Colin Hodgson

Colony Colin Hodgson

A modern adventure/fairytale.  274 pages, approx 84000 words.

When God takes a fall, who's there to pick her up? Her one true-love, of course.

It's 1971 and fourteen year old Peter beats up the bullies, again. He's in big trouble, again. So his long-lost uncle takes Peter and his crippled eight year old sister away from their troubles in England to a new life on the mining colony of New Bury. But after only a few days they are overtaken by surreal events and find themselves alone on the colony. The miners and their uncle have gone home.

Colony tells a story of a world far apart from our Earth, a world which supplied the very beginnings of life from which our own teaming life forms have been created, and a world which momentarily offers respite to God the Creator. After a couple of hundred years of depression and absolute loneliness she turns to Peter to be her teacher, her love and her conscience, and what could be better to replenish God's waning love for her children than an innocent, but protective, teenage boy? And as God and her teacher adopt the orphaned New Bury monsters, Peter's role as an icon is established.

As the story progresses, you have to wonder who is pulling the strings, and who is being manipulated, and with God becoming increasingly isolated from her own conscience, things could become rather dangerous for the colony's own God, the decrepit and blown-out Edward. It is Peter, the adopted conscience, who must control the acts of God. It also falls upon the teenage lad to get his beloved back to her own domain, the Earth, which flows with the blood of her poor children in East Pakistan and Vietnam.

Colony takes a layman's look into mankind and his dominating strength. It reminds God of her children's make-up, and why they reign supreme above all other beings. She made them in her own image, but she begins to wonder, maybe she should have made them in Peter's.

Although not part of a series, the story of Colony is closely related to the stories told in Saint Ninah and in Satvinder's Story.