Manhattan Natural : green Life-Saving , from the concrete jungle ...

The urban jungle that is Manhattan, with all its concrete skyscrapers, should be the very last place on earth where one might expect to see the start of a turning away from the Modern obsession with the artificial and the synthetic and a turn to the Postmodernity's renewed relationship with Nature.

But Manhattan is in fact the place where the wartime mass production of  natural penicillin - with all that momentous decision's consequences for postmodernity - actually began .

Fiction's drive for the smooth closure of all narrative lines demands that penicillin discoverer Alexander Fleming (in his brand new 1931 hospital factory) should have been the first one to grow the green stuff in amounts sufficient to begin to save the world's fatally infected - but he didn't.

Manhattan Natural -- fermenting a life-saving revolution from the concrete jungle

Instead it was Columbia's Martin Henry Dawson and Pfizer's John L Smith that rose to World War Two's moral challenges.

And very soon it was postmodern natural penicillin from Manhattan's concrete jungle that was radiating hope all around a war-shattered world --- while Fleming and Florey's modern artificial penicillin from leafy-green Oxford University never even got off the drawing board.

natural from concrete --- artificial from greenery

The natural from concrete and the artificial from green : life is filled with ironies isn't it ?

So why should I ever think of writing 'mere fiction' ?

No novel-writing for me - not when the extraordinary truth is so much stranger than any fantasied fiction....