Songs of the Zhongzi: How this Project Evolved

(author’s words)
Way back in the 70’s when I was teaching at a comprehensive school in the New Forest, I challenged a class of 12-year-olds to invent a new life form: one that didn’t convert light energy to chemical energy (like plants) or chemical to kinetic (like animals). When they had delivered their quite wonderful and amazing assignments, the kids said “your turn now, Miss!”. I thought I’d give them more to think about than just energy interchanges: how about a creature that could neither hunger nor claim more than it needed; a being that could experience and reflect but not gain physical power?
The Zhongzi were born, and have been singing in my head ever since.

Work in conflict and post-conflict areas has forced upon me the uneasy acknowledgement that we humans may not be able to get ourselves and our planet out of the mess we’ve got into. We are doomed by genes that have been shaped and honed by eons of climbing the food chain through competition, violence, greed and cunning. Our instincts are wrong: they must be tamed by our intellect, but is that possible?
I started reflecting around the question of whether all evolved intelligent life inevitably harbour the seeds of its own destruction.
The Zhongzi found their context.

But once released on Shianshenka, the Zhongzi took over and wrote the story and the songs themselves. The books became something quite different – an adventure that happened on another planet to another life-form: a beautiful planet with no predators, and a life-form that in its conception was innocent. Other people have seen other things in the books, and experienced them differently (see endorsements).

I have never thought of myself as a musician or an artist, but the need to share the songs in the book, and the lack of funding to get somebody to do a professional job led me to a long foray into the possibilities of Encore and Garage Band. My long-suffering and patient husband has helped me to build a mini-studio in what was our spare bedroom. Placing the songs on youtube required the development of illustrations in Photoshop and the mastering of Final Cut. My original training as a biochemist and my fascination with micro-life on Earth took over here. Many of the illustrations have been built from photos through a microscope of seeds, pollen and micro-organisms, or electron microscope pictures of everything from the foot sole of a gecko to the synapses of our own brains.