NewBlog

The moon in a suburban sky. A gigantic sphere of rock, shining with the reflected light of a star, hangs over a commonplace scene of semis and front gardens you could find in any town in England. Seeing the moon up there has often served me as a reminder that the ordinary and the everyday are not the whole story, and that we are surrounded everywhere and all the time by the strange and wonderful. (In fact I used the moon in just such a way in a story called ‘Spring Tide’). The strangest part, though, is that the suburban street is actually much rarer and more remarkable than the moon. There are many cratered spheres of rock in the solar system alone -look at Ceres for instance – but, as far as we know, no dwellings of any kind anywhere in the universe other than Earth, let alone something resembling a suburban semi. * * * Recently my wife and I were returning from an outing with two of our grandchildren in the back of the car, one aged 3, one nearly 2. We pulled up outside a supermarket with the idea that my wife would nip in to buy a couple of things we needed while I waited in the the car with the children. But the children wouldn’t have that. They were determined to go in too. Why? my grownup self thinks with a sigh. You’ve been in supermarkets many times before. What exactly is so interesting about this one? But they rush through the door, take in the scene for a second or two with expressions that say ‘WOW! CHECK THIS OUT!’, and are off down the aisles, finding things, looking at things, competely delighted and engrossed. I suppose it’s necessary, from an evolutionary point of view, that everyday things should stop seeming amazing, because otherwise we’d constantly be distracted from necessary tasks, and that’s why what once seemed wonderful soon becomes merely ordinary. But the mysterious, the numinous, are not really other, not really remote unreachable places like the moon, but anything at all that we manage to see, by whatever means, without the dulling effect that comes with familiarity. This, I suppose, is what my character Jeff in Dark Eden is reminding himself when from time to time he says, ‘We are here. We really are here.’

A family man is having a mid-life crisis, his own personal crisis of masculinity. His life is one of comfort, safety and regularity and it feels too easy. He wants to grapple with nature, he wants to feel that he’s protecting and providing for his family. So he persuades his wife that they should leave their comfortable home and move to a remote island to live in a lighthouse: the man, his wife, his son -a gentle, sensitive boy, on the cusp of adolescence- and his physically very small but extremely tough foster-daughter. The wife is a gentle, calm, nurturing woman, who, without complaint, sets aside her own preferences in order to help her husband get through whatever he feels he has to get through. But she pays a price for her selfnessless. Life is tough on the island, she gets lonely, she misses the things she loves back home, and, for all her overwhelming need to care for others, she can’t completely bury her resentment at being taken for granted, as if her own wishes were of no account. (To add to her sense of being confined, her husband is so determined to be a provider and protector, that he’s constantly telling her to take it easy and leave everything to him.) She occupies herself by making a garden that the sea promptly sweeps away, and then by painting from memory, on the inner walls of the lighthouse, a picture of her beloved garden at home. Unknown to any of the family, they’re followed to the island by someone who has become obsessed with them. She is a desperately isolated figure, so appallingly alone that it’s frightening just to be in her presence. Her loneliness freezes everything around her. (Such people do exist – I’ve met them myself). There is another extremely isolated figure, the island’s single existing inhabitant, who they just call the Fisherman, because he won’t tell them his name. He lives in a tiny hut and refuses to talk to anyone. It doesn’t sound like a children’s story, but the title of this book is Moominpappa at Sea, by Tove Jansson. The father, his wife and his son are not human, but Moomins, which (as you probably know) are cute, hippo-like, cartoony creatures. The tough girl is a tiny fierce-faced creature called Little My, and the lonely being that follows them is a creature known as the Groke, who freezes the world around her not just in a metaphorical way, but quite literally. If she sits somewhere for too long the ground turns to ice, and everything that grows there dies.

Interview here with Jon Jones for his Youtube channel: SciFiScavenger I haven’t listened to it myself (I don’t like hearing my own voice, which sounds much posher and more drawly when recorded, than it does inside my head), but I enjoyed the interview.

In a certain country the people are divided by law into just three classes: the Owners, the Experts and the Workers, the precise boundaries between them being set down in the relevant statutes. At one point the Owners, who were at that time basically warlords and protection racketeers, were in charge of everything. However, as time went on, the Experts – merchants and what we might now call professional people- grew more influential until the Owners deemed it advisable to allow them a share in the running of things. There had in fact always been a few Experts co-opted into the Owning class in return for services rendered, but now they as a class were granted a say – and their very own house of Parliament alongside the House of Owners. And in due course both classes, Owners and Experts, became known collectively as gentlefolk – as opposed to the rough folk, who were the Workers.

Back in my social work days, I was often involved in the placement of children in foster-homes who were from abusive, neglectful or otherwise messed-up backgrounds. Such children are often difficult to look after: closed off, self-destuctive, prone to challenging behaviours. If you didn’t know better, you might think that all their carers had to do was to provide whatever was missing from their own families -love, stability, safety, boundaries- and those children would cease to be sad and difficult, just as a hungry person ceases to be hungry when given food. But in fact closed off and challenging children tend to remain so for many years and few, if any, completely get over early traumas. I have some personal experience to draw on as well as professional. My own childhood was nothing like as bad as many I encountered in my professional life, but it was not a very happy one all the same, and I often felt profoundly alone and unseen. I am in my late sixties now. I have many kind, warm friends, a lovely wife, grownup children and small grandchildren who I love and who love me – all things that once seemed frighteningly beyond my reach – yet I still often feel myself inside to be that lonely, isolated child. My subjective experience, a lot of the time, is that I still lack things that I do objectively possess. In fact, you could almost call this my resting state, the place I end up if I don’t do something to avoid it. I read somewhere about a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps who would sometimes burst into tears when presented with a meal. No amount of food could take away the memory of starving. One thing that has helped me to think about this is a story by Philip K. Dick. His own childhood was unhappy, and he had many problems in his adult life, including drug addiction and an inability to sustain relationships with women. The story is called ‘I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon’ (though it was originally published under the equally appropriate title of ‘Frozen Journey’), and it’s sufficiently important to me that I once wrote a whole 20,000-word dissertation on it for an MA in English Studies.

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon One of my weaknesses as a writer is that I have a tendency, which I constantly have to fight, to spell out things that readers could fill in for themselves. This comes from a fear of not being understood. (I think this fear originates in childhood and probably has a great deal to do with why I write at all). Of course readers do not always latch on to what I mean to say, which feeds into that fear, but this is inevitable. Authors can’t control what readers take from their books, just as we can’t control what other people make of us in real life. But the second part of this quote -it comes, I must admit, from a book I’ve never read- is also interesting. You can omit things which you know, and the reader will still sense their presence, but if you omit things you don’t know this makes ‘hollow places’ in your writing. The way I have always put this is that a reader does not need to be shown everything in order for the fictional world to come alive for her, but she does need to feel that the story-teller understands the fictional world, and could answer the questions that are left unanswered. Otherwise there really is a feeling of hollowness. The very best stories never feel hollow in that way (of the books I’ve read recently, Hangover Square is, for me, a good example). A lot of good stories are flawed but not ruined by hollownesses (A Hair Divides falls into that category). Some stories feel to me so hollow as to be not worth reading.

Another mid-century British writer recommended to me by my late friend Eric Brown (see earlier post on Patrick Hamilton) is Claude Houghton. He’s not well-known these days. Most of his large output is no longer in print, and the few books that are still available are only so because they’ve been reprinted by Valancourt Books, a company which specialises in bringing forgotten books back from obscurity. I’ve read three of these books now: I am Jonathan Scrivener, This was Ivor Trent, and A Hair Divides. Ivor Trent and Jonathan Scrivener are in many ways very similar. Both are set between the two world wars. Both have an eponymous character who is not present at all for most of the novel. Both have a main viewpoint character who is seeking to learn more about this absent charismatic figure, and does so through a series of interactions with the friends, lovers and acquaintances of the missing character. Both too deal with the idea of a superior human being, who perhaps offers some hope in a world that seems to have lost any sense of direction. Shades of the Nietzchean superman? They are both engaging reads, and Ivor Trent in particular left a particular dream-like flavour in my mind that stayed with me, though (as with all dream-like flavours), I would be hard pressed to say what it was. None of the characters was very likeable, though, and they and their stories did not stay with me. A Hair Divides I think is a fine book.

As I’ve mentioned before, I sometimes go to the Museum of Classical Archaeology with a friend of mine, to try and draw some of their magnificent collection of casts of Greek and Roman Statues. I’m not particularly good at drawing, and the Greeks and Romans were very good indeed at sculpting, so, as much as anything, it’s an exercise in appreciation: sitting in front of amazing images, and just taking them slowly in. One of my favourites is this bust of Athena, the goddess of wisdom. In my imagination, she is looking down at the human world, but, although I’ve tried many times, I’ve never been able to capture her expression in a drawing – or for that matter in words. She is interested, certainly, but in what way? Is this the expression of a scientist observing an ant’s nest, or a chess player considering her next move? Or maybe a falconer standing on a cliff and watching her hawk below as it circles above its prey? We have so much acuity in recognising tiny nuances in faces, and yet it is extraordinarily hard to reproduce them, and even harder to name them.

“He was not a major writer,” says Doris Lessing a few lines into her otherwise appreciative introduction to my copy of Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude. This makes me wonder what one has to do to qualify as a ‘major’ writer? Having recently reread The Golden Notebook, which I loved back in the seventies, I have a feeling his work may age rather better than Lessing’s own. I only knowingly came across Hamilton for the first time a few years ago (though before that I was a fan of the Hitchcock film, Rope, which is based on a Patrick Hamilton play.) He was recommended to me by my friend the late Eric Brown, who had a real feeling for British authors of the mid-twentieth century. I read, in quick succession, Slaves of Solitude, Hangover Square and the trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, and loved them: the writing, the humanity, the originality. And, when I recommended these books to other people, they either turned out to already be fans, or, if they read the books for the first time, were as enthusiastic as I was. (Except my wife, to be fair, who is not prone to reckless enthusiasm, and thought Slaves only ‘quite good’). I have recently reread those first two again and remain very impressed. Slaves is my favourite, but with Hangover Square a close second. I also particularly liked the third book of the Twenty Thousand Streets trilogy, The Plains of Cement, in which the barmaid Ella has to choose between marrying a horribly unattractive older man who treats her like a child, and depriving her frail mother of a chance to come out of poverty.

And, on a somewhat similar topic to my last post, is there such a thing as collective guilt? Is it acceptable to mete out suffering and death to people, simply because they belong to the same nation, or the same ethnic group, as people who have done wrong to you and yours? Plenty of people think it is acceptable, and all nations act as if they think it is when they go to war, since all wars involve death and suffering for non-combatants who could have had nothing to do with whatever offence their compatriots have committed. What makes no sense is to condemn the ‘killing of innocents’ by the other side, but defend and condone it when it’s done by your own. (No logical sense, I should say. It certainly serves a psychological and sociological purpose.)

There’s the old-fashioned type of massacre, and the new kind. In the old kind, people are murdered en masse by others who are right there in front of them. Men, women, children may be killed indiscriminately, buildings may be looted and set alight, girls and women may be raped, but, whatever exactly the massacre consists of, it’s done by people who can see with their own eyes both their victims’ faces and the direct consequences of their own actions. In the modern kind of massacre, the killing is done from the sky by people who have never met the folk they kill and don’t have to see how they die. This second kind can be as deadly or deadlier than the first – in World War II, for instance, a hundred thousand people were killed in a single night’s raid on Tokyo, many of them burnt alive- but the aircrews can fly back to base without witnessing the burnt and broken bodies they’ve left behind them, the screaming children covered in blood, the frantic parents clawing at the rubble… We tend to be less appalled, less morally outraged, by the second kind than the first, to the point that bombing raids are not usually even described as massacres. Like the people who do the killing, we seem to buy into the idea that there’s something less culpable about murdering people you don’t ever meet, than doing it face to face. And certainly I find it easier to picture myself pushing a button to release a bomb, even when I know the bomb will kill and maim children, than it is to imagine myself, say, plunging a bayonet into a terrified child. But is there really a moral distinction? Or is it just that the former makes us feel less squeamish?

I’m chuffed that my story ‘Art App’ is included, with distinguished company, in this annual collection, beautifully edited by Donna Scott. The book is now available for pre-order from NewCon Press.

Cover image: To the Stars and Back I’m proud and pleased to have had a story selected for this collection, which has been put together by Ian Whates at Newcon Press in honour of the late Eric Brown who died last year. Eric was well-known and well-loved in the British science fiction world. He was a warm, gentle, unassuming man without a trace of arrogance or pretentiousness, and was an exceptionally prolific writer, not just in science fiction, but in many genres including children’s books and crime novels. Yet he’d never read a book until he was in his teens, when he first encountered the work of Agatha Christie. This (as Eric described it) opened up what felt like a magical and entirely new world to him to which he proceeded to dedicate himself, as a reader, writer and reviewer. The stories in this collection are written by some of his many writer friends. Some of them (I’ve only read a couple so far) refer directly to Eric and his world. Mine doesn’t, but I like to think it’s a story he would have approved of, and perhaps even one that he might have written. It’s called ‘The Peaceable Kingdom.’ Here is the Guardian’s obituary for Eric (who was the paper’s SF critic for many years). The book is available now.

I was struck by this article which showed that the carbon emissions of the top 10% by income of the global population are as high as those of the bottom 50%. The top 10% ‘encompasses most of the middle classes in developed countries’, the article points out, or anyone earning more than £32,000 ($40,000). (The article doesn’t make clear, annoyingly, whether it is talking about disposable income or gross income, but £32,000 is roughly the median disposable income in the UK. The median disposable income of the UK’s poorest 20% is £14,500.) The article makes the point that failing to allow for this fact can mean that those least responsible can end up paying a proportionately higher price for measures intended to reduce carbon emissions than those who are much more responsible, which helps to explain resistance to such measures from poorer people (the article gives the example of the ‘yellow vests’ movement in France protesting against a hike in fuel prices.) This is not the only instance, I think, of measures supported by the liberal middle classes which are resisted by poorer people on whom they more directly impact – a phenomenon that can result in a rather spurious sense of moral superiority on the part of liberal middle class folk. The more general point I take from this is that many people who do not see themselves as rich, or as extravagant consumers – indeed many people who think they are entitled to be richer than they are, and identify themselves as being among the victims of injustice – are in fact, in global terms, rich and extravagant.

Here I am (on the right) signing copies of the Ballard-themed anthology, Reports from the Deep End at Forbidden Planet in London on Saturday. To my right are Maxim Jakubowski (who co-edited the book with Rick McGrath, as well as contributed to it), Pat Cadigan and Andrew Hook. Why do we SF people have such a preference for wearing black? Chemo has made me even balder than usual. I’ve even lost all my nostril hairs. (This makes my nose drip suddenly and without warning, which can be embarrassing). But I’ve had my last dose of those horrible toxins and am on the way up. I came down to London on the train which I wouldn’t have attempted even a week earlier. It felt great to be doing things again.

Some further, possibly not very coherent, thoughts carrying on from a previous post. In that post, I expressed my increasing dissatisfaction with TV nature documentaries which, on the one hand, mainly show scenes of predators hunting, or male animals fighting for control of females, accompanied by the kind of tense, exciting, sinister music that I associate with action scenes in movies, and on the other invite us to see nature as something fragile and vulnerable and in need of protection. Why is an orca drowned in a fishing net tragic and pitiful, but a baby seal being tormented by orcas a thrilling spectacle?

I wrote a post exactly a year and a day ago, in which I reflected on my feelings during a brief period when I neurotically imagined I might have cancer. This is funny because I actually do have cancer right now (though not the kind I feared), and am midway through an 18 week programme of chemotherapy. Chemotherapy is unpleasant. I spend a morning every three weeks having powerful toxins put into my veins and my spine. I’m aware of the poison in my system straight away, but after about 5 days it dominates everything. (And it is poison, though it’s designed to kill cancerous cells before it kills too many others). I feel exhausted and slightly nauseous, there is a permanent unpleasant taste in my mouth, and food tastes absolutely disgusting, like glutinous cardboard. Even water tastes unpleasant. For several days in each cycle it’s almost impossible to eat at all, and I don’t feel up to doing anything except lying down and trying to dissociate from my own experience. Gradually this eases. It becomes easier to eat, though it remains a rather revolting experience with no pleasure in it. (I never realised until now how much the little treats that are meals help to get me through the day.) For the final few days of the three week cycle, I start to feel a bit more normal, and up to doing things like gardening jobs. Then the whole cycle begins again, but with the twist that there’s a cumulative aspect to it, so that the nastiest bit lasts longer and is a little more unpleasant each time. During the first cycle I attempted to do some writing, but I’ve given up on that. I’ve pretty much given up on serious reading too. Not only food but pretty much everything else is polluted by the poison. My book diet is mainly audiobooks that don’t ask anything of me, but simply pass the time, or help me to settle into sleep. I’m currently listening to Sherlock Holmes stories, though I’ve never been interested in crime writing: the simple formula chunders round, the problem is resolved without my having to care about anything, and another 45 minutes have gone by. Giving up on writing isn’t just about lack of energy, it’s also about what’s in my head. This process makes me aware of the disgustingness of the body, of being trapped in the body, no matter what, and my mind goes very quickly to places of horror, those awful places in our world where people would do anything to be released from existence, but must continue to exist anyway, and continue to inhabit the bodies that torment them. I mean, who would want to read anything that continued for any length of time in the mood of this post?

I’m delighted to have a story in this Ballard-themed anthology, which will be out in the autumn (Nov 7th) – and in some very fine company too. I’m a big admirer of Ballard, particularly his short stories. My contribution to this collection is called ‘Art App’. Ballard was an exceptionally painterly writer. His stories are not primarily driven by plot or character development, but by the accumulation and arrangement of very powerful images. I tried to honour Ballard’s attachment to Surrealist art and, in particular, to the work of Max Ernst, whose peculiar vision I only really became aware of as a result of reading Ballard. The Eye of Silence, by Max Ernst

I watched the BBC series Wild Isles, presented by David Attenborough. It was beautiful to look at, but it left me wondering about ‘nature’, as presented by these programmes. In the first episode we were shown a pod of Orcas off the coast of Shetland (or was it Orkney?). I’ve watched enough of these shows to know the kind of spectacle we can expect from Orcas – they typically harry their prey to a slow and terrifying death and I still vividly remember, from Attenborough’s Arctic show, the closeup shot of an exhausted seal looking straight at the camera, as orcas dragged it off an iceberg to be torn to pieces. It felt wrong to be staring into its eyes. This time round a baby seal, which had swum out some way off the shore, was caught by a member of the pod. The orca then took it, still alive, to a group of its companions, where, after a certain amount of playing with its victim, the successful hunter demonstrated to younger orcas -Sir David sounded quite aroused at this point- how to hold it under water and drown it. Later on, though, we were shown an orca that had itself drowned in a fishing net. Sombre music played. This drowned cetacean was apparently a tragedy, while the slow torment of the baby seal had been presented as something rather thrilling. Why, I wondered? Why should I care about one and not the other? The same pattern persisted throughout the series. Predators hunting and killing -and quite often targeting the young of their prey- dominated most episodes, and were presented as an exciting spectacle, accompanied by rousing, if sinister, music,as you might hear in an action scene in a movie. We were being offered animal-killing as a voyeuristic entertainment, not unlike the animal slaughters that the Romans put on in their arenas, except that this was ‘nature’ so we could savour it guilt-free. But then there would be a sudden switch of tone and talk about the fragility of ‘nature’ and the need to protect it from the depredations of humanity. I found this no longer worked for me. I grew bored of the slaughter, and even sickened by it, and it certainly didn’t put me the mood for ‘only man is vile’ pieties. My thoughts were more on the lines of Kurtz in the Congo jungle: ‘The horror, the horror.’ After hunting scenes, the next most frequent dramas depicted in these shows are the endless combats between male animals fighting to obtain, or defend, access to females. In one episode a huge, repulsive male seal spotted an equally huge and repulsive rival that had emerged from the sea, and flopped and wriggled his blubbery bulk across the sand to do battle. They ripped each others flesh, they roared, they reared up to look as big as possible. The much less repulsive female seals meanwhile hurried to get their babies out of the way, because the males in such battles are apparently so indifferent to anything except their need for dominance, that they will crush their own children to death without a thought if these are foolish enough to get in their way. It all felt rather familiar actually, like the story-line for much of human history. Not so much a case of ‘only man is vile’, as ‘nature is vile, and we’re a part of it.’ See also: ‘Vermin’

Thanks very much to Stephen E. Andrews for this youtube interview for his Outlaw Bookseller podcast, providing an overview of all my books. Steve is based in Bath, in Somerset, and his extraordinarly encyclopaedic knowledge of books is matched by his infectious enthusiasm. I first met him when he invited me to give a talk in Bath’s Waterstones. ht

I’ve always thought that there were two types of understanding. The first is to know, as a matter of fact, what something is or how it works (as in ‘the moon is a ball of rock: I know that because I’ve been taught it’). The second is to really feel a thing to be true (as in ‘wow, the moon really is a solid ball of rock’). I think the second meaning is close to the word grok, as coined by Robert Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land. It feels precious when it happens. Rather as love feels precious when you suddenly really feel it, and you don’t just know it’s in there somewhere. But if ‘Type 2 Understanding’ were simply about being able to relate something unfamiliar to with something with which we are already familiar in an intuitive, tactile kind of way, would that really be understanding? When I say that, for instance, ‘I would like to feel I really understood the theory of relativity,’ what I mean is not that I wish someone could take me through the maths, but that I would like someone to be able to explain it to me in a way that would make me feel at home with it, which in my case usually means by analogy with something I’m already familiar with. The trouble with that is that it is circular. Physics is supposed to explain familiar things like, for instance, why solid objects fall to the ground. If those explanations were dependent on analogies with familiar things, we would be back at the beginning. (I think of certain diagrams of gravity in which a large mass has caused a deep dent in space-time towards which other spherical objects, such a steel balls, roll: these make intuitive sense because we know steel balls would roll down a slope towards a hole. Gravity feels to have been explained to us by analogy with… gravity.) Actually, I’m not sure that even mathematical explanations take us out of this circle. Aren’t they just a much more rigorous way of explaining what we don’t know in terms of what we have decided we already know? But then, what would real understanding be? What else could it be? Actually, I’m not sure Type 2 Understanding really is about causes and explanations. I think when I grok something out there in the world -which is a precious experience, as I say, and one that only rarely happens – it’s not that I can suddenly provide explanations, it’s more that explanations are no longer necessary. I’m just briefly very powerfully aware, not that the moon is a ball of rock, because I know that anyway, but that it is really there, and that I am really here, and that we are both in the same world. Which actually is also what love is like when you really feel it. I am here, and you are there, and we both really are together in the same world.

I proposed the song ‘5.15’ as theme music for my previous post. The Who, from my perspective now, seem to me to have represented better than anyone else what it was like being an alienated adolescent in the 1970s. And, of their many takes on this subject, ‘5.15’ (about a stoned teenager riding a commuter train out of London) is, I think, the best. So many things are captured in this song – the free-floating sexual frustration, the sense of detachment from the adult world (‘Why should I care? Why should I care?’) – but my favourite verse is: Magically bored On a quiet street corner Free frustration In our minds and our toes Quiet storm water M-m-my generation Uppers and downers Either way blood flows ‘Magically bored’ is perfect! See also, obviously, ‘My Generation’, its stammering refrain referenced in the above verse, and in particular ‘See me feel me’. This last (from Tommy) is more of a fragment than a song, but its eight, several times repeated, opening words can still bring tears to my eyes, so powerfully do they represent to me now the longing and fear of a 16-year-old from a somewhat dysfunctional family who has never been kissed, never even met a girl of his own age in a social situation, who has only just begun to make real, if rudimentary, friendships, but knows that in another year, he will have to go out into the world. It’s an odd thing. To my 16-old-self, anyone over 40 was in some way emotionally already dead (‘…The things they do look awful cold/ I hope I die before I get old…’), so, if he could see me as I am now, that adolescent me would probably not recognise me as being in any way like him, but I feel an affinity with him all the same, a greater affinity, in a way, than I feel with all the other iterations of me that have existed in the years between. Why is that, I wonder? I think partly it may be because, now, past the age of retirement, with my bus pass and my pension (yes, baby boomer, alright for some… etc etc), I have reached a kind of second adolescence, when I am no longer required to go to work every day or to have long-term plans, and when I can, if I wish, spend a Tuesday morning sitting around for several hours, listening to songs, and asking myself what they mean to me. (The magical difference is that I no longer have to cry into the void ‘see me, feel me, touch me, heal me’, because I have the things I feared I would never have.) But it’s also partly because I have always tried in some way to be true to that 16-year-old, and not to embrace the kind of adulthood he despised. It seems odd in a way for a fully grown man, with a lifetime of experience to draw upon, to want to stay true to a clueless 16-year-old. But there it is. Foolish as he was, he saw something that I don’t want to forget. Like Wordsworth said (I’ve just looked it up! I had no idea it was him), ‘The child is father of the man.’ Cue for another song fragment from a man who burst up from a miserable childhood to explode like a firework into brilliant colours, and then crashed to the ground before he could finish writing the album this song was supposed to be part of.

[Soundtrack for this post: 5.15 by The Who.] A short while ago, in a more than usually neurotic moment, I briefly persuaded myself that I might have lung cancer. (As far as I know I don’t.) This made me think of a time, over half a century ago, when I was 16. Our school had organised a lecture about the harm caused by smoking. The doctor who gave the talk had some bucket-like boxes on stage with him and at a certain point, he opened these up and, to our slight incredulity, took out a number of cancered lungs, flattened and encased in clear plastic, which he passed round for us to feel. The healthy parts of the lung felt soft and spongy, he pointed out, but the cancered parts were hard unyielding lumps. We felt the lumps, and they were nasty, but we were unmoved. After the lecture was over, my friends and I headed off to one of our usual smoking spots to roll up moist, aromatic Old Holborn tobacco into unfiltered cigarettes, and draw in the rich, tarry smoke. I smoked so greedily back then that I often finished when my friends still had half a cigarette left, and tried to scrounge drags from theirs. If I smoked a manufactured cigarette, I would draw on it so hard (my poor lungs!) that the filter sometimes fell apart in my mouth. Remembering this from the perspective of someone who thought he might have lung cancer, I felt briefly angry with my past self for his utter indifference to my well-being, but the feeling didn’t last. The thing is that, while I can remember being that 16-year-old, and still have that 16-year-old inside me – for better or worse, it was the most intense and vivid time of my life – the reverse is not the case. I was not inside him. He had no sense at all of his future self in fifty years time. Me, as I am now, was a complete stranger to him, far more so than, say, my grandfather, then just 7 years older than I am now. In fact, never mind fifty years time, I had no sense of myself in five years time, no idea where I was going, let alone how I was going to get there, other than a vague sense of wanting to be a writer, or a rock star, or something of that kind, which I suppose represented the possibility of being able to continue to play, to hold onto some aspect of being a child. All I really understood was the tiny universe of my school where I lived as a boarder, cut off from the rest of the world. The one imperative I felt was a need to draw a line between myself and the adult world, and the values and forms of authority that the adult world accepted. Even to think about my future in a constructive way would have been to do what the adult world wanted me to do, so that to attend to what the doctor said, and do something about my smoking, would have been a kind of surrender. To free myself from the past, I had also to deny my future. That’s how it felt at the time, and even now I can enjoy in retrospect the feeling of defiance involved in rejecting prudence, forethought and common sense as so much boring, grey, bourgeois claptrap. Of course, I now also see the fear and desperation that lay behind this -and the timidity that actually controlled me – but it wasn’t just fear, it was a need to break free from a stale mold that others wanted me to fill, even if this meant casting myself naked into the world, and even if it meant doing myself harm.

Speaking very broadly, the political choice in many western countries boils down to whether heredity or merit should be the basis of structuring society. (Or so I suggest.) Those on the ‘heredity’ side argue that people should be allowed to accumulate wealth, keep it, and pass it on – along with he benefits that come with it – to their children or whoever else they wish. This idea obviously appeals to those who are already rich, which is why the rich tend to support parties that espouse it. But it also appeals to those who aspire to be rich, or for whom financial success is the primary metric by which they measure their success in life. It also appeals to people who just dislike the idea of the state interfering in their affairs. All political factions promote and defend certain interests, or classes, but they also promote moral principles that seem to endorse the stand they take. They fly flags, as it were, that give moral cover to the preferences of the interests and classes they support. Parties that support the hereditary principle – we call them right-wing or conservative- tend to fly one or more of the following flags: FREEDOM, FAMILY, TRADITION, PROPERTY RIGHTS, LOYALTY TO ONE’S OWN, OPPOSITION TO OVERBEARING GOVERNMENT. Their opponents see these flags as nothing more than a cynical cover for self-interest. Those on the ‘merit’ side, on the other hand, argue that heredity is a bad way of determining who rises to the top, it holds back people from poor backgrounds, and gives a free ride to people from rich ones. We should all be allowed to rise on the basis of our own talents and hard work. This idea appeals, of course, to those who have themselves risen to – or maintained- their present position through their own talents and hard work, and to those who feel their own talents and hard work have been held back, or have not sufficiently been rewarded. And it appeals to people for whom the metric by which they measure their success in life is not simply money, but things like educational attainment, professional esteem and recognised achievement. So the ‘merit’ idea tends to appeal to people such as academics, artists, journalists and other professionals, who earn a living based on their own knowledge and skill, and in a context where non-financial metrics of success are available. (I’d suggest, for instance, that more such metrics are available for, say, a university lecturer, than for the owner of a haulage business: the former can become eminent among her peers for her knowledge, her publications, the originality of her thinking. The latter is, of necessity, more focused on making money as a way of showing that she is doing well.) Parties that support the merit principle tend to fly one or more of the following flags JUSTICE, EQUALITY, FAIRNESS, RATIONALITY, SCIENCE, EXPERTISE, OBLIGATIONS TO THE WORLD IN GENERAL, A BENIGN AND INTERVENTIONIST STATE. Their opponents (of course) dismiss these flags as a cynical cover for self-interest. (For instance, while the partisans of ‘merit’ esteem scientific expertise, its opponents sometimes suggest that so-called experts are merely bigging themselves up into to enhance their own standing and make money. There is sometimes something in this.) These days, we tend to refer to those on the ‘merit’ side as liberals or ‘the left’, though both these terms have meant different things in the past, and they have certainly not always meant the same thing as one another. Few people, even the most conservative, would completely dismiss the argument for ‘merit’ (though you only have to read a few novels from a couple of centuries ago to see that, in the past, earning a living through ones own professional skills was seen as much lower status than living on the rents from accumulated capital). Similarly, in practice if not in theory, few people, even on the ‘merit’ side, completely dismiss the hereditary principle. Even people who vote consistently for parties that are on the ‘left’ or ‘liberal’ side, tend to accumulate at least some wealth if they can, and pass at least some of it on to their children. But one point that isn’t so often made is that both heredity and merit entail a good deal of luck. It’s lucky to be born rich, yes, but it’s lucky also to be born with above average ability or a special and marketable talent. Some people are born with neither – a lot of people actually – but they have to choose between the parties of ‘heredity’ and those of ‘merit’, asking themselves under which kind of regime – which set of flags – will it be more comfortable to live? Their choices have been less predictable of late. And perhaps this is wise. It’s never a good idea to let people assume your support can be taken for granted. See also: Trust

‘Individual gestures are futile, what’s needed is structural change.’ The great cop-out of the well-to-do lefty. Suppose a man is caught in Thailand having sex with a thirteen-year-old boy. In his defence he says he agrees completely that the whole underage sex tourism industry is wrong, but there’s no point in him personally changing his behaviour because the industry is going to continue whatever he does, and what’s needed is structural change. Convincing?

Having a 3 year old granddaughter has got me thinking about children’s games. There are two kinds, I think. I’ll call them role play games and literal games. Role play games are the ‘let’s pretend’ kind: cops and robbers, mummies and daddies etc. Literal games are the kind where no pretence is required but the players agree to follow a set of rules and to pursue some goal that the game itself defines: tag, for example, or any sport. My dear granddaughter is too small to make this distinction. All games are role play to her. If she and I play hide and seek, she will hide in the same place every time it’s her turn to hide, and still expect me to search the house for her, muttering ‘where can she be?’ When it’s her turn to seek she will still go from room to room telling herself ‘no, he’s not in there’, even if I’ve stayed put and simply pulled a rug over my head. She enjoys the game very much (as I do!), and is always charmingly delighted to find or be found, but it’s all role play. A rule-based literal game is either beyond her or, perhaps more likely, is simply of no interest. Thinking about it, I realise that most games are a hybrid that includes both role play and literal elements. Monopoly for example is a literal game, in the sense that it has formal rules and a set goal, but a lot of the flavour of the game comes from the fantasy element provided by pretend money, rent and so on. Would it have caught on if the properties were just called ‘colour squares’, the money was just called points and instead of ‘go to jail’ the card just read, ‘move counter to square ten’? How about a game like football, though? In a way that is a purely literal game, in that the players are not pretending to do anything they are not doing in fact. But football fans don’t follow it as a literal game. To be sure, part of their enjoyment comes from admiring the skill of the players, but much of the excitement comes, doesn’t it, from that powerful identification with one side or another, which allows supporters to refer to ‘their’ team as ‘we’ – and from the whole mythology that is constructed around the teams: their histories, their reputations, their ancient rivalries… Formally speaking, football may be a literal game but its phenomenal popularity comes from a role play game that’s built around it, in which fans ‘pretend’ they are directly involved in the contest and are not simply observers and paying customers. I was born without this particular gene myself, but otherwise sensible grownups have assured me that they can feel emotionally devastated when ‘their’ team loses. It’s safe emotional devastation, though, isn’t it? Not like the kind that comes from being dumped by your partner, or your house burning down. Role play is meant to feel as real as possible without actually being real: real enough to provide some catharsis, not real enough to upturn your life. And now I’m on this track it strikes me that, even for the players of apparently literal games, there is a psychological role play going on, for otherwise why would it matter if you won or lost? People who enjoy playing literal games are not dispassionately following rules. They are engaged in a psychodrama about overcoming danger and obtaining mastery. For some people, this isn’t ‘real’ enough, and they need to do things that really are objectively dangerous like free solo climbing, or becoming a mercenary. And here we move beyond games into the ‘real’ world, which itself consists of activities that resemble literal games – you follow certain rules in pursuit of goals such as money or success – but often get their flavour from the possibilities they provide for psychodrama, and very often require the playing of roles. So on reflection the distinction between literal and role play games seems less clear than it did when it did when I started. At some point my granddaughter will no longer be satisfied with pretending to hide and pretending to seek and will want to really hide and really seek – but the pleasure she takes in the game and her motivation for playing it may not be so very different.

I have a story which I wrote when I was four or five. The full text is as follows: Once upon a time there was an old man he lived in a church but he didnt like it The man cried very loud so he said I want a house to live in He heard the door bell He peeped out of the window and saw somebody he would like Now it was evening and the person said can I live with [you] Yes please said the man I will said the person. They lived in a lovely cottage and they loved it and they wouldnt move house again A smart car came to fetch the person but the person said I dont want to go and the man in the smart car said you must go and the old man shot the man in the smart car Funny thing is, the story works pretty much like the stories I still write. It takes things from my own life and and mixes them up with imaginary things. There are recognisable autobiographical elements: I had not long moved from a terraced house to a large hollow house which might well have seemed like a gloomy church. Sometime before that, when I was less than 2, so it may well already have been outside of my conscious memory, an au pair girl who had looked after me – and (so I now hypothesise) was warm and fun compared to my depressed and unpredictable mother – had returned to Germany, presumably collected in a car (by a boyfriend, perhaps, or maybe just a taxi driver?) I’ve been told I was very distressed by this, so it seems to me that this story might have been a rewrite of that painful scene but with the difference that its protagonist had some power – murderous power, no less! I like the old man’s smile as the smoke and flame comes out of his gun. There’s a primitive magic in stories and pictures. It’s as if at some level we think by naming or depicting things, we can control them. It’s interesting to me how the old man is allowed an age and a gender, but ‘the person’ is given neither, even though in the pictures she is clearly a woman or girl, as if this was someone I wasn’t supposed to name. (Or maybe I was just coy about admitting I liked girls.) I like how the old man reaches out towards her from his window with both arms when she’s still outside his front door.

I was having a dream which I wasn’t enjoying: it was one of those anxiety dreams where you are trying to get somewhere but are constantly thwarted. I was dimly aware that I was dreaming, and that I would prefer not to be, but I had no idea how to stop, or where I would find myself if I did stop. Coming to a busy city park, I approached a group of people and asked them for their assistance with waking up. But they assured me that this truly was the real world and not a dream, pointing out to be me how detailed the scene was and assuring me that you don’t get that kind of clarity in a dream. I remember in particular they pointed out how you could see every single brick in the wall of a nearby building. I still wasn’t convinced, but I could see these people weren’t going to be any help to me, so I turned away and somehow, by a great effort of will, I abolished the world I was in and found myself instead in a strange dark place, with two windows whose curtains were very dimly lit by the street outside. It seemed as strange as anything in the dream so far, and I didn’t immediately recognise it, but it was in fact the bedroom where I’d been lying asleep. Experiences like this have, I’m sure, contributed to the idea that this world we inhabit isn’t the final reality, and there is another world beyond or behind or beneath it. And I have to say that, though on the whole I don’t think there’s world beyond this one, I can’t really see any good reason to completely dismiss that line of thinking. After all, the park in the dream world really did feel real, and even though I had already had some sense of a world beyond, I didn’t doubt that those people I talked to were real people who might really be able to help me.

Recently I came across this conversation that took place sixty years ago between C. S. Lewis, Kingsley Amis and Brian Aldiss. In particular I was struck by what Lewis had to say about his novel Perelandra (aka Voyage to Venus), which is set on a Venus almost entirely covered with ocean: ‘The starting point of the second novel, Perelandra, was my mental picture of the floating islands. The whole of the rest of my labors in a sense consisted of building up a world in which floating islands could exist. And then, of course, the story about an averted fall developed. This is because, as you know, having got your people to this exciting country, something must happen.’ Amis observes ‘that [having to make something happen] frequently taxes writers very much’. Readers want a plot – I do myself as a reader – but it isn’t necessarily what most interests the writer about their book. (The narrator of my novel Tomorrow, who wants to write a book that works without a plot, is a case in point.) Aldiss, on the other hand, is surprised to learn that Perelandra’s treatment of the Christian idea of the ‘fall’ was not the starting point, and was only developed in order to make the imagined world come alive. I was surprised too. Lewis’s science fiction trilogy, like his more famous children’s books about Narnia, is so very much infused with Christian themes, that one assumes that they were his original purpose in writing them. But Lewis wanted to write about a world with floating islands. The reason he came up with a story that included those themes, is that he understood the world in those terms.

Tomorrow is out in paperback today. Many thanks to all the people who wrote to me in response to my offer to give away 12 free copies to celebrate. I’m applying a very complex algorithm (?!) to those requests to decide on the winners (it includes such important metrics as ‘did the requester come from the same town as my grandfather?’) and will be sending out copies tomorrow. If you weren’t successful, my apologies – I only have a limited number of copies to give away – and thanks very much for your interest anyway.

The so-called culture wars have a tendency to map all debates into two pre-existing camps: us and them, and this can result in certain positions becoming associated with one side or the other in a way that seems almost arbitrary. (Why, for instance, would we associate concern about the environment more with social liberalism than with social conservatism?) This polarising tendency appears to be particularly pronounced in America but my sense is that it is more pronounced in Britain than in other European countries. If this is true, I wonder whether it is a product in part of ‘first past the post’ electoral systems which tend to result in a competition for power between two dominant parties, and make it hard for third parties to make headway? (For isn’t that what we mean by ‘culture wars’: the intellectual equivalent of an adversarial two-party system?) Anyway, I think it may be partly as a result of this kind of binary thinking, that Liberalish, Remainish people often lump the Brexit vote together with the election of Trump, as if they were exactly the same phenomenon. This is understandable but lazy. Of course there are large overlaps, but there were people who voted for Brexit who wouldn’t have dreamed of voting for Trump, and there were reasons for voting Brexit that had nothing to do with Trump-style nationalism. So much of politics is about projection. ‘We’ project things we don’t like onto ‘them’ and mock the things they value, while projecting everything that is good and virtuous onto the things we do value. Indeed the very fact that ‘they’ despise something, makes us value it even more, to the point of uncritical idealisation. A narrative emerged among some Remainers, for instance, in which they mocked or condemned patriotism but declared themselves proud Europeans. But is there any moral difference between identifying with a country and identifying with a continent? (If there is, I’d be interested to know what exactly is the the land area required for identification with a piece of territory to become virtuous?) Breaking away from larger entities, defending the integrity of large entities, and joining together to form larger entities are, it seems to me, all quite common political processes. They can all be presented as progress, and can all in different circumstances be associated with political positions that may be described as left-wing, right-wing or neither. I find myself imagining a parallel timeline where it’s the right-wingers who are the biggest fans of the European project, because they want to enhance and perpetuate the global power of the wealthy, developed, culturally Christian countries that once divided the world between them. and it’s the fascists in particular who want to unite the ancestral homeland of the white race into a single giant state. (The lefties in this universe would be advocates for organisations such as the Commonwealth or the Francophonie that build links between countries across the global North-South divide.) If you imagine something that seems plausible, it sometimes turns out to already exist. (I didn’t know that ‘rogue planets’ were really a thing, for instance, until after I’d invented one for a story.) After writing the above, I learned that the British Fascist leader, Oswald Mosley, did indeed advocate uniting Europe into a single state.

Someone quoted the following quite widely-cited passage from M John Harrison in something I read recently: ‘Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unnecessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done. ‘Above all, worldbuilding is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, and makes us very afraid.’ [More context here] Do I agree? Well, it depends what kind of worldbuilding he means. Some worldbuilding is necessary to any sort of story-telling – all stories need a context of some kind, and sometimes the context is at least as important as any of the characters – but some worldbuilding isn’t necessary in that way, and too much of it can be counterproductive, even if it doesn’t make us ‘very afraid’. Of course Harrison is right that for a writer to construct a whole world is in any case impossible. Even to precisely describe a wooden chair would take more words than the word count of an entire library of novels. The reader must be allowed to do much of the work (work to which we are well accustomed, since in life also, we must assemble a sense of a complete world from a collection of fragments and guesses.) Harrison’s own novel The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is actually, I’d say, a rather good piece of worldbuilding. The story ostensibly takes place in contemporary England, partly in London and partly in the Midlands, but the setting is an imaginary place nevertheless, and one of the main pleasures of reading the book, and the thing that most lingered in my mind afterwards, is this place’s peculiar, queasy, dreamlike flavour. (The one moment that jarred for me was when the narrator mentioned ‘the debacle of Brexit’, thus ceasing to be the unfolder of a fictional world and becoming just M. John Harrison talking about this one.) The Sunken Land is saturated with watery imagery: flooded fields, flooded houses, flooded gardens, dampness, houseboats, phials of muddy water, things that live in water, the River Thames, the River Severn, taps, kettles, toilets, a map of the oceans, the pools that form in sodden fields where you can still see grass and flowers beneath the glassy surface… This squelchy stuff, which all of us can easily assemble in some form or other from our own watery memories, comes together in the book to form an extended metaphor for the main protagonist’s depressed, sunken state (and, in a less clearly defined way, a metaphor also for the country we live in), so it’s absolutely essential to the whole enterprise that we enter into it. But he coaxes us to do this, not by precisely describing and explaining everything, which would be impossible (as he says), but by convincing us that he has immersed himself in it. Lots of novels fail to do this. I have given up reading many books because I can’t experience their settings as anything more than clumsy cardboard cutouts, which no one has ever really inhabited. And if even the author hasn’t been there, why should I as a reader even try? But my point here is that this is worldbuilding, and there wouldn’t be much left of The Sunken Land without it. What Harrison dislikes, then, is not worldbuilding per se, but a particular kind of worldbuilding in which the author gets over involved in making stuff up for the sake of it, fussily providing piles of detail which have no thematic purpose and get in the way of our own imaginations. The classic case of this is Tolkein’s imagined languages, alphabets and the whole vast historical/mythological backstory he created for the Lord of the Rings (though, to be fair, he summarised much of this material in appendices to avoid overloading the books themselves). Tolkein clearly had fun coming up with all this detail and, since I used to make up languages, alphabets and mythologies myself as a kid, I understand the pleasure of it. It’s the sort of activity that feels comfortable and safe because it’s intellectually engaging but also emotionally neutral, a bit like doing crosswords, or sorting out a stamp collection, or playing solitaire on your phone. (These days I look things up on Wikipedia that have no bearing on anything important to me at all. I find it restful.) I don’t myself see anything sinister in this sort of activity, but it certainly doesn’t have much to do with story-telling, or the literary arts, and most of us probably wouldn’t want to feel that we’d spent too much time on it at the cost of other more lively and more outward-looking pursuits. It can be an escape from stress, though, and readers as well as writers find it so, which is where the ‘nerdism’ comes in. Some people enjoy absorbing themselves in the minutiae of imaginary worlds such as Tolkein’s, or J K Rowling’s. Some people learn to speak Klingon, or enact scenes from their favourite fictional universes, taking a holiday from the real world in those non-existent places. The kind of worldbuilding that Harrison disapproves of is (I think) the construction of these sorts of intricate non-places to hide in, something that is often referred to as escapism by those who dislike science fiction and fantasy. I’m sort of with him. Yet at the same time I […]

Two kinds of statement seem to come from the more radical wing of climate change activists: (1) Unless we end greenhouse gas emissions in the next few years it will be too late and we will see a catastrophic collapse of civilisation and of the biosphere, (2) We will only end greenhouse gas emissions if we completely get rid of the present capitalist political/economic system. While I accept the possibility that both these statements may be true, I really hope they’re not, because there is absolutely no way that a completely new and fully functional political and economic system is going to be constructed in the next few years. I mean, it’s not even as if we have blueprint of how such a system might work. You can’t just say you want ‘a society that values people more than profits’, or ‘a society that lives in harmony with nature’, and call that a plan! How are resources going to be distributed? Who is going to be in charge? (Oh, the people are going to be in charge are they? Is that the same ‘people’ who voted for the governments you say aren’t doing enough?) What is going to prevent the pursuit of short term gains that lead to long term harm? What incentives for work are there going to be? What is going to prevent the system being hijacked by its own elites, like Communism was? etc etc. Lots of different kinds of people have their place of course, and this may in part be a matter of temperament, but speaking for myself, I am much less impressed, when it comes to combating climate change, by radical heroics than I am by meticulous practical work. XR cofounder, Roger Hallam, apparently thinks that nothing will change without a major insurrection that leads to large number of activists going to prison. I can’t see myself that large numbers of people being sent to prison will necessarily have the desired effect. I can imagine all sorts of possible consequences of insurrections of that kind, including the rise of authoritarian governments with no interest in climate change at all. Remember that Lenin believed he was leading the Russian working class on the fastest route to socialism – and that Russia ended up with petro-capitalism and Putin. Personally I’d rather see large numbers of people working on problems such as mass energy storage, affordable green fuels, and carbon neutral cement. It’s solving problems like these -and the political and business headaches that come with them – that’s going to stop climate catastrophe. Utopia can wait.

Idea for a detective series: Inspector Sane is clever, skilled, and emotionally mature, and is thus an asset to the force, but is also happily married, observes appropriate professional boundaries when dealing with suspects and witnesses, is not a heavy drinker, does not suffer from depression, is not haunted by ghosts, operates strictly within the rules, and does not act as if in a one-person crusade against the forces of evil. In particular Inspector Sane tries very hard not to work outside paid hours and is frequently seen stubbornly negotiating for time off in lieu if forced by circumstances to work late. All these driven, maverick, fucked-up detectives you actually see on TV! (a) They valorise the idea that there is something noble about a police officer who refuses to be accountable (do we really want that?), (b), more generally and perhaps even more insidiously, they valorise the idea that it is admirable -heroic even- to prioritise work over family, over personal relationships and even over mental health. (Thoughts prompted by learning that my daughter and her husband, who have nothing to do with the police, have been expected to work to 10pm on a regular basis.)

I haven’t read this book yet – it’s on its way to me- but I’m keen to do so because it connects with something that I’ve been thinking for a while, which is that, even in their concern to protect ‘nature’ against the depredations of humans, human beings are anthropocentric. The ‘nature’ people seek to protect is a kind of much loved park or garden that they don’t want to change in any way. For instance, people who worry about species becoming extinct are often in favour of measures that would involve killing large numbers of animals that are thriving and prospering. Red squirrels (‘indigenous’) must be protected. Grey squirrels (originating from North America) are ‘vermin’ to be controlled. ‘Vermin’, like ‘weed’, is an entirely human category which means ‘successful species we don’t like’. Some flightless bird that stumbles about on a small island off New Zealand, and survives only because there are no ground-living animals to prey on it, must be protected by killing any new arrival that threatens it. But possums, introduced to New Zealand by humans, and now thriving there, are vermin to be wiped out. I don’t say that people aren’t entitled to make these choices -I’d be sad myself if red squirrels died out, and sad if New Zealand’s flora and fauna became simply a compendium of European and Australian species. I’m just pointing out that they are essentially aesthetic choices, based on human preferences, and have nothing to do either with animal welfare (I’m sure British grey squirrels and New Zealand possums enjoy being alive every bit as much as the animals they are supplanting) or with protecting nature. Species evolving in isolation, and species competing with one another when circumstances bring them together are equally natural processes (see for instance The Great American Interchange) and are both important drivers for evolution. So, if you deliberately protect species against their competitors, you are actually stopping one of the ways in which new species come into being. British grey squirrels and New Zealand possums may threaten indigenous animals, but, given time, they themselves will evolve and diversify into new indigenous forms. (Llamas, for instance, those most iconic of South American animals, are actually descended from the North American mammals that came south when the two Americas collided, and drove many of South America’s indigenous mammals to extinction.) Admittedly this takes tens or hundreds of thousands of years, and often much, much longer than that*, but the fact that this is longer than the lifespan of human beings or human cultures is our problem, not nature’s. *PS Having since read the book, which gives many examples, I have now learned that new varieties, and even new species, can sometimes emerge far more quickly than this. Nevertheless evolution is a slow process, and presumably even slower if things are done to stop it happening.

I was asked by this website (shepherd.com) to pick a category of book, and then list five favourites in that category. I picked the category ‘hard to categorize’. My list is here. The first four books I’ve been aware of for a long time (since my teens in a couple of cases). The Molly Keane I only came across recently.

I heard a news item on the radio last week about the department store chain, John Lewis, getting ready for Christmas. It concluded with a reassurance from John Lewis that there would be no shortage of lorry drivers because they had put up lorry drivers’ pay and were busy recruiting. In fact, they have put up pay by £5,000. Many other chain stores have done the same. The current shortage of lorry drivers in the UK is due in part to Covid, but there seems to be general agreement that Brexit is also a factor, because companies can no longer recruit drivers from other parts of Europe. I’ve seen this presented in Remainer contexts as another example of how bad Brexit is, but if I was a lorry driver who’d voted for Brexit, I wouldn’t take that view. I’d see it an example of Brexit helping me, just as I’d hoped, and I’d be pleased. Driving lorries isn’t an easy job, and up to now it hasn’t been particularly well paid. £5,000 a year is a big raise. And, if I was lorry driver who’d argued in the past that companies were holding wages down by bringing in workers from poorer parts of Europe, I’d be angry. I’d be angry that up to now I’d been told that this was a myth put about by racists and xenophobes. A very Remainer friend of mine once said that Brexit would be bad because we’d no longer have access to all these excellent plumbers and cleaners from Eastern Europe. Bad for the cleaner- and plumber-using classes perhaps, was my thought at the time, but not necessarily bad for the cleaning and plumbing classes.

I’ve been known to say that September is my favourite month. There’s still a bit of summer left, but also some autumn. Sometimes in September the light has a particularly kind of intensity that’s unique to this time of year. So I love September, but I also hate it. I associate it with coming back from a holiday, when the grass is overgrown and strewn with dead leaves and rotting apples, and I know that I’m going to have to go back to school very soon, or back to work at a job that worries me sick – and when I know that next it will be October, and then November and winter. My feelings about months and seasons are different now from how they were when I was young, because time flows much more quickly – months come and go, seasons whirl round, I never have the feeling that I once did of summer stretching ahead almost forever, or of winter doing so either – but I still have the same ambivalence about this time of year. Assuming I live until my mid-eighties, as my parents did, I’m in the mid-September of my life, which is to say, about three quarters of the way through. At the end of this year I will start receiving my state pension. It will be nice to have of course, but at the same time it is a message from the state: ‘nothing is expected of you any more.’ The fact that nothing is expected doesn’t mean I don’t have anything to give, of course – I think I have a couple more books in me, I still have things to give as a father and a grandfather… – but still, the message is a reminder that I’m entering the final part of my life. I’m not like Frank Sinatra. I do have regrets. I’ve done many shitty things. But I think what I regret most of all is my own timidity, which I think lies at the core of most of those shitty things anyway. Timidity, I’m calling it, though I could call it cowardice: the thing that stopped me from grasping nettles, the thing that stopped me properly confronting things that needed to be confronted. At the root of timidity, or so it seems to me, is a lack of trust in one’s own self: ‘I do not trust myself to be able to deal with this situation,’ the timid person says, ‘and so I’m going to avoid it altogether, and maybe even pretend to myself that I haven’t even noticed it.’ But of course one shouldn’t spend September thinking about all the things you should have done in April or May or June. The winter is coming. No sense in wasting this time too. (Postscript: on reflection, it isn’t particularly original to say that a lack of trust in one’s self causes timidity! After all, ‘trust’ is a synonym of ‘confidence’, and so all I am really talking about is a lack of self-confidence. But interestingly using the word ‘trust’ made the idea seem fresh to me, so that it had the force of a sudden flash of insight! I suppose this is simply because ‘self-confidence’ has become such a widely used term that its meaning has become blunted. When I was a child, teachers also talked a lot about ‘self-respect’, which is a different idea and an important one: more of an ethical principle, a duty towards oneself which is akin to the duty one had towards others.)

I think all belief systems that deal with human conduct are attempts to reconcile two principles. One: self-centredness, our tendency to prioritise our own experience, our own feelings, our own needs. Two: empathy, our ability to recognise that the feelings, needs and experience of others are equivalent to our own. I guess some other animals have no capacity for empathy at all. They experience themselves as being the entire universe. (I wrote a story called ‘Ooze’, in which I attempted to think myself into the mind of such a creature.) But very few humans are completely devoid of empathy. Some people say that what we should strive for is to be completely un-self-centred, and completely empathetic, treating other people’s needs as equally important to our own (there are even those who would have us treat other people’s needs as more important). Such people might argue that self-centredness is not a principle at all. It is simply a falling short. This strikes me as a somewhat empty piety. I say that not just because most of us are incapable of being entirely selfless, but also because I don’t think that would even be desirable. Happiness is only possible because we are able, at least sometimes, to shut out the suffering of others. At any moment of time, someone is being tortured, someone is starving. How could we ever laugh, or fall in love, or savour life in any way, if we were never able to set that to one side, just as we set aside our own future and past suffering? But even our limited capacity for empathy is, for most of us, enough to make it impossible to completely disregard the needs of other people. So our belief systems are all designed to allow us to think of ourselves as ‘good’ even though our behaviour suggests that we are quite largely motivated by self-interest. Christian theology for example includes the idea of original sin -we can’t help being bad- but also includes a way of nevertheless being redeemable by faith, even if not by deeds, a formulation that also rather neatly serves the self-interest of priests, who provide the formula we need to believe in in order to be saved. Under all the theological elaboration, though, this idea does contain a simple truth: we are bad (selfish), but we are not completely bad. It also has the effect of burying the unworkable morality of absolute empathy which some sayings of Christ rather inconveniently imply. (Easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven… etc) Or, another example, Adam Smith argued that the mechanism of the market place meant that more good was done by people pursuing their own interests, than by people trying to be good. This idea is as comforting for rich people as the idea of salvation through faith alone is for Christians, (and of course it isn’t unusual to combine the two). How nice to think that buying nice things and having lovely holidays are actually morally good things to do! But then again, attempts to impose economic systems that are not driven by the pursuit of personal gain have tended to end in tyranny. And, since fear is no less selfish a driver of human activity than the pursuit of pleasure or status, but is a lot less efficient, maybe Adam Smith had a point. Anyone who ever spends any money on nonessential things -and I don’t know anyone personally who doesn’t- is placing his or her own pleasure or comfort in that moment above the needs of people who are hungry, or homeless, or unable to afford treatment for illness. Our awareness of this stops most of us from being entirely selfish, but we remain selfish all the same. One way out is to blame the unhappy for their own misfortunes. Another is to look for others who are more selfish than we are, and build up a sense of moral superiority by condemning them. (It is a common activity to condemn the extravagance of folk who are richer than we are, even though we ourselves are many times richer than most people on the planet.) In this way, morality itself is turned upside down, becoming, not a system of guidance for ourselves, but a means of proving our superiority to others. This technique is as old as history and now forms a staple of arguments on social media.

Just over a week ago, in Bury, in Greater Manchester, a woman called Sarah Hussein was set alight in the street and subsequently died of her burns. It’s surprising how little prominence this story has been given. I only happen to know about it because I saw it posted on social media by someone of fairly right wing political views, who for convenience I’ll call X. X’s angle on this was to compare the coverage given to this Sarah with that given to another Sarah, Sarah Everard, who was kidnapped, raped and murdered by a police officer earlier this year, and whose case was very widely discussed, and made into something of a political cause. Since both cases involved murderous violence directed at a woman by a man or men (the details don’t yet seem to be clear in Hussein’s case but three men were arrested), why, X wonders, did one horrific crime become a feminist cause celebre and not the other? Hussein had a Pakistani background, and X, apparently assuming that her assailants had the same background, seems to think that her case has not been taken up in the way that Everard’s was, because ugly behaviour in a Muslim community can’t be fitted neatly into a liberal narrative, and drawing attention to it risks accusations of racism. X’s belief that the media is controlled by liberals and leftists seems questionable (!) but the underlying point may have some validity: we are all prone to focus on stories that can be fitted into our preferred worldview (or at least into a worldview which we imagine other people expect of us), and steer away from those that don’t. X is doing the very same thing of course. He is picking up on the lack of coverage of this story because he feels this supports a right wing narrative in which people on the left are hypocrites whose claims to be the caring ones are shallow and self-serving (a view of the left, incidentally, shared by my late, and rather right wing, father). It’s agreeable to X, no doubt, to feel himself to be the one saying that a Pakistani woman deserves the same attention as a white one, while those lefties who are always going on about racism remain (as he sees it) silent. It reassures him about the virtue of his own position, the dishonesty of theirs. (They, whoever they are, would of course have a different view.) I’m not sneering at X here, though, because I’m no different. I too notice stories that fit into my own worldview. I’ve picked up on the lack of coverage of this story and X’s reaction to it because both connect with a topic that preoccupies me: the self-serving nature of the narratives that each human individual and each human tribe is constantly telling itself about the world. Can we make anything of a news item like this, I wonder, other than by either ignoring it, or else connecting it up with things we feel we already know? There are people to whom this event is not reducible to a story: first and foremost poor Sarah herself and those who love her. To them it wasn’t a story about horror, but horror itself, the thing we are all constantly seeking to avoid, to manage, to hold at a distance. The rest of us, though, carry on trying to avoid it, or manage it, or hold it at a distance.

Liberal friends claiming not to like this country and to much prefer other countries… Hmmph. This has become more widespread after Brexit, but it’s been around for a long time. I don’t like it. A lot of funny stuff going on, it seems to me, in those kinds of claims. A lot of idealisation of the foreign other. A lot of taking your least favourite Brits (or more usually, your least favourite English people, since there’s been a certain amount of idealisation of Scotland too), and comparing them, not with their equivalents in other countries, but with the foreign equivalents of the English people you do like. A fair amount of ‘classism’ in the mix too: Middle-class folk trying to distance themselves from their ‘own’ plebs in order to ingratiate themselves (if only in their imaginations) with middle class folk in other countries. Jingoistic patriotism is unattractive, but equally so, I think, is the affectation of despising your own country. Parents are not appealing when they’re always bragging about how much better their own kids are than anyone else’s or shoving other people’s kids aside to get the best for their own. But the opposite is, if anything, even worse: parents who put their own kids down and say other people’s kids are better. My subjective feeling is that my children and grandchildren are the best in the world. I know this is subjective and that other parents and grandparents quite naturally feel the same about their own, but it still seems natural and appropriate to feel that way. Not an exact parallel, obviously, but to have a special feeling for my own country seems natural and appropriate in the same kind of way, while similarly recognizing that it is subjective and personal. A special contempt for my own country would no less subjective, but also feels mean spirited and perverse.

Although the current Corvus version of The Holy Machine was published in 2010, I actually wrote it in the mid-nineties. The backdrop for the book is a global phenomenon called The Reaction, in which people all over the world, alienated by liberal, secular, scientific modernism, have reverted, violently, to older religious ways of seeing the world. (I had watched the Iranian revolution and I thought something similar might happen in the West.) In the world of the story, the old liberal order has been overthrown and replaced by theocracy in most countries, including Britain and America. Among others, scientists of any kind are actively persecuted. (My second novel, Marcher, had a similar theme, though here I described a threat to modernity posed by pagan intruders from other dimensions, whose desire to take the world back to the age of the Vikings had a strong appeal among those on the margins of society. The short story, ‘To Become a Warrior’ was a precursor of this novel). In a way, I was proved right. The real Reaction is much more complex and varied than my fictional one -among other things, it was naive of me to think that fundamentalist theocratic regimes would not be perfectly happy to make use of science when it suited them- but it has happened (or would it be more accurate to say, ‘it has begun’?) We’ve seen a shift away from secularism in Palestine, Israel, India, Turkey, America, and the rise of Hindu nationalism, Islamism and Christian fundamentalism. We’ve experienced the phenomenon of Trump, and so-called populism in many countries (a rather vague word, but it seems to mean a kind of politics that privileges the prejudices of the general public over those of the most educated section of the population). And, while scientists are not (yet) actively being persecuted in the way described in the book, there is a distinct anti-science strand in all this: anti-vaxxers, creationists, climate change denialists are all part of it.

R.I.P. dead fly in my window. It died trying to get through a pane of glass to the sunlit world outside. I learned some time ago that when they want to collect semen from a prize stallion they put it with what is called a ‘breeding mount’ – an object that (see link) doesn’t resemble a real horse at all, but does look something like a gym horse with an artificial vagina at one end. My momentary initial thought was that this demonstrated how simple and easy to fool horses were compared to humans. But then I realised this wasn’t the case at all. How is the stallion climbing onto the breeding mount more stupid or easy to fool than, say, a human male jerking off over porn? At least the breeding mount is a three-dimensional object, and not just a pattern of pixels on a screen. In one sense neither is fooled, since presumably the stallion doesn’t think the mount is really a mare, any more than the man hunched over his screen thinks he is really in the presence of another human being. But, since in both cases there is enough there, in certain circumstances, to activate and sustain sexual behaviour, their instincts, in a way, are being fooled: their bodies’ machinery responds as if this was a breeding opportunity, when in fact it isn’t. It isn’t just sexual behaviour that can be so activated. People experience tension, fear, excitement, pity, when watching actors on a TV screen in the corner of their living rooms, or when scanning the black marks on a white page. They know the story isn’t real, but there’s enough there to activate real emotional responses. In fact you could make a case that pretty much the whole of human culture works like this: a vast system of things that remind us of things, that remind us of things, that ultimately remind us of something that’s able to set off some preprogrammed emotion or drive, and allow us in some way to act it out. Flies see the sunlight and head towards it. Their vision isn’t good enough to detect the glass. When they hit it, they perhaps have no other response in their repertoire but to keep on trying to head towards the sunlight. There are two kinds of tragic scenario here. In one of them, an ironic one, the window is actually partly open, and all the fly would need to do would be to crawl over the lip of the upper window frame and it would be free. But that would mean not heading directly towards the light, and many flies die without ever learning that the way out was only ever a few inches away from them. Flies are relatively simple creatures, but all the same there is nothing uniquely fly-like about this scenario, any more than there was anything uniquely horse-like about the breeding mount one, and it’s equally easy to think of human analogues. I would guess that psychotherapists might see their job as helping people to stop beating uselessly on the glass, and help them find a way to the part of the window that’s open. In the second scenario, the window is closed. There is no way out. The fly can either beat on the window until its life is over, or simply give up, and live out its life inside the closed room. In some analogous human situations, it’s hard to know what the right choice would be. Is it better to accept that the outside world is lost forever, and settle for imprisonment in the dreary, empty room – or better to refuse to give up, to continue the struggle right through to the end, even when to an outside observer, it’s obvious it can never succeed?

Gnostics saw the material world as a cage in which the spirit was trapped. Christianity (like other religions) has been preoccupied with the idea of the soul needing to free itself from base, animal instincts. But oddly at the same time as characterizing our animal nature as something to be struggled against, Christianity has insisted that ‘unnatural’ behaviour is wrong: homosexuality, contraception, feminism have all been portrayed as going against the natural order of things. Progressive liberal morality, which sees itself as supplanting those old moral codes, is nevertheless their heir. It is no longer stern about sexual continence. It sees sexual diversity as something to be celebrated, and gender, or the roles to be played by people of each biological sex, as a choice, rather than something to be imposed or enforced. But there is still, in progressive liberal morality, that same sense that our animal nature is something to be fought against. It’s just that other aspects of our biological nature are now the focus: our tendency to form hierarchies, our tendency to favour our own family and our own tribe. Progressive liberal morality still expects people to struggle against what comes naturally to them. Any morality must, I suppose. And liberal moralists get confused, tied in knots, just like the old moralists. There are tribes of anti-tribalists, who look out in contempt at the tribalists beyond their circle. There are hierarchies of anti-hierarchalists, with powerful opinion-formers at the top who lay down the anti-hierarchical doctrine, and armies of followers below to hound those who do not conform. (History shows how easily the religion of the God of Love turned its hand to torture and murder, and how quickly the political doctrine of equality created its own godlike despots.) These days people fight human biology on its own ground, by modifying bodies and body chemistry with surgery and medicine, and even altering the genetic code. We now have alternative bodies too in the form of thinking machines which one day may have souls of their own. Some people, weary of the endless struggle between humanity and itself, speak of evolving a new a better kind of being: superhumans, robot saints. But I don’t believe that a self-reflecting being could exist that didn’t experience the conditions of its own existence in the same ambivalent way that we do. Is a human being happier than a lark, or kinder than a lark is to its fellow creatures? If not why would we expect a superhuman to be happier or kinder than we are?

I went to the 70th birthday party of a friend recently. Since she has friends who are older than herself as well as friends who are younger, I was among the younger people there, but I’ll be 66 at Christmas, so I was very definitely part of the same generation as the people there in their seventies. I was in a group of old people with white hair, and brittle skin, and stiff limbs, and I was one of them. It is a cliche, and only partly true, to say that I don’t feel old. In some respects I certainly do feel old. I have arthritis. I have health conditions which I’m now stuck with. I ache in the mornings. I have to pee at least three times every night. I have to make a effort to stand up from a sitting position. I am a granddad. It’s not all bad, and that last is definitely one of the nice parts. Another thing: my parents are dead, and have been for several years, which to be honest is also one of the nice parts. They were not bad people, and I felt affection for them, but all my life their neediness felt like a ball and chain which I had to drag around behind me . Latterly, neither of them wanted to carry on living and both of them deliberately hastened their own deaths. The fact that they no longer wanted to live was part of the burden, and now I’m free of it. Another freedom I have now comes from having a pension. I don’t have to work unless I want to. This is obviously also a nice part (and perhaps especially so for a writer). I well remember, a few months after finally retiring from my last part-time day job as a university lecturer, suddenly realising how lucky I was to have an income until the day I die (not particularly high, but perfectly livable), and giving a little whoop of relief and delight at this new freedom which I have, whether or not I deserve it. The only downside is that it’s a reminder that I’m in the last part of my life, I am in the part of my life where society no longer demands anything of me. The sense in which I don’t feel old – and I remember my mother saying the same thing- is that it feels like the same me looking out through my eyes as looked out through those eyes when I was 21, still grappling with essentially the same things.

My new book Tomorrow came out a month ago. Normally, I’d have another book well on the way by this stage, but I haven’t. Plenty of ideas, plenty of scenarios and first chapters, but nothing that seems to want to crystallize into a book. This is more of less the situation of the narrator of Tomorrow, a would-be novelist who can’t seem to get started on a book. It worked well for me when I wrote that book, the story just flowed out of me, but it’s not something I can hope to pull off more than once. I can’t find the exact quote but the poet Ted Hughes said something about having to find a way to evade his mental policeman in order to write. Sounds right to me. You can’t keep using the same trick because the policeman gets wise to it. You have to find another.

Interview here with Chris Gregory, at Alternative Stories, interspersed with readings by actors from my books (Including preview of my next novel, Tomorrow.)

Here’s an audio drama put together by Chris Gregory for his Alternative Stories and Fake Realities podcast, based on an extract from Two Tribes. You’ll see the names of the actors when you click the link. What makes this a exceptional feat is that the actors were not together in the same room, each one recorded their lines separately – or rather several versions of each line- and Chris G selected the delivery he thought worked best, spliced them together, and added sound effects. It’s constructed around a central scene in the book where Harry and Michelle, meeting for the third time, go together to the Tate Modern in London, where they have their first big row.

Although told from 250 years in the future, the main part of this book deals with a Cambridge-educated North London architect (Harry), and his relationship with a hairdresser from a small town in Norfolk who left school at 16 (Michelle). When I described this to my friend Ian, his immediate reaction was ‘well, that would never happen’. You’d need to read the book to judge whether he was necessarily right, but it’s interesting, I think, that such a relationship seems so unlikely. I’m sure he wouldn’t have reacted in that way, if for example, I’d said the book was about a relationship between Harry and another architect who had, say, an Indian Hindu background. Nothing particularly unlikely about that. Which suggests to me that the cultural gap between different ‘cultures’ is actually smaller than the cultural gap between different classes. Over much of my lifetime there was a kind of alliance between Harry’s class (which is also my own) -the liberal professional class- and the working class, both of which tended to vote Labour (just as both tended to vote Democrat in the US). In recent years, and notably in the Brexit vote, that alliance has fallen apart. Isn’t that what we really mean by the rise of ‘populism’? And that was the background against which I wanted to foreground Michelle and Harry’s relationship. Two Tribes on Hive. Two Tribes on Amazon

Two Tribes is out in paperback this week, so here’s a short post to celebrate. (More info about the book here.) This is a book with a simple moral, which (adapting Solzhenistyn) could be summed up as ‘The line between good and evil does not pass between those who like the European Union and those who don’t.’ Or: ‘It’s a mistake to assume you’re one of the good guys, just because you and your friends think you are. Pretty much everyone thinks their lot are the good guys.’ Or: ‘Just because someone doesn’t agree with you about politics, doesn’t make them a monster.’ Although mainly set in the aftermath of Brexit, it isn’t really about Brexit. It’s about social class, and specifically about the complicated relationship between the liberal middle classes and the working classes in Britain, and the way that relationship is changing. I’m very proud of it. Here’s another moral. ‘When there is more than one elite, each elite condemns the elitism of the others, but denies its own.’ Two Tribes on Hive. Two Tribes on Amazon