplet poem Hudibras (1663-80) satirizing religion (Puritans), inter alia. The timeless themes of intolerance and xenophobia are justly held up to ridicule. While in traditional science fiction, aliens are characterized as hostile, selfish, and with complete disregard for humanity, in The Picklock Lane Stories no such prejudice is countenanced. In fact, the tales subscribe to beneficent alien populations which have the periodic option to be reclaimed by space vehicles to be redistributed elsewhere in the universe. Author E. W. Farnsworth writes in many genres and mixed genres. In these short stories, he uses science fiction tropes to make his satires intelligible. The stories may be read individually or in binge fashion as a series. The Picklock Lane stories continue to appear in Schlock! Webzine. Further collections like this one can be anticipated in due course.