Appendix Removed

Author’s note

You have before you the notes and references which I compiled for the first edition publication of My Life in Hyperspace, written by my close friend and colleague, Doctor Howard James Blitz.

Howard’s name was synonymous with controversy throughout his professional life. His studies, theories and practices were ceaselessly lambasted in scientific and sociological journals world-wide. While his love of the celebrity lifestyle and the many - often petty - scandals that dogged his personal life made him the gossip columnists’ darling. Yet his cult status as a self-styled ‘Guardian of the Ultrazone’ ensured his position at the cutting edge of the socio-scientific left field. Equally, his romantic notion of ‘adventuring in hyperspace’ brought the concept of our existence in an omni-dimensional space-time continuum to the popular masses.

Loved and hated in equal measure - it was impossible to have no opinion about the life and work of Howard J Blitz. This much was evident in the aftermath of his terrible and sudden death. It’s my personal feeling that last summer; a horribly tragic event robbed the world of a talented free-thinker of awesome intellect and imagination. On the other hand, I’m sure many readers will recall that tabloids and mainstream news networks were far less kind. Indeed, one British newspaper was famously venomous, devoting its whole front page to Howard’s death, showing a photograph of his wrecked light aeroplane beneath a half-page tall headline that simply read, “GOOD!”

To this day, many questions about Howard’s death remain unanswered. Personally, I have grown to accept the official story - that his Cessna struck a flock of migrating Canada geese over the Salisbury Plain military testing range. It helps me to sleep at night, especially now that the Home Office have stopped tapping my telephone. However, I don’t doubt that the many inconsistencies in the circumstances of the accident will keep conspiracy theorists busy for many years to come. Just last week I received an e-mail from an anonymous source who claimed that Howard was alive and well, and campaigning against nuclear testing in French Polynesia in the company of Elvis Presley. Sadly, this can’t possibly be true - I know for a fact that Elvis is held in cryogenic storage in a bunker below the CIA’s headquarters at Langley, Virginia.

Of one thing, I am certain: Unknown forces with a sinister agenda took advantage of Howard’s death to deprive the world of his finest work to date. Howard’s distrust of unsecured e-mail led him to insist upon delivering the final manuscript for My Life in Hyperspace to his agent in Oxford by hand. This is exactly what he had been doing at the time of his death. Neither paper nor electronic copies of the manuscript were recovered from the wreckage, both being presumed destroyed by fire. In the days following the accident, Howard’s home in Clifton, a suburb of Bristol, was burgled. His computers were among the items stolen, and much of his scientific paraphernalia was vandalised. At the time, his friends and family simply regarded this as a sad coincidence, adding insult to their injury. But my suspicions became aroused a week later when my own lap-top computer was stolen from my car. These thefts combined to ensure that no further copies of the manuscript were available for publication.*

I’ve heard a rumour that shortly before his death, Howard enlisted the help of an internationally renowned computer hacker known only as Eagle-Eye, to encode the manuscript into a semi-intelligent digital virus that is now disseminating itself throughout the world wide web. I had dismissed this as the idle speculation of fantasists until February of this year, when an Intel Corporation AI Psychiatrist discovered two pages from chapter six lurking in the start-up subroutines of a Yokohama accountancy firm. Maybe there is hope for My Life in Hyperspace after all.

In the meantime, please regard this appendix as my tribute to the work of a great and fondly remembered man.

William PJ Roberts
Varanassi Heights Holiday Inn
July 2008

* * *

1. (p.14) Spring 1992 and the birth of Britpop.
2. (p.15) A shamanic ‘dwell point’ - the moment of terminal velocity within the space-time continuum.
3. (p.29) Superficially, it all seemed to start with a bet made in a trendy Soho media bar. However, much of that story is probably apocryphal. See the author’s introduction (pp.9-11) for a fuller account of My Life in Hyperspace’s origins.
4. (p.31) Eden.
5. (p.39) £.s.d., (Librae, Solidae, Denarii.) Here used in a colloquial sense.
6. (p.40) Elsewhere, the author has described human consciousness as being “like a squatter, occupying only a small corner of the basement in a magnificent palace.” (See Tales of Doctor Hoffmann, by Howard J Blitz. An article in American Scientist, January 1991.)
7. (p.45) An obscure reference to the Warner Bros. cartoon character, Speedy Gonzales.
8. (p.45) Moonrocks.
9. (p.50) a.k.a. Mister Manitobia, who famously coined the expression “Financial Terrorism”, following the innovative use of index-linked nuclear weapons upon the Hang Seng stock exchange in 1999.
10. (p.54) A soldier specially trained in sabotage and demolition.
11. (p.59) Literally, “Now is the place.”
12. (p.59) South Mimms Services, at the junction between the A1(M) and the M25 London Orbital Motorway.
13. (p.60) As with other vehicles of this classic marque, the gear-shift involves moving down into first, then up and across the bare metal gate for into second. Initially, this caused Howard some confusion, though fortunately the 512TR is forgiving and powerful enough to pull away from standing in second effortlessly.
14. (p.61) Unusually, the car had been delivered in Verde scuro metallizato; metallic green. The name is actually derived from the fact that it’s twelve cylinder, 4943cc engine’s cylinder-head is painted red.
15. (p.64) The author is being (deliberately) vague on this point. My research indicates that it wasn’t just somewhere in Stamford, but in fact the private quarter of Burghley House. The Tudor mansion’s park is often used as a venue for horse-trials, craft fairs and other public events. It seems likely that the Blitz brothers believed that one more classic automobile would go unnoticed in such a locale. (See chapter 7, Hiding in Plain View.)
16. (p.67) i.e., written off. (re; Mutual and Friendly Motor Policies at Lloyd’s of London, claims dept.)
17. (p.68) Foreman, boss of the drilling team. Industry jargon.
18. (p.68) Core samples from a four thousand metre bore-hole. The missing 2m section was from the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary layer. Howard believed it could have provided vital evidence to support his controversial theory about the KT Mass Extinction of 65 million years ago.
19. (p.68) The earlier ugliness to which the author refers was local opposition to possible contamination from his quantum planar-field separation experiments.
20. (p.72) An enfant terrible of the mid-nineties British art renaissance, he is notoriously litigious and so cannot be named here.
21. (p.74) In July of that year, Howard conducted a lecture tour of institutes of higher education around the UK. It was here that he gained much of his notoriety with the tabloid press. Headlines such as Time-Travel Doc’s mass Acid Rally! adequately demonstrate popular feeling of the time.
22. (p.75) Text of a lecture at Nottingham Trent University, March 14th. The techniques to which the author refers are fairly self-explanatory.
23. (p.80) Caroline Armjourth-Fforbes’ career in music began at the age of fifteen, when she sang popular show-tunes with a couple of school-friends around the hotels and minor music venues of Blackpool and the Fylde coast in Lancashire. After about eighteen months of this surprisingly lucrative entertainment, the group disbanded due to scholastic pressure.
“The other members of the group wanted to go to university,” she explains.
It’s no co-incidence that about this time, she finally accepted a long-standing invitation to front a young guitar-based rock band that had been playing many of the same local venues under the name Metropolis Ten. This new act, with Armjourth-Fforbes at the mic and a slightly modified line-up of musicians, very quickly began to enjoy huge success on the North-west pub circuit under the new name, Crow and Alice.
“It was an obvious and very cynical attempt to introduce some glamour into the band,” bitterly observes sacked Metropolis Ten Bassist, Ollie Falconer.
Crow and Alice first came to the attention of the general public after appearing on the One FM In New Music We Trust Stage at that year’s Glastonbury Festival, performing their independently released single Get This!
With this exposure, and the reasonable chart success of their debut, they very quickly secured a deal with Warehouse Records of Manchester.
The band went on to enjoy nearly three years of success and prosperity, having no less than eight top-forty hits and releasing two very well received albums; Love Me, Love My Dog, and Eclectic Guitar.
It was during this period that Caroline Armjourth-Fforbes met Howard J Blitz.
24. (p.84) Lord Rennie Urquhart, self-styled post-millennial Free Love guru and Blitz’s unofficial biographer. It’s worth noting that this occasion was their only ever meeting.
25. (p.85) Assault.
26. (p.88) The arrangement to which the author refers was an out-of-court settlement of an undisclosed sum.
27. (p.90) i.e., commercially.
28. (p.104) An unknown American woman. This editor’s attempts to locate any information about the so-called Mrs.Eddison have proved fruitless. What relevance she has here, we cannot know.
29. (p.108) Mostly amateur soft-core pornography, distributed by e-mail viral marketing.
30. (p.112) The notorious Old Trafford Mass Hallucination.
31. (p.124) Owing to Howard’s limited Italian, his attempt to translate “Bugger Me!” as an exclamation of his surprise was, almost inevitably, mis-interpreted as an instruction, thus resulting in the unfortunate incident in the hotel toilets and his subsequent arrest.
32. (p.130) To everybody’s surprise at the time, Crow and Alice’s contract was not renewed. In retrospect, this was probably a good thing, considering warehouse’s subsequent collapse into bankruptcy. The band, about to embark upon a North American tour could have easily ended up facing massive debts of their own.
33. (p.133) Ritchie Waygang, Crow and Alice’s lead-guitarist and principle songwriter was the most notable absentee from their wedding. Indeed, there is some speculation over whether he was ever actually invited. He and Caroline had, after all, enjoyed a much publicised romance of their own.
34. (p.140) The Opera House Hotel, Buxton, Derbyshire.
35. (p.141) See n.25.
36. (p.146) Mostly brunettes.
37. (p.154) Interview with Russell Clerkin, Radio Station ZLD, Australian Broadcasting Commission, October 1998.
38. (p.156) Blitz’s discovery of Critical Thinking techniques, which he was keen to incorporate into his own philosophy.
39. (p.158) i.e., Formal Intrigue and Material Novelty.
40. (p.163) The belief that “impromptu, quickie sex,” keeps love alive.
41. (p.163) Symmetry, counting rituals and obsessive cleanliness. For a while, her condition remained manageable, thanks to Blitz's suggested regime of adapted Thought Field Therapy and pilates.
42. (p.170) Zoom, 1996, Dir.; Richard Waygang. Caroline’s presence at the London premier did nothing to heal growing speculation among the gossip columnists.
43. (p.172) Trial separation, reconciliation
44. (p.189) “Nothing has been proved.”
45. (p.190) i.e., you won’t see it.
46. (p.193) On this second occasion, the author’s disappearance wasn’t reported for a full eight weeks; “We’re starting to get a little worried,” explained Caroline in an interview to New Musical Express at the time, while publicising the re-formed Crow and Alice’s new album on Theatrical Records, Jesus’s Trousers.
47. (p.200) Credited for playing the harp and cow-bells under the pseudonym, Joseph Kaye.
48. (p.204) The title of this chapter, Where’s That Confounded Bridge? reflects the author’s frustration during this period at his constant failure to maintain a tangible access into hyperspace. However, it also refers to the successful e.p. of Led Zeppelin cover versions, Zep-esque, recorded by Crow and Alice around this time.
49. (p.204) To this day, I still have it stuck to my ‘fridge door - A picture postcard depicting the Boudnathe Stupa, Kathmandu. The message reads; Well, it’s pretty obvious where I am. Needed a break, bit cold tho’. Kat’s an excellent city - buskers and street hawkers everywhere you turn, plenty of pavement bars ideal for people watching (& v.def worth watching, too!) Fortuity done good this emergence ‘n’ no mistake! Don’t dip, dazzle! H.J.B.
50. (p.210) East Midlands Airport, and subsequently, Kandie’s Kitchen, Castle Donington, because the coffee was “strong and cheap.”
51. (p.229) sic, he means heuristic, adj. helping to discover or learn.
52. (p.236) On the jukebox, some wag selected Let’s Do The Timewarp Again! But that it were so simple! They’d obviously had very little understanding that, in purely psychotemporal terms this complex process required the projection of one’s perceived macro-environment one picopixel into the so-called fourth axis. (See chapter 8, How It’s Done.)
53. (p.237) Naked except for short socks and training shoes.
54. (p.239) And thus becoming a victim once again of his own paranoia of digital photography. Thankfully, two films were never developed. Pictures from the third, however, were controversially acquired by adult online magazine Celebrity Skin, November 2001.
55. (p.239) “Getting it right.”
56. (p.246) A second opinion.
57. (p.253) e.g., critical mass.
58. (p.270) Representation at any coroner’s inquest or fatal enquiry in respect of any death.
59. (p.274) Triangles.
60. (p.277) Thing/Gap/Thing.
61. (p.280) This extract taken from the text written on location at Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire. Filmed in B/W 16mm stock for the documentary, The Byronic Man, (March 2002, BBC TV in the East Midlands. Dirs.; Richard Waygang and Ellis Verve.) A minute of footage was also featured - differently fashioned - in the video promo to Waygang’s only solo release to date, Her Party Dress.
62. (p.281) The fire that in my bosom preys, probably a reference to his guilty and unrequited passion for the Greek boy Loukas, his page at Missolonghi. In this context, the author’s fire metaphor adopts a somewhat different meaning.
63. (p.286) Return Dynamics.
64. (p.289) (b.1959) The author of Umbrellaman, and highly regarded in the field of hyperspacial studies. Such was their friendship that he even refused to accept the reward.
65. (p.293) “Derivative of everything, with more than a passing nod to Ballard,” TLS, February 2006.
66. (pp298-314) It seem highly unlikely that this chapter was part of the author’s original conception. More probably, it is a modified version of a much earlier essay which was never published.

* Supplementary note.

Biographical records pertaining to the editor of the above notes indicate a history of near-psychotic episodes, manic depression and frequent retreats into worlds of personal fantasy. It seems likely that many of these blatantly transparent lies were concocted following the loss of the manuscript in order to avert any personal blame and avoid possible legal action from the publishers, who were unable to recover any of their advance payment from the estate of the author.

Julian RW Power.