The rise of homo benefitus

According to Metro, the city of Glasgow not only has the lowest average life expectation in Europe, highest rates for obesity, high blood pressure and death by knife, it's also officially a city with really high poverty. News?

There's a new breed of humans developing in Glasgow and spreading throughout Scotland - homo benefitus. 

It's the people who never experienced getting up in the mornings to go to work and working eight or more hours a day. Still, they believe going to court for 10am at least once a month and to the Jobcentre every two weeks is normal. So is walking to the corner shop in your pyjamas in the afternoon and being bored 'oot ur skull' for most of the time.

They have no concept of normal human interactions. They glare instead of looking, demand instead of asking and shout instead of talking. They fuck everybody that's got a different set of genitals and drop sprogs until their sprogs start having kids themselves at the ripe age of fourteen, when they become grannies. Marriage is virtually unknown. Religion is a baffling concept. Paying taxes is a mysterious activity that 'rich cunts' do.

Cheap alcohol, narcotics and multicultural 'chippies and chinkies' are staples of homo benefitus diet. That's why the ones in their twenties look puffy and in their thirties - like they are almost fifty. In males lined, gaunt faces with sunken beady eyes and grey skin of vitamin deficient are prominent. Aggression and violence is also common because of the constant substance hunger, the packs of hooded youngsters on little bikes prowl the boundaries of the estates looking for sustenance for themselves and their relatives. 

In homo benefitus society simple biological facts, history of one's own country and basic geography away from streets and parks of birth are unknown. Even their grasp of language is not quite there, but as long as their own tribes understand the honking slang of the junkies, slurring of toothless alkies and angry sharp calls of bored council estaters it's all that matters. The landscape of half rotten sofas chewed on by staffies and kids surrounded by ugly buildings with boarded windows smelling strongly of urine and neglect is a familiar one that comforts your average homo benefitus on return home from the necessary trip 'ootside'.

So, all these problems listed above are news, really? And if you think I'm exaggerating here, take a walk across one of Glasgow's council estates. Just don't go alone...

Hey, space opera sf fans feeling the drought of such books - read these!

Just when I started losing faith in the existence of good science fiction books of a space opera type, that are not a part of some painfully prolonged cycle or have about as much science in them as a cookbook or are written in a teeth pain inducing I-explain-the-setting-in-the-first-chapter style - I have found two real gems, one by a new unknown author and one by an old bearded bear with 44 novels under his belt.

Dark Eden by Chris Beckett - I picked it off the shelf because of a creepy cover and it proved to be a fascinating read. A bit of a rough ending but big kudos for throwing the reader in a middle of an unknown ecosystem of a far away planet without a sun, where the inbred descendants of two Earthlings live in near darkness, awaiting a mythical rescue party from an even more mythical world where the light comes from the sun and not from the fluorescent plants and animals. Chaos awaits the human settlement when a young guy challenges old rituals and gathers a party of youngsters to cross the frozen darkness (not a darkness like we know it, imagine pure darkness with no moon and no nearby stars...) of a mountain range to prove that there is more to this world than one valley in a forest. More kudos for the most imaginative alien ecosystem I have encountered in a good long while. A word of warning, don't read Dark Eden if you are in a depressive mood, it's a rather heavy book that proves that humans are always same in the end, doesn't matter on which world we end up living.

City at the End of Time by Greg Bear - I'm still reading it but I'm so awe struck by the intricate structure and multitude of characters and the in your face chaos theory science bits that I recommend it just now to any sf fan craving what I just mentioned. The story takes place in the future so distant the universe is dying and in the future not so distant where the time is dying, characters are linked between these two story strands by dreams and 'straying' into each others heads. Multiverse, beings that shed matter as inconvenient, future changing the past, muses sorting out lose ends of history, shreds of Earth's dirt as something of most value, books that change what's written inside them and cats that know but are not sharing - I'm going back to reading, excuse me...