Paul Georgiou – författare

After the abrupt termination of the Fourth Beginning, Adam and Eve Smith reluctantly settle back into their old lives until, unexpectedly, Adam is recruited by the business consultancy firm Slievens as one of their chosen executives. David Minofel, a partner in Slievens, is Adam’s sponsor.  

On the evening Minofel visits the Smith's home in Harrow to offer Adam a job, a couple of burglars burst into the Smith's home, and beat up Adam and Eve.  Just as one of the burglars is about to rape Eve, Minfoel arrives for his appointment with Adam. When he rings the bell one of the burglars sends him away but, realising something is wrong, Minofel returns, bursting into the house and killing both burglars.

Adam and Eve are both inexpressibly grateful to Minofel who reveals that he spent years in the SAS and as a mercenary before joining Slievens.

Adam’s first appointment is in Geneva, as Marketing Director of ZeD, a major Swiss pharmaceutical company.  Adam's mentor in Geneva is the beautfiul and highly intelligent Miss Gorgeous Tomic, personal assistent to the MD of ZeD.  Adam quickly learns the Slievens philosophy. Define your goals, devise the most efficient way of achieving them, and act, uninhibited by any scruples.

Meanwhile, at the Smith’s house in Harrow, the other questors, including Kit, the enigmatic blind man from the Fourth Beginning, have gathered. Kit is keen to reactivate the Fourth Beginning but Eve and the other questors are less enthusiastic, fearful of retribution from whatever aborted the Fourth Beginning. Kit, undeterred, visits Adam in Geneva but meets with a cool reception.

Adam feels challenged but fulfilled by the demands of his new job.  He enjoys the power he has to get things done and the extraordinary financial incentives he is given to succeed.  His main task is to oversee the successful introduction of ZeD's new drug, Angeloma.  All seems to be going well until a patient on the drug dies in a clinical trial in Basel.

Adam quickly discovers that the application of Slievens modus operandi involves him in bribery, blackmail and, finally, murder.

While Adam is in Geneva, Eve discovers she is pregnant. She misses Adam and becomes increasingly concerned that his work for ZeD is taking him over.  As the weeks pass, their relationship deteriorates until she confides in Kit that she thinks she has lost Adam and that their marriage may be over.

Although Adam does not fully understand Slievens objectives, he is a tremendous success in Geneva.  His career, guided by Slievens, seems assured and his financial future secure. Indeed the prospect of real wealth beckons.  Perhaps even more importantly, Adam feels he has found a kind of truth, not the abstract truth he had sought in the Fourth Beginning but a practical, pragmatic truth about the nature of man - and his own true nature.

Adam has no idea that Slievens and David Minofel are working for the Praesidium, a secret organisation that, for thousands of years, has been guiding man and directing history. The goal of the Praesidium is to enable man to be himself and to fulfil himself.  To this end, the monitaurs, agents of the Praesidium, promote depravity, extremism, corruption, obfuscation and negativity.

Minofel is grooming Adam.  He knows Adam set out on a quest to find the truth.  Minofel is going to provide him with a different kind of truth, one which will satisfy him and ensure that he and Eve are never again tempted to set out with the Storyteller on another quest.

Adam returns from Geneva to England where Slievens Consultancy provides him with a luxury apartment in the Praesidium’s PCC (parallel coincident construct), set over Westminster.

For thousands of years, the Praesidium has secretly controlled the affairs of men. The Praesidium’s mission statement is benign enough - to enable man to be what he truly is; the subtext is that they oppose any effort by man to evolve or improve. John Noble, the Praesidium chairman, explains that the Praesidium directs mankind through the agency of the Monitaurs. The Monitaurs, evil entities capable of adopting human form, promote depravity, extremism, corruption, obfuscation and negativity. Adam is sent on excursions with each of the monitaurs to visit recent events that illustrate man’s true nature.

David Minofel, Adam’s mentor, is working for the Praesidium. Minofel’s brief is to ensure the questors can never again attempt to activate a beginning. To achieve this end, David Minofel sets about systematically deconstructing Adam’s moral sense. While fulfilling his brief, Minofel becomes aware that Kit, the blind man, could be an emergent, one of those rare individuals who can move man forward in the evolutionary process. The Praesidium fears emergents more than anything else so Minofel is commissioned to eradicate the blind man. Kit is lured to the Westminster PCC.

Eve and the other questors gather at the Smith’s home in Harrow. With the help of the Smith’s mentally-enhanced dog Luke, they seek the help of their old friend Prometheus. He sends them his daughter, Aletheia, the goddess of truth.

Aletheia accompanies Eve and the other questors to the Westminster PCC. When they arrive, they find themselves in the middle of an unsuccessful boardroom coup and the subsequent chaos caused by the murder of the chairman, John Noble, both of which are the work of the sadistic deputy chairman of the Praesidium, Simon Goodfellow.

On three occasions Eve warns Adam that the Praesidium is destroying his ability to empathise with others, that they are stripping him of his humanity. Adam can’t see it.

Kit is falsely blamed for John Noble’s murder. Adam, now promised a place on the Praesidium board, is tasked with prosecuting the defendant for capital murder in the Praesidium court. Minofel is confident that, if he can persuade Adam to prosecute his friend successfully, while knowing he is innocent, Adam’s corruption will be complete.

Minofel and Simon Goodfellow have reckoned without Aletheia. Aletheia defends Kit in the court and then demonstrates the power of the truth when represented by a goddess, skilled in swordsmanship. Eventually, Adam sides with Kit; Kit escapes execution. Aletheia uses the evil in Simon Goodfellow himself to punish him in a fittingly agonising manner. She then takes control of the Praesidium’s power source and destroys the Westminster PCC.

But for Eve, soon to give birth to her second daughter, and for Adam, the quest for the truth continues.

The author takes on the toughest questions about the nature of existence::

and, on the basis of fact and through the application of reason, he ruthlessly dissects each issue to provide the best available answers. 

He invites the reader to join him on a journey. What do you need? An open mind. A willingness to accept conclusions if they are clearly based on facts and reason, even if the conclusions are counter-intuitive.

He promises there will be nothing complicated as you move forward. It's a journey anyone can take. Only those whose minds are closed will fall by the wayside.

Anyone who is hoping they will find absolute truth, whatever that means, will be disappointed. As you progress, the author concedes, you will have to make compromises at every stage. But the journey is still worthwhile because, at the end, although you won't have absolute truth, you will have come as close to it as is possible. 

And you will have avoided the irrational excesses of the extremists on either side of the existential debate.

The author gives this warning. You will be asked to rethink many of the certainties which you take for granted and believe are true – because they are not true. The material world is not what you think it is. Space and time are not what you think they are. Simplistic answers to existential questions do not survive even cursory scrutiny of the facts. With our current state of scientific knowledge, he sets out to give an accurate description of reality which he summarises in the following terms: "We live in a largely immaterial universe of powerful and invisible forces, governed by intellectually comprehensible rules." He then goes on to consider the nature of the rules and how man, 'half angel and half beast', fits into this world and deals with what he describes as our 'appalling and ridiculous predicament'..

After all the analysis, the author identifies a series of existential questions which monotheists tend to fudge or ignore:

and then, breaking his rules about confining himself to fact and reason, he offers a simple but  paradoxical solution to all these questions. 

At the end, as promised, he offers God for the curious unbeliever.

This book is very likely to change the way you see the world and your place in it. 

Adventures in Numberland is a fairy story about numbers in life and in business. The target audience is adult but will work for older children as an introduction to business and the importance of numeracy

The hero is Piff, the wood-cutters daughter, a beautiful , strong-minded young girl who is thrown out of her home by her fat and lazy step-mother.  Alone in the forest, Piff meets the fairy, Numberlina, who decides to help Piff by showing her how useful numbers are and how powerful they can be. In return Numberlina wants a share of the profits and help in dealing with the Anathemath, an evil and confusing spirit, shrouded in a noxious green cloud.

Piff develops the wood-cutting business successfully, moving into furniture manufacturing and finally ship building.  In the process, she leans how useful all the numbers (including pi, phi and e) can be. She attracts the unwelcome attention of Prince Baltigral who owns almost everything in Numberland. Baltigral is a greedy prince who has enlisted the help of the Anathemath, to mislead, suppress and exploit the population of Numberland.

In the course of her commercial career, Piff learns that mathematics has many practical uses - e.g. for making perfect right angles in the design of furniture, for measuring distances, for designing buildings and for calculating interest.

In the end, there is a final cataclysmic political and numerical struggle between Piff supported by Numberlina on one side and Prince Baltigral aided by the Anathemath on the other. 

Following the death of their daughter Bella in a freak accident, Adam and Eve Smith are given the opportunity by the Storyteller to seek answers to some fundamental existential questions.   Despite the risks and dangers, Adam and Eve, together with their unbelievably intelligent dog, Luke, decide to set out on a journey with the Storyteller in the Storyteller’s yellow camper van.

Adam and Eve, joined, after a chance meeting at Fleet services on the M3, by the insatiably curious Rambler and his mentally challenged nephew Numpty, soon find their search is to be impeded by Grimrose, a shapeshifter, and his master, the Breaker, Nick Peters, who tells the questors they are wasting their time.

The questors first excursion is to the Garden of Eden, near Hook off the A31, where they are granted an audience with God.  Things do not go well. Eve alienates God who decides to impose a terrible punishment on the questors, a punishment from which they are saved only by the intervention of a blind traveller, Kit, whom God wrongly believes is his long lost son.  While in Eden, the questors visit one of Eden’s industrial estates where they meet Rodney and Derek, two angels who constitute God’s R and D department.  Rodney and Derek fill the questors in on how the universe and humanity was created.

On leaving Eden, the questors travel in the camper van, equipped with a paradox device and an exponential drive, to Mount Strobilos in the Caucasus of some thousands of years ago, where they are hospitably entertained by the titan Prometheus who gives them his version of the birth and destiny of man.  While there, Nick Peters makes a determined effort to persuade the questors to abandon their quest.   When Adam and Eve reject his advice, he warns them he will destroy them.

The Storyteller now conducts the questors on three excursions to witness three great beginnings: the creation of the universe; the birth of life; and the emergence of human consciousness.  These extraordinary experiences challenge Adam and Eve to reframe their questions and re-evaluate their quest.  Throughout these excursions, uncle Rambler displays his not always relevant erudition and nephew Numpty pursues his almost always irrelevant enquiries.

When the questors return from their excursions, they are seized by the Breakers.  Eve is put under house arrest at Poulner Hill where the master Dawk, Despiro Nihilopificus, attempts to deconstruct her mind; Adam is incarcerated at Breaker head office where he is put through an ordeal in hell, a great underground construct beneath the Breaker offices.

The Breakers are fearful Adam and Eve could trigger the Fourth Beginning and they, with the help of their Dawks (deconstruction applied with kindness), will do anything to prevent it.  But they reckon without Adam and Eve’s qualities and strength of character - and the powers of the enigmatic blind man, Kit.

Having escaped the clutches of the Westminster Praesidium, Adam and Eve Smith have settled back in their home in Harrow, hoping their life will return to normality.  It is not to be so.

Roland Samiat, the CEO of the Slievins Consultancy, is outraged.  The Smiths, with the help of their friends and the goddess of truth, Aletheia, the daughter of Prometheus, have managed to damage the infrastructure of the Praesidium, one of Slievins most valued clients – and this despite the best efforts of Roland’s deputy, David Minofel.  Roland is determined to destroy Adam and Eve, in revenge for the havoc they have caused and as a way of putting an end, once and for all, to any hope they may still harbour of initiating a Fourth Beginning.

Both Adam and Eve are caught in a Slievins-organised terrorist outrage, perpetrated in Covent Garden. Although both survive the blast, Slievens succeeds in convincing each of them that the other is dead.  Eve ends up in the tender care of Roland Samiat, befriended by two Slievins’ staffers, the handsome Lister Bavad and the delectable Enid Mavlow.  Adam, under investigation by HMRC for tax evasion and by the Swiss police for the murder of Guy McFall, a former colleague at pharmaceutical company ZeD, is forced to go on the run.

Confident that he has set in motion a plan that will finally break the relationship between Adam and Eve and eliminate any danger of a Fourth Beginning,  Roland is able to concentrate on a major Slievins’ initiative that he believes will compel man to face the truth about his nature and will enable mankind at last to fulfil its true potential.

This initiative is Project 75241, a cull of three quarters of mankind (approximately six billion people), leaving 24% of the more intelligent of the species to service the one percent elite (essentially Slievins’ client base).  Samiat sees the acceptance by the establishment that a cull is the only solution to the problems humanity faces as a true coming of age for mankind. It will prove that Prometheus’ deeply-rooted faith in the benign potential of man has always been totally and grotesquely misplaced.

Although all the cards seem to be in Samiat’s hands, he has, at least to some extent, miscalculated.  First, Adam’s experience on the run is giving him new insights into life and challenging him to review what he has learned in his quest  for truth. Secondly, while Roland has a grudging respect for Aletheia, the daughter of Prometheus, he still underestimates the strength that goddess and the blind man Kit, working together, can deploy against him.  Thirdly, he finds it hard to grasp the nature of the love between Adam and Eve, which remains a powerful force despite their belief that their partner is dead.

Samiat also has to deal with the machinations of David Minofel and other senior  members of the Slievins organisation who, when not fornicating, spend much of their time conspiring to kill him or each other.

This tale comes to a climax in Ubar, the city under the sand, in the desert of southern Arabia, where Slievins has installed its new headquarters. It is from there that the Cull is to be initiated; and it is there that the final confrontation between Roland Samiat, the CEO of Slievens, and Kit, the blind man and suspected emergent, takes place.

 Man is a meaning-seeking creature. We have an undeniable need to ask how and why. We look for answers to ‘how?’ in science and mathematics. For answers to ‘why?’ questions, we have to search in our experience of life and to explore the world of ideas, those of others and our own.

That’s when words and ideas, suitably arranged, come together in a happy confluence of sound and meaning, signifying something worthwhile. The poems in this book are written in various forms and styles. Some rhyme; some don’t. The meaning of some is perfectly straightforward; others are multi-layered.  In some of the poems, the poet is seeking to meet one of poetry’s familiar objectives, of conveying “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed”. But he clearly hopes that some of his readers will be interested in poems that explore ideas that are less commonly thought. Some of the poems deal with contentious issues; some contain sexually explicit lines and provocative thoughts. As he says in his Introduction: "If I offend anyone, I apologise. But everyone should have the right to say what they think, just as everyone has the right to disagree or criticise." 

The collection is divided into eleven sections: Love;  Anger, Madness & Despair; Conflict & War; Danger & Fear;  God;  Hope; Life; Occasional Poems; Stories;  Lyrics;  Stuff & Nonsense.