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Proverbs from the Red Book of Hergest | Source
2022/05/21: ‘Industry in the Country of the Blind’ goes to Culture Matters
In a short story, ‘The Country of the Blind’ by H G Wells, a climber in the Andes separated from his party stumbles upon a highland valley cultivated by a forgotten community of the congenitally blind. These people, cut off in their isolated valley over centuries, have created a way of life so perfectly adapted to their blindness that they have forgotten that sight exists, their eyes have atrophied, and they have come to believe that the valley is the whole of the world, created for their benefit. Dismissing their discoverer Nuñez’s talk of cities and plains and vision as a mark of his apparent madness, and of the stupidity which accounts for his clumsiness and uselessness in their sightless world, they slowly reach the conclusion that his eyes should be gouged out as the evident source of his delusions and madness, before his marriage to the pious and beautiful young woman, Medina-Saroté.
The story contrasts a Plain People content with their rural simplicity and religious piety with the science and technology of the outside world – Nuñez has the choice of accepting mutilation as a condition of membership of the community, or leaving to attempt the dangerous journey home; and reading the story was helpful to me when a relationship with a woman from an intensely religious family was coming to an end. But any implication that life in the valley after Nuñez’s departure could continue as before seemed false; and in my short story, set in the present day, Nuñez returned at the head of an army of mercenaries to open gold mines run by forced labour, wreaking havoc on the valley’s ecology and nearly destroying its unique culture.
‘Industry in the Country of the Blind’ first appeared in Pugnacious Little Trolls, my fourth short-story collection publised by Cockatrice. It later appeared in Land of Change: Stories of Struggle and Solidarity from Wales, edited by Gemma June Howell and published by Culture Matters. You can read the story, and buy the books, below:
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Books by Rob Mimpriss

Pugnacious Little Trolls
‘freely and fiercely inventive short stories… supercharged with ideas.’
Jon Gower, Nation Cymru

Prayer at the End: Twenty-Three Stories
‘heaving with loss, regret and familial bonds.’
Annexe Magazine

For His Warriors: Thirty Stories
‘sketched with a depth and sureness of touch which makes them memorable and haunting.’
Caroline Clark, gwales.com

Reasoning: Twenty Stories
‘dark, complex, pensively eloquent’
Sophie Baggott, New Welsh Review

The Sleeping Bard: Three Nightmare Visions of the World, of Death, and of Hell
Translated by T. Gwynn Jones, with an introduction by Rob Mimpriss.

A Book of Three Birds
‘Lucid, skilful, and above all, of enormous timely significance.’
Jim Perrin

Dangerous Asylums
‘In this exemplary collaboration between medical science and imagination, lives preserved in official records, in the language and diagnoses of their times, are restored not just to light, but to humanity and equality. This anthology is a resurrection.’
Philip Gross

Hallowe’en in the Cwm: The Stories of Owen Wynne Jones
‘An invaluable translation.’
Angharad Price

Going South: The Stories of Richard Hughes Williams
Translated by Rob Mimpriss, with an introduction by E. Morgan Humphreys