Synopsis "Spaceman Daddy (in English)"
"Who needs acid when you've got memories like mine?" Take Turgenev's 'First Love', turn Vladimir into a girl and Pyotr Vasilyevich into Zinaida's father. Throw in a one way expedition to Mars made into a TV reality show and add a brain-frying orgasm suicide pill. Next add a sprinkling of porn, the advice of a well hung Oxford don, a thief with a camcorder, and a murder trial. Finally set the whole lot to David Bowie's 'Heathen' and you're about done. Stick the events in the year 2024 and have them stewed over by an aged bisexual fifty years beyond that. 'Spaceman Daddy' is a semi-erotic exploration of sex and sexuality, love and death. Julia looks back at a life defined by her tragic first love when she was a history undergraduate at Oxford. Unable to believe her girlfriend's fantastic beliefs about her father, confused by her own sexuality and infidelities, drugs and a world possessed by a space expedition reality show called One Way, Julia decides to exile herself to her own new 'planet' in America. After twelve years of displacement working the San Pornando Valley, she is persuaded by her ex male lover, Dr. Jeremy Bantham, to return to confront the incredible. This adult novel examines the interplay between the privacy of sexuality and social acceptance. It looks at incest and voyeurism without flinching, in order to expose the anatomy of male and female sexualities and sexual politics, cultural norms and queerness. Where do we draw the lines and why? "History is a narrative only because things that happened are most easily recalled in sequence. No one remembers the whole thing, just the next day and the next and another day. Nudge, nudge, nudge. Time on a conveyor belt. Sure. Then my mum made some tea. We sat down. We talked about Emma. I got upset. I stood up. I said I was leaving. I mean, really leaving. Blah, blah, blah. One thing follows another and before you know it you're on the final page of the final book of You."
