Vanguard was published in Interzone 142 in April 1999. Click here for a PDF or here for html.

This began as an idea for a collage. When I was young, in the 1960s, my father was an airline pilot, Thunderbirds and Lost in Space were on the telly and men were flying Geminis and Voskhods into orbit. My brother Anthony and I, inspired by the zeitgeist, made our own spaceship controls out of paper and toothpaste tube tops and flew to the moon with a rabbit and a penguin long before Apollo and Gromit. In 1968 my father converted to the Boeing 707 and in the house we had the complete flight deck layout available full-size on paper (though that was considered cheating).

This QT Panorama of a 707 flight deck shows that there's a lot of stuff to operate, but one day it struck me that we all have to deal with a lot of controls in the ordinary course of life, only they're scattered about the place. Car, TV, computers, phones, stereos, radios, tape decks, cameras, projectors, VCRs, digiboxes, heating systems, remotes, clocks, thermometers, gas meters, scanners, faxes, photocopiers, plugs, cookers, iPods, washing machines, lights and so on variously have switches, buttons, dials, screens and mysterious functions. Put together they'd make a fine flight deck: you could sit in one place and control everything. I thought of doing a collage or, better still, a physical sculpture of real objects formed into a kind of cockpit nest for living.

But instead of a collage and partly inspired by a JG Ballard story of a man disengaging from the world ("The Overloaded Man"), I wrote this story of someone dealing - after a fashion -with losing control of his life.

The only review I saw of it was in Tangent Online and it was both a bit sniffy and mildly incorrect: "A visit to an aerospace museum triggers in Henry a desire to go back to the glory days of early aviation" is not quite what I had intended to get across. Still, it admits there is "competent writing".

Illustrations: A quick collage at the top, with TV, washing machine control, electricty meter, keyboard &c incorporated. A rabbit and a penguin on their way to the moon in 1967, and my father in a 707 on 5th January 1972, Kuwait Airport.