#32: Damocles (Novagen, Amiga, 1990)

I haven’t found as many direct references as in Elite to Douglas Adams’ comic sci-fi Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but Damocles feels all the more of a type. It’s a mode that sees space as somewhere to magnify the absurdities of society, in particular a certain type of British bureaucracy, to new heights. Hitchhiker’s opened with Arthur Dent discovering that his house was about to be demolished to make way for a new road and he’d missed the notification, then discovering that the same thing was happening to Earth. Damocles doesn’t have any set piece as brilliant, but it’s significant what kind of interactions it does put in its sparse cities. Go to the wrong floor of one office and you lose all your money to a lawsuit defeat catching up with you. Another building contains a file of political proposals, including one where the President suggests a poll tax and “believes this will be electorally popular”. It may be an alien planet, but where better for some contemporary British political satire.