This is book #3 of the Warder Trilogy, comprising Throwback’s Realm, Tree Thinker and Heavy Biscuits.

HEAVY BISCUITS is set in the turbulent transition period during which oil becomes too expensive to use as a fuel.  Electric light transport ( just cars and bikes, basically ) uses Liquid Hydrogen ( LH ) in a Fuel Cell instead of batteries; synthetic heavy diesel-like fuel is made for ships, trains, trucks, based on a 3-stage fermentation process invented in the 1920s, but updated to allow a different hydrocarbon source – a process that had cost its Indian inventor his life.  Oil companies make synthetic aviation fuel and LH commercially and a new invention – the LH Still – allows private citizens to make their own LH slowly...  just a few liters per day.  Oil companies try to ruin the market for ‘home-made’ fuel.  Other factors that impact on events to make this period a watershed for humanity are the steady increase in trade between the Hidden Realms and Outside Nations – often to the dismay of Outside industries who try to sabotage Hidden Realms trading efforts – and the start of asteroid mining, at great cost to the stock market and the detriment of traditional mining operations.

Main character Martin Farrell is now over 160 years old – even for a cold-flame, he is actually getting old, and would dearly love to retire, after a century in official life as the Hidden Realms’ Ala Daq Da.  To do so, he must smoothly cede control of his private and public responsibilities which, over time, have grown to resemble a business empire.  His daughter Banta and her husband Jabo are next-generation cold-flames, capable of a similar long-term perspective as himself, so they become ‘Patrons’ of two critical Hidden Realms initiatives, and other cold-flame friends and family members become Patrons for others – actual management ( and ownership ) must fall to the shorter-lived hot-flames who form the majority of the Hidden Realms population.  Bio-mass ‘Kidaq’ energy drives all the Hidden Realms’ business, always with an eye to decreasing humanity’s planetary ‘footprint’, which does not win them many friends.

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