The Parasite

A guest post from a friend & illustrator Ross Howell:

Arthur C. Clarke was an excellent Science Fiction writer, one of the best. He wrote excellent stories from great tracts to relatively short ones such as  "The Parasite". If you've not read any of his stories I would strongly recommend them, they are very imaginative and often have a somewhat dark twist at the end. 

One of the best ways a story can be brought to life is through subtle illustrations that bring the words to the fore.

I will from time to time pop up the odd illustration either alongside Cora's work or of my own. Tune in any time you like and have a peruse!

Below is an extract from "The Parasite" to give you a feel for what I am proposing:

"'Omega doesn't belong to our age: he's somewhere in the future, immensely far ahead of us. For a while I thought he must be one of the last men - that's why I gave him his name. But now I'm not sure; perhaps he belongs to and age when there are a myriad different races of men, scattered all over the universe - some still ascending, others sinking into decay. His people, wherever and whenever they may be, have reached the heights and fallen from them into depths the beasts can never know. There's a sense of evil about him, Jack - the real evil that most of us never meet in all our lives. Yet sometimes I feel almost sorry for him, because I know what has made him the thing he is.

'Have you ever wondered, Jack, what the human race will do when science has discovered everything, when there are no more worlds to be explored, when all the stars have given up their secrets? Omega is one of the answers. I hope he's not the only one, for if so everything we've striven for is in vain. I hope that he and his race are an isolated cancer in a still healthy universe, but I can never be sure.

'They have pampered their bodies until they are useless, and too late they have discovered their mistake. Perhaps they have thought, as some men have thought, that they could live by intellect alone. And perhaps they are immortal, and that must be their real damnation. Through the ages their minds have been corroding in their feeble bodies, seeking some release from their intolerable boredom. They have found it at last in the only way they can, by sending back their minds to an earlier, more virile age, and becoming parasites on the emotions of others."