Fear Week

By Andrew McBurnie

Teenager Adrian Thorby is about to experience a week of embarrassing and comic incidents. But he's scared. It's 1962, the week of the Cuban missile crisis, and the world is threatened by nuclear war. He's a science-fiction fan who fears he won't live to see a futuristic world of high-technology, including space travel and robots, and will never have a girlfriend.

Adrian lives in Hull, a north-eastern English city still half-flattened by WW2 bombing. He assumes that with his country’s experience of intense bombing during the last war, there will be a swift introduction of emergency preparedness measures. But everyone continues with their lives as normal. Nobody prepares; Adrian begins to think the grownups must all be mad.

He is also in love with a girl from another school, is troubled by sexual thoughts, and through some awkward moments begins to wonder if he really has the brains to participate in a technological future. The seven days of “Fear Week” narrate his exploits, blunders and embarrassments during the nuclear crisis, and his yearnings for the girl of his dreams.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrew McBurnie
• Release date: Sep 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301095780

Andrew McBurnie

Andrew McBurnie was born in Hull, UK, and emigrated with his family to Australia in 1966. He lives in Sydney.Starship Walker grew out of my desire for a mode of interstellar travel which seems more believable to me than warp drives, stargates or any other of the other current SF means of bypassing the dismal fact that the enormous distances between the stars are very unlikely to be crossed by human beings. I also wanted to include as part of the story some more recent discoveries of astronomy, particularly the fact that our home system exists in an enormous, safe bubble inside the galactic clouds, from which it will depart in a few million more years into a much more hostile environment. Much SF seems oblivious to this.Fear Week is about the city where I grew up, Hull, in the Yorkshire East Riding. It was the second most bombed city after London, but was always kept secret during the war. Hull was only referred to as 'a north-eastern city'. This is not widely known. As children, we were accustomed to bombed-out ruins: in the way of children, we thought it was normal. The early sixties was an era when all young people knew that at any moment, their lives might be ended by a nuclear war, a threat that was just called 'The Bomb'. The phrase, 'press the button', was widely used to mean the end of the world. The Cuban missile crisis was very nearly it. It's surprising that many people nowadays don't know how close we came - and aren't aware that the danger still exists.

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