On 10 December I’m flying East to give some lectures at The University of Tokyo. After the general anaesthetic, the long-haul flight – two treats in two months. The anaesthetic and the plane fall into the same category of relaxation. While I’m unconscious or flying, I’m not supposed to be doing anything else. Or probably I am, but there’s not much anyone can do about it right now. Especially not me. So relax, lie back, you won’t feel a thing.

Imagine being an astronaut. Everyone would understand when you didn’t pick up the phone.

I don’t know whether it says this on the poster, but if in Tokyo feel free to come along.

From The Independent Book of a Lifetime

In 1985 I bought a 30p second-hand paperback because I liked the title: The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester. This fits into a rare category of novel – short science-fiction – and I read it during my first two days as a student. University promised friends, drinks, adventures, but I preferred life on Mars. On the third day, I read it again.

Since then, for me, The Demolished Man has become a comfort book. All writers should have them. Instead of reading for research, or reading to steal, there are books that recalibrate the original, childish joy of reading to escape. This in turn reignites the urge to write and, for me, The Demolished Man is one of those books. Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male (1939) is another.

Both these short novels are full of vigorous action. The Demolished Man (winner of the inaugural Hugo award on publication in 1953) is an American cop novel set in the future, a genre combination later exploited by Philip K. Dick and William Gibson. For Bester, familiar police procedures are given an original edge because the investigating cop, Lincoln Powell PH.D 1, is a first grade ESPER.

‘Esper for Extra Sensory Perception … for Telepaths, Mind Readers, Brain Peepers.’ He knows and the reader knows right from the start whodunit. It was Ben Reich, evil industrialist (an ever contemporary touch) who lives by the flawed motto – `Be audacious, be brave, be confident and you will not fail.’

Powell’s challenge in the book is to trick the murderer into revealing his method and motives, because not everybody in the future can read minds. Reich himself, for example, attempts to outwit Powell by filling his head with a popular song and acting before he thinks. In this way the ripping pace of the book becomes part of what it’s about.

Each time I re-read the novel I’m impressed by the formal daring. Bester experiments with fonts and layouts to convey different types of unspoken thought, and his prescient characters include Sam @tkins, Jo ¼maine and the very sexy Miss Duffy Wyg&.

Not all his future projections have worn so well. Reich’s motives are stiffly dependent on Freudian theory, but most glaringly Bester fails to predict any type of feminism. The words girl and pretty always come as a pair.

My edition is the 1966 Penguin with the ugly Halloween cover and a glut of hard-boiled typos, and I doubt it will survive many more readings. If anything, the story itself gets younger – I’m now older than the characters, who in their late thirties once seemed impossibly experienced in the ways of the future world.

And however many times I re-read The Demolished Man, I never tire of the ending: ‘There has been joy. There will be joy again.’ Yes, I think. That must be so. It is 1985 and time to go out.

In boxing, the first and simplest of the combat sports to get itself organised, the referee from the earliest days brought the fighters’ gloves together and said: ‘May the best man win.’ There is an acknowledgement in this saying, a sporting dread, that the best man will not always win. The best man sometimes loses. This creates a visceral sense of injustice – sport needs to be fairer than this.

The injustice of cheating can be stopped. That’s why rules are invented and evolve. Then there’s the referee himself. In Wales 8 France 9, the semi-final of the Rugby World Cup, in one of the least simple of combat sports, the referee created a situation in which the best team was most unlikely to win. And they didn’t. But only just, which goes to show by quite how much they were the better team on the pitch.

I love French rugby, everyone knows that, but France shouldn’t be in the World Cup Final. What’s disappointing about Alain Rolland’s decision is that it extracted the heart from the game. He ignored what he knew about the human beings in front of him.

There are vicious idiots in the game of rugby, who aim to injure with malicious intent. They tend not to thrive, and such a brutal sport could never prosper without good faith. Roland would have talked to the captains before the match. He knew who he was dealing with, and there’s no evidence that Warburton (or Dusattoir, for that matter) aren’t the self-effacing heros they appear to be from the outside looking in.

Stop, Alain, think. Warburton is not a vicious idiot (he’s not Jamie Joseph). Clerc is very small. He tips easily. But there was no stopping and no thinking. The best team lost, and this decision didn’t only ruin the semi-final, it ruins the final as well. Everyone wants to see the two best teams in the tournament contest the prize match at the very end. That’s not going to happen – and even if neutral fans can muster some excitement, there’s always the fear  that the officials may well ruin the day again.

My heart aches for Wales, and for Warburton. The injustice, his life-changing opportunity cut short, the hollowing of Wales. These are not the feelings that sport at its best is supposed to provoke, when justice is done and the best man wins. This was the opposite, the best man losing, the worst-case eventuality feared from the beginning of organised sport and that we still haven’t managed to eradicate. Human beings are useless.

Except the valiant Wales 14, who were magnificent. Unfortunately, this makes the unfairness even greater. This is a why-oh-why moment, with god absent from his heaven. It’s a day when it feels like there were better things to do, in a universe that ought to reward its champions.