An alien, sent from his own planet, “Oitar”, to assess whether Earth is suitable for colonisation, falls down to the ground. There he makes the demand on every alien’s lips: “take me to your leader”. Mistaken for the emir of a wealthy Gulf state, he somehow wrangles an audience with the “pee-em”, a woman “as nondescript in dress and manner as any common walker”. Margaret Thatcher intones some platitudes about their “very ancient alliance which goes back”, promises to keep the oil prices up, and offers to sell him Mount Snowdon. She has already privatised the River Severn, you see, and sold the Channel Islands to France.
This is the dystopian country Oi Paz discovers when he lands on Earth some time during Thatcher’s fourth or fifth term as prime minister in the 1990s, as wryly foreseen by the historian EP Thompson in his 1988 novel The Sykaos Papers. Its dismal portrait of Britain – a “little satrapy” of Nato, “used by its officers for parking their nukes” – is about as on-the-nose as one would expect from a former member of the Communist Party and activist for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Most of the people Oi Paz finds, like the Nato busybody “Mr Lacky” and the White House spokesman “Mr Fibbs”, appear to have been struck over the head by nominative determinism. So, too, humanity itself – we natives of “Sykaos”, the Oitarian word for “Earth”, really are “Sykotic”.
Content from our partners
