The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #87391   Message #1861745
Posted By: The Fooles Troupe
17-Oct-06 - 08:14 PM
Thread Name: BS: Where's the Global Warming
Subject: RE: BS: Where's the Global Warming
Actually Old Guy, I would recommend you read

'Play Little Victims' by Kenneth Cook (an Aussie!) - published in late 70s or early 80s

If you can cope with this, you are capable of understanding the movie about Global Warming - it was pitched at such people as you.

a nice review is at http://kimbofo.typepad.com/readingmatters/2006/07/play_little_vic.html

Extract

It's basically a macabre satire about two mice that survive the end of the world. Adamus and Evemus (geddit?) start being fruitful and multiply -- and multiply and multiply -- until it's quite apparent there's an over-population problem.

An official governing body is set up, which then spends the rest of the book trying to work out ways of solving this problem. With the Word of Man to guide them -- a bible and 4,268 editions of the New York Times -- they systematically introduce wars, pollution, abortion, road-death, alcohol and cigarettes to stem the ever-increasing numbers of mice living in Earth's one remaining habitable valley.

When they stumble upon the final solution -- revealed on the very last page of this novella -- it is more horrifying than one could possibly imagine. It makes your skin crawl and your spine shudder.

The beauty of this charming and intelligent fable is its polished brevity. It's also laugh-out-loud funny in places, startling and morbidly dark in others. It says so much about the state of the world right now I find it amazing that Play Little Victims has never been reprinted: it would garner such an audience today. Perhaps because it is by an Australian, little known outside of his homeland, it just never gained the international attention it deserved. I'm sure that would not have been the case had he been a Brit or an American...

End Extract

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