Whose pen am I holding?

It was William Gibson.
 
Not for the first time, a row had erupted over dinner at number eight, ashgrove. Mr Reginald Cirencester had been toying with his model ships in his office when he was disturbed by a loud roaring from his nephew Tommy's room.

"Third time today! he shouted across the table. "If you can't control that lion, it'll have to go!"

Tommy tried, yet again, to defend the overgrown house cat.

"She's hungry," he said, "All she gets to eat are kibbles and lucky charms. If we could just let her out to hunt..."

"Do I look stupid?" snarled Uncle Reggie, a piece of sausage suspended in his bushy beard. "I know what'll happen if that lion's let out."

He exchanged dark looks with his wife, Marigold.

Tommy tried to argue back but his words were drowned by a long, loud fart from the Cirencester's son, Wallsall.

"I want more brussell sprouts."

"There's more in the oven, tiddlypoos," said Aunt Marigold, turning misty eyes on her massive son. "We must feed you up while we've got the chance... I don't like the sounds you make on that school food..."
 
If you really want to get the JKR I would have had more superfluous adverbs after every speech verb

"Third time today! he shouted angrily across the table.

"She's hungry," he said, defensively

"Do I look stupid?" snarled Uncle Reggie brooking-no-disputedly

She really is a bugger for giving insultingly simplistic over-explicit stage directions to her puppets. Just in case the target audience don't get it from what the characters are actually saying.

(I am not a fan.)
 
Douglas remembered, before, the lurid rush of life. A frenetic existence, moving from one place to the next without the slightest idea of why you were doing it, only knowing that standing still meant you were missing out. And there was so much to miss out on! New films, massive faces cast like shadows on the silkscreen. New ideas, everything old must go! New places to explore. Thunderous rockets sent daily sprawling into an open sky, reaching for whatever heights had not yet been aspired to.

There was also the regular keening of air raid sirens that stirred blood to boiling with anger and fear. The daily affirmations of please not me, not now. The sharp rain of metal shrapnel falling over vast deserts that used to be cities.

What do you have left, when everyone else is gone?

You have the sunset, Douglas thought. Sun glowing a lion’s mane of red and orange and yellow as it dips beneath the horizon. And, as the light fades, you have firefly stars shining vanilla white in the wide Illinois sky.
 
Ray Bradbury? (too many direct references, -- or were they false flags?) :unsure:
 
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Astro Pen said:
Ray Bradbury? (too many direct references, -- or were they false flags?) :unsure:
Click to expand...
Oh no, those were there to make sure people could get it. It is my attempt to channel Bradbury.
 
We was just having a lark about. Giving Raggety the needle 'cos word was he'd gone soft on a pretty and she had a squealer on the way.

The barman complained about the rowdy so we gave him a stiff kicking and trashed the place to put his thinking straight.
Once the window was out a van load of tidy turned up in short order. Skrote passed us 20mg of bone each to harden us up for the fight. After a couple of minutes blue goes purple. Their truncheons right up, for posterity.

We hit the street. Outside they had left their van open, discotheque light still on.
To emphasise who's on top here to the pavement proles, assembled with their cod fishy droolers open, I threw Skrote the matches.
 
Astro Pen said:
We was just having a lark about. Giving Raggety the needle 'cos word was he'd gone soft on a pretty and she had a squealer on the way.

The barman complained about the rowdy so we gave him a stiff kicking and trashed the place to put his thinking straight.
Once the window was out a van load of tidy turned up in short order. Skrote passed us 20mg of bone each to harden us up for the fight. After a couple of minutes blue goes purple. Their truncheons right up, for posterity.

We hit the street. Outside they had left their van open, discotheque light still on.
To emphasise who's on top here to the pavement proles, assembled with their cod fishy droolers open, I threw Skrote the matches.
Click to expand...
Bolshy good it is too, my droog?

Burgess??
 
He was awake. His name was part of him just as his legs and arms were but not of a physical nature that he could touch or feel but it was a part of him. He turned into an alcove in the corridor. No spy beams could see him here. It was one of the few places in the palace that was sheilded from them. He knew all the secret places in the palace. He waited, then sure that he was not being physically followed by any of the agents of any of the many factions opposed to his scheme of action he quickly donned a lifelike flesh mask. The mask was a perfect replica of his own face. No one seeing it would be able to tell that he was wearing it unless they got close and even then no one would suspect him of disguising himself as himself. He touched a hidden button and a secret panel slid. He entered the secret tunnel behind the secret panel that had opened at his touch and worked his way through it in darkness. Halfway down the secret tunnel he stopped and touched another secret button and another secret door opened onto another even more secret tunnel than the one he was already in. He took off the lifemask and put on another and stepped through a door into a woman's room. The woman was there doing a woman's thing as women do. There was nothing false about her. Was she wearing a fleshmask too? He did not know. His brain paused. Had he come through the right secret tunnel? Had he closed the secret tunnel door behind him or had he left it open? The woman was unaware of his presence. There was a noise. He woke up chained to a dungeon wall on a space ship heading for Venus. He recognised it instantly. If only he could remember his name...
 
More of the same:

Kroel prowled on and onward across the volcanic plain. The dead dark sky of night above, in front, to the left, and behind him was almost starless. To the right of him the sky was even more starless than the rest and tinged with a reddening glow of the approaching day. Kroel sensed the slow dawn. Gigantic, feline, and merciless his senses reached out. Across the desolate, rugged, barren, and not very inviting wasteland nothing stirred. His giant leonine, almost catlike, head scanned the horizon, eyes peered, nostrils scented, the slender tendril things that grew from his shoulder neck area undulated tautly as they probed. Probed with the strange Uff sense of his kind, for the food prey beast things that he had been following for so long. There were no food prey beast things. He had lost them. For a hundred days he had stalked the beasts so full of life giving Yum. He needed Yum. He was growing weak from lack of Yum. His senses had failed him. The Yum beasts were gone. When had he last had Yum? He could not remember. The memory was not there. In the last thousand years he had come across many of his own kind, weak and dying. Dying from lack of Yum and not remembering when they had last eaten. Pitiless and merciless he had ripped them apart and sucked the Yum essence from the marrows of their bones. He thrilled at the memory of the life-giving Yum surging through his body and roared loudly, quivering air molecules in all directions for a great distance. It was a roar of defiance and an outward expression of his inward will to live.​
Suddenly he froze into immobility and crouched in an alert hiding down posture. There was a light on the horizon that moved. Brilliantly the light came closer and was a ship that became a giant shining globe of silvery metal that was bigger than it looked and a bit pointed at one end. It hovered with an audible noise before settling slowly behind some jaggy pointy rocks that hid it from view. A ship! A ship from space full of Uff-sense blindingly brilliantly bright fulgent yum! And in handy, bipedal, self-delivering packages too.​

I really do love this guy's work. He is such a compulsively readable but bloody awful writer.
 
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