Apart from the occasional satirical rant from Jacques, 'Percy the Editor' and Maggie Stiggle, the Tunesmith novels carefully steer clear of topical debate, because the author wants the stories to have positive effects on his readers' lives.

 'Until the last three decades, the human ability to continue developing an active memory was the very foundation of our society, yet now it is being swept away as if it were merely irrelevant nostalgia. I hear children and young adults saying how quickly time flies, which is ample proof of what is happening.

'Of course, there's nothing original in what I'm saying here!'

'One day blurs into the next because we are saturated with unnecessary information which engulfs and obliterates the things which have real personal value to us as individuals with our own lives, our own friends and our own families. Is it really a healthy thing to know more about a character in a soap-opera or a celebrity on a social media channel than someone who shares our home?

'In terms of the whole human timescale, novels are not blameless in this, for they have always been a way to escape reality. But novels grew as an art form in the so-called 'Age of Enlightenment', so hopefully anyone who takes the time to write one with something other than money in mind will have some kind of altruistic purpose.'

'In illiterate societies people have to develop excellent memories in order to survive, particularly in harsh environments such as the desert, the vast subarctic zones and the tropical rainforests where contact between groups might be very limited. You can see a modern fictional counterpart to this in some of the great films set in prison, as well as in many war-films, where precise, reliable memory is the difference between death and life.

'Nevertheless, ever since writing was invented thousands of years ago, 'words on a page' have made a huge positive contribution to human learning...something so self-evident that it is hard to believe that teachers and parents could ever consider it to be otherwise.'

'In the nineties this reached its peak, when the new technology made book-production so accurate and so affordable that it was possible to produce a good-quality book about almost anything.

'To think that a capable photographer could produce hundreds of superb images at almost no unit cost, and a professional writer could generate tens of thousands of words without throwing a single sheet of paper into the waste-paper basket.

'At the end of the last century, the potential for building human knowledge and understanding was colossal.'

'When we slowly work our way through the pages of a real book, we are exercising our memory as well as our hands. This physical process helps to anchor things in a growing network of connections in our brain, whereas scrolling through seamless touch-screen pages with a single finger or thumb does not provide this rich sensory input.'

'From years of first-hand experience and observations, I'm convinced that the process of tapping on a touch-screen is doing serious neurological damage, by bypassing the normal, natural learning-processes.

'Over the course of a few months I saw dramatic changes in children and teenagers. Once our brain is wired for instant responses, in just a few minutes an entirely new operation can become a reflex action, which is so deeply burned into our brain that we may never escape it. Our ability to think past the reflex can vanish, just as though it had never been there.

'What results from this can make it impossible for someone to learn to play a piano properly, for example. The ability to develop complex, organised, sequential thoughts might never develop.

'Even going back to pre-computer days, any of us who learned to type on the job will spend the rest of our lives making basic errors which can add up to months or years completely, needlessly wasted, with all of the implications for our career, our confidence and our relationships which such wastage can entail.'

'By 1977 my anthropological studies at Cambridge had begun to focus on the evolution of the human brain. What I have learned since then has sadly confirmed the jest of one of our favourite lecturers, when he said that human beings had reached their peak and would now quite possibly regress. I'm sure I even remember him facetiously predicting that we would lose the use of three fingers, and our hands would develop into something like the claws of a crab.

'I do hope that the twenty-second century will prove him wrong!'

'Artists can have a vital energising rôle in human society, using fictional worlds to wake us up to reality. This is one of the main reasons why some of us continue to work, come what may.

'It is now much too late for me to become the scientist which I might have been had circumstances in my twenties been different, but I put that knowledge to good use as background to the novels. I don't need to do any internet research because enough of my memory is intact, largely thanks to having chosen a relatively isolated lifestyle, not entirely swept away by all of the technological and cultural changes of the last forty years or so.

'Any writer who works from memory is living proof of the value of what is already stored in our own brain, if we simply give it a chance.'