Zero at the Bone

Zero
[all photographs: Bronwyn Lloyd]

i.m. Zero Tolerance Lloyd-Ross
(c. November 2007-21st April 2023)

We're devastated by the loss of our delightful companion Zero, who left this world - hopefully for a better one - on Friday.

I don't really have any words to express how much she's meant to us over the fifteen and a bit years we were privileged to have her with us. Instead, I thought I'd put up some photos of her over the course of her life, together with a few poems I wrote about her during this time.

Hail and farewell, beloved friend. We'll never stop missing you.

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Zero at the bone


The dark looniness
of your leaping
worries me

no pause to reflect
furry paws
outspread

food comfort sleep
combine in
strange parentheses

(just like the town
they found you in
dodging

post-Xmas traffic)
beating up
poor Smudge

before you’d met us
even
now hounding

Otis
forgiving? maybe
needy

certainly
roving emblem
of desire

claws outspread


(12-15/3/08)

This is an early piece, written shortly after she first came to us. She was certainly a very spirited kitten! Later on she calmed down a little, but she never ceased to have strong views on a number of issues. It first appeared in the anthology below:

Our Own Kind: 100 New Zealand poems about animals. Ed. Siobhan Harvey (Auckland: Godwit, 2009): 67-68.

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Zero is lying down today



but little specks of blood
on the bedspread
make me think

she may have run into
one of her twin nemeses
last night

Yellow
a big fat greedy
green-collared glutton

or Brindle
a raccoon-tailed
bully

each of whom
sneaks in the back door
several times a day

to eat her food
she jumps out
hisses at them

but is only a little cat
once or twice we’ve seen
them ganging up on her

unable to help her
unless it’s in plain sight
I suppose that’s it

our little cat
so wilful
cuddly

spirited
has become the thing
we most fear losing

yet cannot safeguard
threaten to crush
with the sheer weight

of our love

(18/1/16-22/10/17)

This poem makes Zero sound like a bit of a victim, and it's true that she was bullied from time to time by larger neighbouring cats. She never provoked these fights, but she always gave as good as she got. Later on most of these cats seem to have moved away, so the last few years of her life were almost entirely free of such squabbles. The poem first appeared in Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2020, edited by Johanna Emeney, and subsequently in the book below:

The Oceanic Feeling. Drawings by Katharina Jaeger. Afterword by Bronwyn Lloyd (Auckland: Salt & Greyboy Press, 2021): 21.

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All I want



is for every moment
of every day

to be constant bliss
for Zero

Astyanax cringing
from his daddy’s helmet

safe in his mother’s arms
Andromache

watching enslaved
as Achilles’ son

throws her baby off
the walls

if only I could wish away
fast cars on the road

trespassing neighbour cats
basements with tempting doors

shut after her
lead nailspoison baits

the loss of a furry friend
is the sack of Troy

by the Greeks



(2/9/22-8/4/23)

This poem, written late last year, sounds uncomfortably prophetic to me now. The reference to Andromache's baby Astyanax being frightened by his father Hector's plume is from Homer's Iliad [Bk 6, ll.466-502]. His death at the hands of Achilles' son Neoptolemus is reported in Euripides' Trojan Women [ll.719-25]. The last two lines are a paraphrase of the quote below:

Someone has said that the death of a mouse by cancer is the whole sack of Rome by the Goths

- Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)

SF Luminaries: John Christopher

The Tripods (1984-85)

"John Christopher" - aka Christopher Youd, Samuel Youd (his real name), Hilary Ford, William Godfrey, Peter Graaf, Peter Nichols, William Vine, and Stanley Winchester - is perhaps best remembered for his YA SF series The Tripods, dramatised - rather poorly - by the BBC a couple of decades after the trilogy first appeared.

John Christopher: The Tripods Tetralogy (1967-88)

Concentrating solely on his 'second life' as a YA author would be to sell him short, though. His earlier adult novels have often been characterised - mostly by people who haven't read them - as imitations of fellow Brit John Wyndham's crossover megahit The Day of the Triffids (1951).

John Christopher: The Death of Grass (1956)

This may hold some truth for one or two of them - The World in Winter (1962), for instance - but even the Wyndham-influenced Death of Grass (1956) occupies a distinctly fiercer and more troubled space in the post-apocalyptic landscape than the older writer's "cosy catastrophes" (in Brian Aldiss's phrase). It's this brutal and uncompromising flavour which makes his work particularly relevant to readers today.

Sam Youd ['John Christopher'] (1922-2012)

As you'll see from the bibliography here, Youd began writing novels under his own name, then under a succession of other pseudonyms, each tailored to one of his many interests. It was as "John Christopher" that he achieved his greatest commercial (and probably artistic) success, however:

I read somewhere ... that I have been cited as the greatest serial killer in fictional history, having destroyed civilisation in so many different ways – through famine, freezing, earthquakes, feral youth combined with religious fanaticism, and progeria.

- quoted on his Goodreads author page

John Christopher: The Caves of Night (1958)

These early novels were all thrillers of one type or another, but not all of them can be classified as Sci-fi. The Caves of Night is about a group of amateur speleologists lost in an unknown cave system, and The Long Voyage (which I've discussed in more detail here) describes the strange odyssey of a ship that drifts through the North Sea to the ice-packs of Greenland.

John Christopher: The Guardians (1970)

The first of his novels I myself read was The Guardians. I got it for my birthday one year, and it made an indelible impression on me. There was a sharpness and precision to the writing which I hadn't really encountered before. He didn't seem to pull any punches for his "juvenile" audience. In fact it's clear in retrospect that he found these shorter narrative units particularly suited to his talents.

John Christopher: The Prince in Waiting trilogy (1970-72)

Perhaps the high point of his talent is the brilliantly original - and terrifying - "Prince in Waiting" books. The protagonist Luke was, I think, my very first antihero. Camus's Meursault, Greene's whisky priest, Joyce's Leopold Bloom, none of them surprised me as much as the bitter, scheming, unrepentant hero of these three vividly imagined novels.

After that the temperature of his writing began to cool off a little. Had he gone too far for Puffin Books? Certainly the successors to The Prince in Waiting were mostly one-offs, and the "Fireball" trilogy, when it finally arrived, was a bit of a disappointment.

But then I don't think it really matters where you start with John Christopher. The "adult" novels are not really significantly more demanding - or terrifying - than the children's ones. My favourite of them all remains The Long Voyage - it's the one I keep on coming back to - but I suppose his most dazzling achievement would have to be The Prince in Waiting and its sequels.

Whichever of them you choose to read, though, you certainly won't be wasting your time. He's long outlasted the era he wrote in, and only a few of his books are still in print. They're worth snapping up when you see them, though. I still have a couple of them I'm looking for, but fewer and fewer bookshops now maintain those tatty shelves of SF paperback which used to be such a happy hunting ground for fans like me.

John Christopher: The Fireball trilogy (1981-86)

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Sam Youd (1929-2018)

Sam Youd ['John Christopher']
(1922-2012)

John Christopher: The Year of the Comet (1955)

Novels:


1. The Year of the Comet [US: Planet in Peril (1959)] (1955)
   • The Year of the Comet. 1955. London: Sphere Books, 1978.
2. The Death of Grass [US: No Blade of Grass (1957)] (1956)
   • The Death of Grass. 1956. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.
3. The Caves of Night (1958)
   • The Caves of Night. 1958. London: Panther, 1962.
4. A Scent of White Poppies (1959)
5. The Long Voyage [US: The White Voyage] (1960)
   • The Long Voyage. 1960. London: Sphere books, 1986.
6. The World in Winter [US: The Long Winter] (1962)
   • The World in Winter. 1962. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964.
7. Cloud on Silver [US: Sweeney's Island] (1964)
   • Cloud on Silver. 1964. Hodder Paperbacks. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1966.
8. The Possessors (1964)
   • The Possessors. 1964. London: Sphere books, 1978.
9. A Wrinkle in the Skin [US: The Ragged Edge] (1965)
   • A Wrinkle in the Skin. 1965. London: Sphere books, 1978.
10. The Little People (1966)
11. Pendulum (1968)
    • Pendulum. 1968. Hodder Paperbacks. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1969.
12. Bad Dream (2003)

Short Stories:


13. The Twenty-Second Century (1954)

YA Fiction:


14. The Tripods trilogy:
    1. The White Mountains. 1967. Rev. ed. (2003)
    2. The City of Gold and Lead (1967)
    3. The Pool of Fire (1968)
    • The Tripods Trilogy: The White Mountains; The City of Gold and Lead; The Pool of Fire. 1967 & 1968. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
15. The Lotus Caves (1969)
    • The Lotus Caves. 1969. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.
16. The Guardians (1970)
    • The Guardians. 1970. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
17. The Sword of the Spirits trilogy
    1. The Prince In Waiting (1970)
    2. Beyond the Burning Lands (1971)
    3. The Sword of the Spirits (1972)
    • The Prince in Waiting Trilogy: The Prince In Waiting; Beyond the Burning Lands; The Sword of the Spirits. 1970, 1971 & 1972. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
18. In the Beginning. Structural Readers (1972)
19. Dom and Va (1973)
    • Dom and Va. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1973.
20. Wild Jack (1974)
    • Wild Jack. 1974. A Beaver Book. London: Hamish Hamilton Children’s Books, 1978.
21. Empty World (1977)
    • Empty World. 1977. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.
22. The Fireball trilogy
    1. Fireball (1981)
       • Fireball. Fireball Trilogy, 1. 1981. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
    2. New Found Land (1983)
       • New Found Land. Fireball Trilogy, 2. 1983. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
    3. Dragon Dance (1986)
       • Dragon Dance. Fireball Trilogy, 3. 1986. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
23. When the Tripods Came (1988)
    • When the Tripods Came. 1988. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990.
24. A Dusk of Demons (1993)
    • A Dusk of Demons. 1993. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994.



John Christopher: A Dusk of Demons (1993)


as Christopher Youd:


25. The Winter Swan (1949)

as Samuel Youd:


26. Babel Itself (1951)
27. Brave Conquerors (1952)
28. Crown and Anchor (1953)
29. A Palace of Strangers (1954)
30. Holly Ash [US: The Opportunist] (1955)
31. Giant's Arrow [UK: as Anthony Rye] ((1956)
32. The Burning Bird [US: The Choice (1961)
33. Messages of Love (1961)
34. The Summers at Accorn (1963)

as William Godfrey:


35. Malleson at Melbourne (1956)
36. The Friendly Game (1957)

as William Vine:


37. "Death Sentence". Imagination Science Fiction (June 1953)
38. "Explosion Delayed". Space Science Fiction (July 1953)

as Peter Graaf:


39. The Joe Dust Series:
    1. Dust and the Curious Boy [US: Give the Devil His Due] (1957)
    2. Daughter Fair (1958)
    3. The Sapphire Conference (1959)
40. The Gull's Kiss (1962)

as Hilary Ford:


41. Felix Walking (1958)
42. Felix Running (1959)
43. Bella on the Roof (1965)
44. A Figure in Grey (1973)
45. Sarnia (1974)
46. Castle Malindine (1975)
47. A Bride for Bedivere (1976)

as Peter Nichols:


48. Patchwork of Death (1965)

as Stanley Winchester:


49. The Practice (1968)
50. Men With Knives [US: A Man With a Knife] (1968)
51. The Helpers (1970)
52. Ten Per Cent of Your Life (1973)

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John Christopher: Bad Dream (2003)