Old Boy’s Sci-Fi Trilogy – John Standingford 1956-64

Do you remember Image? It was the School’s first magazine for creative writing, the brainchild of English teacher Chris Price. He joined the school in September 1961 and Issue No.1 was published in November 1962. Image was run by an Editorial Committee of six: four modernists, a scientist and a classicist. Mr Price and fellow English teacher Mr Woodland were Editorial Advisers.

One of the modernists was John Standingford (aka Standingford, J R K), who contributed a poem and a very short play to the first issue. He went on to read Economics at Cambridge and follow an international career as a consulting economist, spending much of the last 23 years in the former Soviet republics. He lives in Australia with his wife, Mary.

John just turned 70 and is easing out of consulting into authorship. “I remember being shocked when Mr Price told us he liked science fiction,” he told us, “because we solemn sixth-formers didn’t consider that a serious literary genre!” But Mr Price’s words echoed down the decades, and John’s first published work is a science fiction trilogy.

It’s called The Eeks Trilogy. The three books are ‘Eeks’, ‘Speeks’ and ‘Squidgies’. They are available only as e-books, through all the main e-book retailers.

The hardest question to an author is “What’s it about?” An honest answer might be “Life, love and death,” but that’s not a good sales pitch. A more informative answer usually turns into a summary of the plot. John’s answer is “Human nature, relationships and adaptability. Robots and aliens help to create situations that demand human responses, and provoke questions about euthanasia, religion, colonialism, racism, sexuality and our long-term survival as a species.”

John has a blog too (http://stroppygit.com) where he expresses his sometimes controversial opinion about issues of the day.