My Book of Revelations by Iain Hood #BookTour #BlogTour #Extract @renardpress

J-LBRBSBLOGS

Oct 1

Out Now from Renard Press

Book blurb

The countdown to the millennium has begun, and people are losing their heads. A so-called Y2K expert gives a presentation to Scotland's eccentric Tech Laird T.S. Mole's entourage in Edinburgh, and soon long hours, days, weeks and months fill with seemingly chaotic and frantic work on the 'bug problem'. Soon enough it'll be just minutes and seconds to go to midnight. Is the world about to end, or will everyone just wake up the next day with the same old New Year's Day hangover?

A book about what we know and don't know, about how we communicate and fail to, My Book of Revelations moves from historical revelations to the personal, and climaxes in the bang and flare of fireworks, exploding myths and offering a glimpse of a scandal that will rock Scotland into the twenty-first century. As embers fall silently to earth, all that is left to say is: Are we working in the early days of a better nation?

BlogTour

Many thanks to Renard Press for an invitation to join the BlogTour for My Book of Revelations by Iain Hood. Enjoyed his previous books? You're going to love this one. New to Iain's writing? Prepare to be blown away!

Introduction

It's my turn on this mind boggling, mind blowing BlogTour and I am delighted to bring you an extract from My Book of Revelations by Iain Hood published by Renard Press.

Extract from My Book of Revelations by Iain Hood

15 decades to go

By the year 1850, developments in travel and communication made apparent that local time usage, by which all geographical points defined noon as the time at which the sun reached its highest point overhead, could no longer be sustained. Up until about then, no one moved fast enough nor far enough for time differences to matter. But, for example, the first temporary train terminus of the Great Western Railway had been opened at Paddington in 1838, and since 1840 GWR had used portable precision time pieces, chronometers, set to Greenwich Mean Time, to help with the running of their trains, expected periods of time for the train to travel east or west counted with a single point of reference and therefore the times at which the train would reach intermediate stations and a final terminus. By 1847 most railway companies in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland – we'll use the terms of the time – were using GMT as the time throughout the nation for their own purposes and on their timetables. Yet local time still prevailed in many people's minds over the curious London-centric imposition of GMT, what people who cared to be bothered by it called 'railway time'. Similarly, the development of telegraphy meant that, by 1852, the Post Office could transmit the time from the Observatory at Greenwich, and soon most if not all public clocks, or noting of the time
via other public means, such as church bells, were using GMT, though often with secondary means of noting the local and therefore 'real' time. Some realised it could only be a matter of time before the whole world would require such standardised time. And it was a whole new world. Momentous events were taking place in all areas of life. For example, in 1859, Darwin finally published… Yes, OK, we all know that side of things.
(It's possible you're pushing it.)

In 1868, New Zealand, at the time still governed as a colony, even though the Constitution Act of 1852 had established a fairly independent New Zealand parliament, adopted a standardised time of GMT+11.30. By 1880 the bulk of the British Isles were using GMT rather than local times, spreading out to the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey, and, finally, Ireland, which in 1880 set Dublin Mean Time, measured at the Dunsink Observatory as GMT minus 25 minutes and 21 seconds. In 1916, GMT superseded Dublin Mean Time. The first inklings of time zones were being established.

During these same years a number of schemes for a worldwide system of time zones were proposed. The foremost of these was developed by the Italian mathematician Quirico Filopanti in the 1850s, whose system went unrecognised and was never adopted, and then in 1876 by Kirkcaldy-born Scots-Canadian Sir Sandford Fleming, who was instrumental in the invention of twenty-four one-hour time zones, and the setting of Greenwich as the prime meridian – the zero degree by which each part of the earth relates longitudinally by degrees. Not to say he was alone in this endeavour, and indeed there were a number of learned committees and political appointees who took a more or less useful part in these developments. In one sense, Fleming might be considered one of the great obliterators of time: he banished all the other GMT+ and GMT-s of interim minutes – the GMT-s of 5.45, 1.23, 9.58 and the GMT+s of 7.38, 3.46, 6.21 – leaving only 1, 2, 3, et cetera.

It was this eminent Victorian, Sir Sandford Fleming FRSC KCMG, who, travelling in Ireland in 1876, missed a train in Dublin one day, due to an error on the timetable between a.m. and p.m. that obviously irritated the illustrious gentleman greatly. The already reputed 'most distinguished Canadian of his age' was then forced to spend a night at the train station. He arrived with twenty minutes to spare for the scheduled 5:35 p.m. train. Unfortunately the train had arrived on schedule too, at 5:35 a.m., the p.m. printed in the timetable being the offending error. As he was left waiting for the next available train, Fleming conceived of a simpler world with a simpler clock, one that would consider all twenty-four hours of the day without the fraught-with-risk possibilities of double-counting the hours in the day. As he thought it through it became clearer and clearer to him that it was only stupidity that kept us from counting past the number twelve in this particular instance. In time, he would go on to not only proposing a twenty-four clock, but also a twenty-four hour terrestrial time that would map over the earth in twenty-four hour intervals, beginning with a prime meridian, proceeding by fifteen longitude degrees around the globe, and define the hour in these geographical locales relative to… oh, let's say… the time at the zero hour at Greenwich.

(Well, there you go – a ripple of applause and laughter, and in a job-interview presentation, of all things.)
Thanks.

My thoughts

With his original style of writing Iain Hood takes the reader into the turn-of-the-2000s Edinburgh and a take on the Y2K mania that will I'm sure be equally hilarious as it is, as you can see from this excerpt, impressive and striking.

Information

Publisher: Renard Press (27 September 2023)

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Author

Portrait by Jeremy Andrews

Iain Hood was born in Glasgow and grew up in the seaside town of Ayr. He attended the University of Glasgow and Jordanhill College, and later worked in education in Glasgow and the west country. He attended the University of Manchester after moving to Cambridge, where he continues to live with his wife and daughter. His first novel, This Good Book, was published in 2021.

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Books

This Good Book, was published in 2021, followed by Every Trick in the Book in 2022.