Lallie Steele's Bradman Pride: Object Post 52
Significance? In the first flush of
off-on-honeymoon excitement, Lallie lent the Pride to her younger brother, Glen
who took it off on the Outback Highway with bewildering results
Fate? The Pride, despite its adventures, came back to
Lallie unscathed
Author’s inspiration?
This was my forecast (at the time of its writing) of the way cars might
be in the future
First
appearance? Pride:
Bridgeover Sundown
Glen Steele is driving through the night, driving a
rough red road that's straight as a pencil. The sleek Bradman Pride's headlamps
glare over the road ahead, glinting now and again in the lambent eyes of a
kangaroo. Cocooned in the low lean cab, Glen hopes none of the roos will hop
across the road. He hasn't the stomach for needless slaughter, and
"slaughter" won't be the word for it if sister Lallie finds a
roo-shaped print on her precious car's deflector.
The Bradman Pride is an anxious nanny of a car
that never misses an opportunity to remind Glen of his economic best-path and
his civic duty. It is a large, sleek, comfortable vehicle, but as it makes many
of its own decisions Glen never feels much in control. In his mind, he sees it
as yet one more personality trying to keep him in line.
Was this
all there was to outback motoring? Where was the skill in driving this
automated nursemaid of a car? Bradman Pride… make that a Bradman Nanny, keeping
her little charge on the straight and narrow.
He braked,
and the Pride smoothed down to another halt. It seemed almost surprised, and he
imagined its fussy, nannified voice protesting that it didn't need to stop,
fuel and air and water levels were well within acceptable parameters…
"…and
you should always use a Sanitpak, my dear, for hygienic matters."
'Shut it,'
he said to the Nanny and his own imagination. Who needed a living companion
when he had a mind that conjured up mealy-mouthed motors?
The Pride had onboard mapping, a key-con, a
pacer and a deflector. Glen found it less that exciting, but when he ended up
dealing with a Crossley 14, he was all at sea.
As he peered
and probed, he thought ruefully of the Bradman Pride, its self-satisfied
subliminal purr, its cosy lines, its intelligent macrochip.
When he was eventually reunited with the Pride,
Glen had learned a few things about life (after all he’d lived a few years in
(maybe) a few days)…
Glen and the Bradman Pride appear in Pride: Bridgeover Sundown
ABOUT THE BLOG
Sally is Sally Odgers; author, anthologist and reader. You can find you way into her maze of websites and blogs via the portal here.(Sally is me, by the way.)
The goal for 2017 was to write a post a day profiling the background behind one of my books; how it came to be written, what it's about, and any things of note that happened along the way. 2017 is well behind us, but I ran out of year before running out of books. As of June 2018 I STILL hadn't run out of books, but many of those still to come are MIA by which I mean I don't have copies and remember little about them. There are more new books in the pipeline, and I'm certainly showcasing those, but in between times, I'm profiling some of my characters, places and objects. Thank you so much to everyone who's come along on this journey so far!
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