Radio serialisation
🔗 http://www.lep.co.uk/news/Lancashire-author-to-have-novel.5175944.jp
Shelagh Watkins, who set up Published Authors groups on LinkedIn andGoodreads, is administrator of the Published Authors Forum and creatorof the Published Authors Network. She is also group leader forChildren’s Fiction on LibraryThing and the author of two novels. InSeptember 2008, Shelagh published and edited the anthology, Forever Friends.
Her first novel, Mr. Planemaker’s Flying Machine, was recently serialised on Preston FM community radio.
<p>“<em>We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”(</em>Teilhard de Chardin<em>)</em></p><p><span style="line-height:1.6em;"><em>Involution-An Odyssey Reconciling Science to God </em> is as layered as a French cassoulet, as diverting, satisfying and as rich. Each reader will spoon this book differently. On the surface it seems to be a simple and light-hearted poetic journey through the history of Western thought, dominantly scientific, but enriched with painting and music. Beneath that surface is the sauce of a new evolutionary idea, involution; the informing of all matter by consciousness, encoded and communicating throughout the natural world. A book about the cathedral of consciousness could have used any language to paint it, but science is perhaps most in need of new vision, and its chronology is already familiar.</span></p><p><span style="line-height:1.6em;">The author offers a bold alternative vision of both science and creation: she suggests that science has been incrementally the recovery of memory, the memory of evolution/involution</span><em style="line-height:1.6em;">.</em></p><p>“<em> Involution proposes that humans carry within them the history of the universe, which is (re)discovered by the individual genius when the time is ripe. All is stored within our DNA and awaits revelation. Such piecemeal revelations set our finite lives in an eternal chain of co-creation and these new leaps of discovery are compared to mystical experience</em>” (From a reviewer)</p><p>Each unique contributor served the collective and universal return to holism and unity. Thus the geniuses of the scientific journey, like the spiritual visionaries alongside, have threaded the rosary of science with the beads of inspiration, and through them returned Man to his spiritual nature and origin.</p><p><span style="line-height:1.6em;">The separation between experience and the rational intellect of science has, by modelling memory as theory, separated its understanding from the consciousness of all, and perceives mind and matter as separate, God and Man as distinct. This work is a dance towards their re-unification: Saints and scientists break the same bread.</span></p><p><span style="line-height:1.6em;">All of time and all the disciplines of science are needed for the evidence. Through swift (and sometimes sparring) Cantos of dialogue between Reason and Soul, Philippa Rees takes the reader on a monumental journey through the history of everything – with the evolution of man as one side of the coin and involution the other. The poetic narrative is augmented by learned and extensive footnotes offering background knowledge which in themselves are fascinating. In effect there are two books, offering a right and left brain approach. The twin spirals of a DNA shaped book intertwine external and internal and find, between them, one journey, Man’s recovery of Himself., and (hopefully) the Creation’s recovery of a nobler Man.</span></p><p><span style="line-height:1.6em;">From the same review “</span><em style="line-height:1.6em;">The reader who finishes the book will not be the same as the one who began it. New ideas will expand the mind but more profoundly, the deep, moving power of the verse will affect the heart.</em></p><p><em>(Marianne Rankin: Director of Communications, Alister Hardy Trust)</em></p><p> </p>
<span class="postbody">Fantasy is deftly combined with realism in this tale of two children, Emmelisa and Dell Planemaker. Science and metaphysics blend together as Dell and Emmelisa deal with troubles ranging from the tragic loss of their father to the agony of coping with school bullies. They begin to find solutions to these real problems when they happen upon their father’s old computer, and, with the help of their mysterious family cat, Cosmos, find themselves magically transported into the computer’s inner workings. They have entered a magical city where the buildings have names like the Central Processing Unit and the Read Only Memory building, where they and their readers incidentally learn the various parts of an actual computer and how the interconnected parts work to make the computer function. They are guided by a strange-looking individual named A. Leon Spaceman, and meet several of his companions. Eventually, they embark on a journey into space and a quest for their father’s “trail of light.”<br /><br /><em>Mr. Planemaker’s Flying Machine</em> by Shelagh Watkins is available through amazon.com and amazon.co.uk. Watkins’s extensive knowledge regarding computer technology and the science of space travel combine with her imaginative story-telling skill as she weaves the children’s adventures with a fascinating primer where young people can learn about science as they get caught up in the travels of Dell and Emmelisa.<br /><br />The metaphysical element is explored through the dreams of Mr. Planemaker and his children, and it is often difficult to tell where that element ends and the scientific one begins. The sometimes harsh realities of the children’s lives are tempered by the thoughtful manner in which their story is told, as well as through the solutions they find on their quest. The action of the story holds up through the book’s very last pages and its surprising ending. While the book was written for children, adult readers will also find themselves caught up in its ageless story.</span><br /><br /><span class="postbody">Ann L Joiner<br />July 2009</span>