I'm working on a short story commission so while my head is in that general area I thought I'd do a few tweets about a story called The Berg. I wrote it a few years ago and one way and another it's stayed alongside me ever since.
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The idea for it - or something like it - came to me in 2014 (bloody hell), when I read a footnote in Desmond King-Hele's biography of Erasmus Darwin about how Darwin once conceived of sailing or towing icebergs south from the Arctic in order to cool the tropics.
Regular readers (Sid and Doris Bonkers) will know that a lot of my stories spring from mad things I find in environmental history books. Anyway I wanted to write *something* about this. I even asked an engineer pal how you'd set about moving an iceberg.
I still have his long, brilliant answer. Sample: "We hoop ropes over the berg and bore some grooves to run the chains through. We then smack in some pins (a wide-tailed pin through the eye of a link should work). Underwater, we can perhaps make use of diving bells, which are just being developed."
But anyway in the end I ditched all that (*shrug emoji*) and decided they could just put sails on the berg itself and move it that way. Don't come at me with your "sailing knowhow" or your "science". THAT'S WHAT THEY DO.
So, as usual with my fiction, I know where the root idea came from, but I have no fucking clue about the rest of it. So I don't know how I came to have the story narrated by a semi-literate clockmaker's son from Bridlington who is on the berg as an alternative to being transported for sodomy.
That's just how it came out. The other main character is a Great Auk, or penguin (the word "penguin" was actually used for this now-extinct North Atlantic seabird before we applied it to those unrelated characters from down south). "He doesnt have a Name. He is onlie the Penguine."
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