Sadly he died on the day before he was due to collect copies of his book The Long-Sighted People from the printers (it is not due for publication until 15 February next year). 'I had naively assumed that the eponymous, presbyopic people of the title would be Chinese but, though they boast Sino-characteristics, they live in a remote future: “yuman” survivors of — or mutations from a third global catastrophe rendered inevitable by the idiocies of the current edition of the anthropoid race, Homo desipiens (Stupid Man).
The book is addressed to his granddaughter, for whom the environmental message is doom-laden: “In your lifetime or that of your children, there will be nothing to eat but one another. From which predicament nuclear, chemical or bacterial warfare would come as a happy release. Just as the bacteria in my gut (and yours) without which we cannot digest our food, will all die when we die; but if they should perish first we cannot long outlive them; so humans will not long outlive those other species which form part of our, and one another's food chain, nor the wild forests which we are busily destroying for ephemeral profit."
I find it difficult to work up great indignation about ecology and food chains, vaguely accepting a nature red in tooth and claw and natural selection. Nature is more resilient than the doomsters would have us believe.
But Barnett preferred the apocalyptic view. Perhaps his occasional sourness could be traced to a resentment that his (most happy) marriage to a Chinese had blocked his promotion. Anyway, he nursed an intense hatred of homosexuality and believed that AIDS was a divine (or Nature's) deserved punishment on societies which tolerated, even glamourised, deviants. Despite this, Barnett protests he is an optimist. But he tells his grandchild: "Some of your descendants (which means mine too) may be among the remnant [of the third catastrophe] but I bet they'll wish they had died with us. I'm that kind of optimist, you see.”
As an author, Barnett had a lot of fun creating a Clockwork Orange-type lingo for his yumans, revealing a surprising element of anti-establishment thinking for a former Hongkong bureaucrat.
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