Andy Secombe
BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR
- Title: Limbo
- Description:
A highly entertaining humorous fantasy in the vein of Douglas Adams and Terry Gilliam. This is set partly in the fantasy world of Limbo, with its castle, king and queen, wizard, and unending night; and otherwise primarily on Hove seafront amongst supposedly normal human beings perpetually drawn into Iudicrous situations. Both venues are under threat when the Prophecy starts to come to pass, heralded by a shower of garbage-eating clams broken loose from a massive spaceship of the far future. What is happening is that the hoop of time is beginning to break up...till the denizens of Limbo and Hove increasingly merge, and this composite place is eventually overrun by monsters, dinosaurs, Roman soldiers, Norman invaders, Edwardian gentlemen, and Regency ladies with parasols, etc. all fighting for the space in a giant time-warp. Excerpted from Limbo by Andy Secombe. Copyright © 2004. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter Nine: Serena Kowalski, garbage operative, third class, tapped the glass of the temperature gauge. It was the only instrument in the vast, computerized display that was real, and with good reason. Through the port window of the behemoth-sized garbage scow, the S.S. St. Francis Sinatra, she could see the Earth, floating far below - blue beneath a covering of wispy white cloud. This gigantic ship was the latest in a long series of 'final solutions' to the growing problem of what to do with the waste produced by fifteen billion human beings. They’d had to stop landfill disposal back in 2030, when the average height of the land had risen by fifteen feet and most city dwellers had found themselves living underground. Soon afterwards, dumping at sea had been halted. Apart from poisoning the oceans, garbage islands were appearing everywhere, proving extremely hazardous to navigation. Then there was the notorious ‘Great Asian Plain’ scheme, championed by the Chinese, which involved levelling off the Himalayas by dumping garbage in the valleys. They’d tried filling space ships with rubbish – sending them hurtling into the sun. This had seemed like a good, long-term solution until they discovered it was interfering with the balance of the sun’s internal nuclear reaction and making it unstable. Then, one afternoon early in 2036, a researcher at Porton Down, whilst trying to create a creature that could clean the inside of high-pressure steam pipes in nuclear reactors, spliced together the DNA from a deep-sea, hydrothermal clam with that of a silica-digesting amoeba, adding along the way, a few off-the-peg genes from seagulls, aphids and wolves. What he ended up with was a clam about the size of a dinner plate – too large for its intended use in the narrow confines of high-pressure cooling pipes, but capable of eating anything. Not only that, it thrived in a methane-rich environment, reproduced asexually and had an insatiable appetite. Soon, great vats of these clams were being exported to countries all over the world. So efficient were they at devouring rubbish, and so much confidence did the people of the world put in them that garbage production ballooned again – the rubbish depots were overwhelmed. An orbiting fleet of garbage scows was the answer. A never-ending stream of rubbish-bearing shuttles from earth fed vast ships, with holds so big they could swallow a small country, which were seeded with clams that busily turned society’s waste into nutrient-rich fertilizer. The clams seemed almost perfect, their one flaw being that they could only operate within certain, very limited temperature parameters. Below 75 degrees, they died, and above 80° became so active they could eat their way through six-inch steel plate in minutes. That’s why Serena’s eyes were never far from the glass of the internal-hold temperature gauge. Currently, it was rising. 
- Title: Limbo
- Description:
An amusing fantasy tale based around the Brighton Seafront
