Through The Looking Glass

I'm sending this message to both the UK based AAA list and my own NZ AAA Aotearoa list.

Here in New Zealand it is already Sunday, April 23, 2000, the official end of the Five Year Plan of the AAA. The AAA List has therefore been full of closure statements from the various cells, with the notable exception of Mr Balli and his 333 Extension.

On December 4, 1999 the AAA Aotearoa held a Symposium here at Kitchener St called 'First (,) Into Space'. At the plenary session under the washing line it was decided that AAA Aotearoa would become an umbrella for AAA activity in Enzed and that we would fracture into individual cells for all other purposes.

Thus Baaary became Kitchener West AAA

Maaark became AAA Kitchener East

Saaam continued as Te Aro AAA

Millennium set up a company called Fireships :-)

and so on.

The consensus was also that we had hardly begun our efforts to get into space so are hardly going to pull up at the end of the so-called 'Five Year Plan'.

As outlined in 'Suspension in Reality 1', the tendency towards community based space travel that has come to be titled the AAA Aotearoa did not come into existence on April 23, 1995. Rather it is the continuation of an effort that goes back to my address to the 1990 McGillicuddy Serious Party Symposium in which I argued that the Great Leap Backwards was only possible on another planet and that a push for Mars be initiated immediately. The AAA title slipped into our consciousness in 1996 at a time when McGillicuddy was fracturing and was freely used by me in a McGSP context, even while our initial efforts to contact the AAA proper got nowhere for some two years. The AAA Aotearoa was formed by a meeting in Nelson at New Years 1998, some three months before contact with the AAA mainframe was finally established. As *Autonomous* Astronauts we see new real reason for us to follow the crowd down the plughole.

As I type Issues 4 and 5 of Suspension in Reality are in the envelopes and about to be posted. They represent a clearance of the backlog of material but there is much more to be written. The Ballardian in me likes the constant revisiting of similar themes, so we can continue to organise more and more elaborate balloon stunts and then write about them for some time to come. Twains motor seems to work as a liquid thing so it should ignite. The AAA logo is resplendent on the Life of Galileo propaganda that we're distributing. The Mars Mission was due to happen this weekend but has been put off cos we're too busy. In short we've plenty to do. Our NZ audience, small though it is, has never been aware of a Five Year Plan so won't miss it I don't reckon.

So I won't unsubscribe to the AAA List. Perhaps I'll land up in this room on the other side of the world by myself, like some exhausted survivor of a party under SETI program dish. I will try and subscribe directly to the Anti-Starwars stuff that Neil sends out and which has been the main body of stuff I've passed on to the AAA Aotearoa list. I will be in Britain in September and October so fully intend to find you various members of the withered AAA network then. Until then, see you in space

Have Fun

Mark


Free Lunch
PO Box 380
Hamilton

021 256 0796 & 07 853 5332

www.oldfarm.co.nz/freelunch.html


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