Nothing that a bit of moisturiser won’t fix.

You may find this shocking, but I’ve tried drugs, lots of alcohol—even a strong cup of tea and a good lie down—and I still don’t understand a bloody thing Professor Brian Cox tells us on the telly. And it doesn’t help that BC, as I prefer to call him, is full of all kinds of high-minded theories that trash the very essence of every science fiction and horror story ever written—the bastard.

But at least I’ve figured out BC’s wrong.

Take, for example, that BC doesn’t believe we’ll ever meet any decent aliens. Not even any Borg, which to be honest most of us would probably pass on any having any introductions. For a start, this opinion is totally unsupported by the hundreds of innocent people have been abducted by flying saucers, unwittingly sucked up by some light beam thingy, then had a vacuum cleaner nozzle shoved up their arse for a quick bit of anal probing. Try telling them that aliens don’t exist. Mind you, I will admit that the anal probing seems a bit extreme—I mean, the aliens can traverse the galaxy, but they haven’t figured out x-ray technology yet? Odd.

BC’s alien-less concept is built on a surprising idea. We’re all familiar with the problem of the vast distances through space and that pesky limitation of not travelling faster than the speed of light—that we’re all just too far apart to ever meet each other. However, that’s a lot of twaddle. Two hundred years ago reaching the moon was considered just as impossible.

But time is the other stumbling block. That’s not the time it takes Telstra to answer your support phone call—which sometimes can be measured in millennia—or what time you can really have your first beer on a public holiday. The issue is that our universe is 13.81 billion years old (or roughly 6000 years, if you believe the Old Testament) while our civilisation might be lucky to last 100,000 years, which is not much more than a lazy yawn in comparison. Okay, no one’s quite sure about that one, but the point is that any alien intelligence zooming around the universe has to exist at the same time as us. We all need to be building UFO’s and anally probing each other at the same time to ever possibly bump into each other. Instead, what’s more likely is that The Borg were pissing off the Daleks, while the first Predator was chomping on the first Alien… while human beings were still trying to rub two sticks together to light our first fag.

Lately, BC has offered another theory. That our universe isn’t the only one. The bursting bubble of the Big Bang Theory wasn’t a single event, but just one of millions of fizzy things happening in an enormous, gargantuan place that created unlimited, multiple universes. Now we’re starting to say shit like “infinity” and “infinite possibilities”. Accept that stuff, and you’re allowing the possibility that somewhere, sometime, out there in the impossible vastness of space, there’s another you reading this blog (bloody hell, two readers—I’m chuffed). It’s the same as the old saying, “Give an infinite amount of monkeys an infinite amount of typewriters, and one of them will eventually write War and Peace”. Personally, I reckon Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code is more likely.

You can’t have it both ways. BC can’t say “aliens don’t exist” and at the same time insist there are an infinite amount of possibilities. One day, we’ll meet aliens (friendly ones who won’t shove a Hoover up our bums) and ask them, “How do you travel faster than the speed of light, and through time?” And the answer will be, “Pfftt, piss of cake—with this button here. But don’t press it too often, because the damned gas consumption goes through the roof.”

So next time you get a clear night sky with no moon and plenty of stars, stand out in the garden and hold one hand up to the sky. Line the tip of your middle finger only on The Big Dipper and say loudly, “Fuck you, Brian Cox. The truth is out there.”

By the way, one of my original horror books, A Place to Fear, is all about aliens turning people into zombies. Lots of readers called it science fiction, but really it’s horror. You’ll find links here.

For those of you interested in a progress report about my new writing, I’ve been really caught up creating audiobooks of my Horror Story Volumes series—and I’ll admit I’ve been a bit slack in the “new writing” department. But things are balancing out. New books are on the drawing board and an audiobook of Footprints in the Snow is almost finished.

I’m not wasting any time watching the footy. Honest—well, hardly ever.