Blog | Chris Beckett's Fiction

Good guys and bad guys

I was very pleased to be asked to take part in a conference at University College Dublin earlier this month called Alternative Realities: New Challenges for American Literature in the Era of Trump, and then to take part in a panel discussion at the Museum of Literature in Dublin with the other keynote speakers, Aleksandar Hemon and Karen Bender, and the conference organiser Dolores Resano. I had a great time.

The following is (more or less) the text of my keynote speech.

Two Tribes

‘Bursting with brilliantly thought-provoking ideas on almost every page, Two Tribes is one of these rare novels that leaves you looking at the world in a new way.’ James Walton, Reader’s Digest.

‘Read this for his mordant dissection of tribalism — why the sense of belonging can become so desperately destructive.’ Simon Ings, The Times.

‘Brilliantly and chillingly imagined.’ Jude Cook, The Guardian.

‘Two Tribes holds up a mirror to our fractured times, stripping away the shallow concerns of contemporary politics with razor-sharp observations.’ Jamie Buxton, The Daily Mail.

Most of the story takes place in the latter half of 2016 and the beginning of 2017, and is about a brief love affair between a man and a woman who come from opposite sides of the Brexit divide and from very different backgrounds. But it’s told by a future historian in the harsher and bleaker England of 2266.

Some personal thoughts about this book:

…I don’t think it’s my job to exaggerate the ugliness of rival tribes, or big up the heroism of my own…

…Just as we see through every religion but our own, so we tend to assume that the flags flown by rival groups are either the product of delusion, or a cover for self-interest, but take our own flags at face value...

...I was very saddened by the referendum result, but I thought to myself, how would it be if instead of looking at all this as me living in an island of correctness in a sea of error, or an island of decency in a sea of intolerance, I was to look at it more in the way that, say, an outsider looks at the political geography of Belfast…

Online reviews:

Review by Robin Brooks (GeekDads), here.

Review by Sarah Brown (‘Harry’s Place’), here.

Review by Matt Bone (Boney Abroad), here.

Review by Gareth D Jones (SF Crowsnet), here.

Review by Matt Finch (Mechanical Dolphin), here.

Review by Nick King (Resilience.org) here.

Full Guardian review here.

Full Daily Mail review here.

My next book…!

This is my next book, due out in summer 2020. Most of the story takes place in the latter half of 2016 and the beginning of 2017, and is about a love affair between a man and a woman who come from opposite sides of the Brexit divide and from very different backgrounds. But the story is told by a future historian in 2276.

Building other worlds

I’ll be at Waterstones in Cambridge on Monday 25th November for this event, with Jane Rogers, Andrew Bannister and Tiffani Angus.

On 28th, I’ll also be doing a talk in Cambridge at Milton Road Library.

Wind Power

In the third quarter of 2019, for the first time ever, more electricity generated in the UK came from renewable sources than from fossil fuels. 20% of the total came from wind power. We ought to be celebrating this milestone.

Of course this is not enough, and of course electricity generation is only one of the sources of human-generated CO2 in the atmosphere. There is also transport to address, and deforestation, and meat production, and fossil fuel use for heating… And if there is to be any possibility in the long run of establishing some kind of equilibrium again, the human population of the Earth needs to stabilise.

But the growth of renewable power is something to celebrate all the same. Windpower was a hippy pipedream when I was young, but now it’s a giant industry that generates one fifth of the electricity we use in Britain. People say nothing is being done about global warming, but this isn’t true, and is not helpful because it just invites cynicism and resignation. Some of the right things are being done, and on a pretty large scale too. They just need to be scaled up even more.

No longer a hippy pipedream! Wind turbine blades passing through Edenfield . Photo by Paul Anderson.

Telling the story of us and nature

I was very pleased to be asked to take part in the ‘writer’s rebel’ event last night as part of the Extinction Rebellion protest going on in London. The request was that I do a short reading of my own choice, as one of a number of writers doing the same. Having agonised all week about what to read, I ended up sitting down and writing the following a few hours before the event:

Greenland

President Trump’s proposal to buy Greenland has been greeted with ridicule and cited as evidence of his mental instability and inability to govern. I’m not so sure. The very existence of America demonstrates that countries grow by acquiring territory from others, whether by conquest, manipulation or purchase. Alaska, at the time another very sparsely populated Arctic territory, was obtained by purchase, and Trump is not the first American president to propose buying Greenland as well: Truman suggested it in 1946.

Greenland was a strategic asset even then because of its position in the western Atlantic. And now it’s far more valuable. As the Arctic melts, new seaways are opening up to the North of Canada, for which Greenland would be a gateway; Greenland’s mineral wealth is becoming more accessible; and Greenland itself is a very substantial piece of real estate -at 2 million square kilometres it’s three times the size of Texas – with a tiny population (less than 60,000), and a small and distant mother country (Denmark). Farming is already possible in a small area of the country, and global warming will make more and more of its territory available for development and human settlement. As I tried to show in America City, as many parts of the world become uninhabitable due to global warming, Arctic territory is going to become a very valuable asset indeed.

The history of oil demonstrates that when big powers need something that’s in another country, they find ways of taking it. (So does the history of rubber, or spices, or gold…) I’m sure Trump has blurted something out that is being seriously discussed behind the scenes. And perhaps it’s not even a case of blurting it out, but rather of deliberately softening the ground. The more often a thing is spoken about, the more possible it seems.

Greenland would be laughably easy for America to acquire. I very much doubt if Trump will be the last President to talk of taking it, and my bet would be that Greenland will indeed be annexed to America at some point in the coming century.

Meanwhile the Amazon is burning. The politics of climate change are truly upon us. A time will soon come when obsessing about whether or not Britain should be part of a European bloc will look like the displacement activity it really is.

The Land of Grunts and Squeaks

In the anthology, Once Upon a Parsec, edited by David Gullen and published by Newcon Press in June 2019.

Reprinted in The Best of British SF 2019, edited by Donna Scott and published by Newcon Press, 2020.

Cover of anthology

Audio version of The Peacock Cloak

George Hrab has recorded an audio version of my story ‘The Peacock Cloak’ (a particular favourite of mine), here on Starship Sofa.

Podcast discussions of Dark Eden (and an interview)

Spectology have recorded not one but two very detailed discussions of Dark Eden. The ‘pre-read’ discussion is here. The ‘post-read’ discussion (i.e. the one in which spoilers are allowed) is here. They like the book a lot, which I’m obviously delighted about.

Following these two podcasts, Adrian from Spectology did an additional podcast in the form of an interview with me, which you can find here.