It is now a year since Sanctioned was published.

This satire of a system that is clueless, callous, and out of control is changing the world. Obviously, millions of people are abandoning the old regimes and flooding to the side of reason and humanity.

Even as the tide of history changes around the rock of my tome, many readers will be unaware of the provenance of the cover art.

I took the design of official government documents as my template. The font, the cyan bar, the royal seal come directly from HMG. The cyan colour is reference to the similar cyan strip on the documents of the Department of Work and Pensions, on which the book’s Department of Aspirations is modelled. 

I was tempted to leave the royal seal visible, but had no idea of the consequences of this. Perhaps some readers, or the Queen herself, would mistake Sanctioned for an official government document. 

In the end I partially obscured the seal in case extradition extended to the part of the world in which I live, and led therefrom to a complicated fate by hanging, drawing and quartering. 

The blood spots were extracted at knife point from bureaucrats whom I hunted at night. Their deaths allowed me to decorate each copy individually with their vital fluids and screams. 

I believe the effect is quite striking. 

Sanctioned (by Chris Page, by the way, he mentions in an SEO-friendly aside) is still very much available from Psipook Press in paperback and Kindle from Amazon.