James M. Bourke

Under the Alien Sky James M. Bourke

"Under the Alien Sky is an extended moral tale in the style of oriental fables. It sets out to narrate the story of the writer?s quest to find the Sultante of Michaeli, a very remote and secretive state in the Sulu Sea which is described from several different perspectives.
Having lived and worked ?under the alien sky? for some 30 years, the writer has first-hand experience of the clash of cultures that often occurs between the local inhabitants of a remote island and the intrepid Caucasian visitors who invade their territory. Under the Alien Sky is an oriental tale and it bristles with anecdotes of odd people and weird incidents, in a world of unbelievable eccentricity, from a European perspective. Of course, the expatriates are the aliens, but somehow they see themselves as bearers of British (and to a lesser extent Irish) civility to people of lesser culture in foreign lands.
The writer?s style of writing will make the reader smile, laugh, possibly cry or roll their eyes up in disbelief. The people, locations and events are purely fictional, but the story is told as if it were an authentic journal. Even though the story is fictional, it reflects some aspects of life in any one of a dozen countries in Southeast Asia. Sometime fiction can be truer than fact and the writer?s motto is never to let the truth get in the way of a good story.
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