Blog | Chris Beckett's Fiction

Dreams and stories

A story written in a dream is one thing, but of course dreams themselves are stories, protypical stories that everyone weaves for themselves in the night, whether or not they think of themselves as story tellers.

Like good stories dreams are constructed of disparate elements and have many layers, bringing things together that in the ‘real’ world may not seem close, but which are connected in some way at the level of meaning. And in dreams, as in stories, things of the mind may transformed into tangible objects out there in the world. Once I spent a day walking in woods with a friend, during which I pretended to carefree, though all the time a big secret was burdening my mind. As I sank into sleep that night I found myself back in the woods, and saw a brontosaurus tiptoeing delicately through the trees: the abstract ideas of bigness and secrecy succinctly captured in concrete form.

Of course, like stories, dreams often come from places which we are not consciously aware of. Freud saw them as rising from the unconscious, and being manifestations of our forbidden desires. I only partly buy that. Yes they can be manifestations of desires, but in my experience dreams can also be wiser and less driven than my waking self. Sometimes in dreams, what seem alluring temptations when I’m awake, are revealed to be drab and tawdry. And often dreams make things clear to me that I find confusing or overwhelming in waking life. That tiptoing brontosaurus was not a symbol of desire, but a succinct summing up of what, in essence, that day had been.

I think in waking life, time and literal space can overly dominate our thinking. We see things stretched out across time, scattered across space, and imagine that this matrix – this grid – defines their true relationship. But I think there’s a level of the mind that isn’t fooled by this. It works in an entirely different kind of space, that you might call the space of likeness. (After all, even in waking life we use the language of literal space to describe relations of likeness and difference.)

All the while, as parts of our brain beaver away at understanding causal connections within the matrix of space and time, other parts of our brain are weaving this entirely different kind of space constructed of metaphors, similes and associations. It’s a space that disregards proximity, category, causality and scale, and it’s a big source of invention, intuition and lateral thinking. Dreams are the purest manifestation of that alternative space, but all good stories dip into it too. So useful is dreaming, in so many ways, that we’ve found a way of doing it in waking life.

Dream stories

I often have dreams in which I find new things in familiar places or unearth new events in my past. I discover an extra room in my house which I’d forgotten was there, for instance, or recall a place I once stayed where I was exceptionally happy and at home. In the real world, I’ve kept goldfish for most of my life – why I’m not sure, but in my dreams goldfish seem to stand for plenty and abundance – and I quite often dream of fishponds that I’d forgotten I had. These are all delicious dreams and, even when I’ve woken from them and realised that the room, or the fishpond, or the event in the past isn’t actually real, I still feel comforted.

One dream of this type that I have from time to time involves stories that I’d forgotten I’d written. It might be a short story published in some obscure magazine which has gone out of print, or a book published by a small press that’s no longer trading, but whatever narrative the dream supplies, I remember the existence of a additional story, over and above the ones I already knew about. For me my books and stories are, like my goldfish, reassuring signs of abundance and fecundity, so the discovery of stories I’d forgotten I’d written is a deeply satisfying thing.

I can never recall the stories themselves when I wake up, but I’m left with tantalising glimpses of what they were like. They’re not science fiction or fantasy, but nor are they shackled by realism and its tedious need to reproduce quotidian life. (These stories exist after all, only in dreams, and dreams disdain realism). There is just a hint in them of Arthurian romance, but by that I don’t mean that there are knights in armour in them, or archaisms, or damsels in distress. I’m just referring to the sense I took from those stories as a child of a forest, a matrix, through which a traveller could move and encounter events which aren’t linked together in a single narrative stream. I get the same sense sometimes from stained glass windows, where different stories, or different episodes of the same story, can take place simultaneously, as if in a place outside time.

My dream stories do not have plots. They aren’t dramatic. There are events in them, or at least encounters and scenes, but they manage to work, somehow, without that tiresome need to bring everything together at the end, which so often diminishes or trivialises what has gone before. The elements in them, in other words, are not parts of a machine. They make satisfying wholes, like paintings do, rather than coming to satisfying conclusions. Stuff happens, and that is enough. The lighting is subdued and shadowy, without being glum.

I’d be curious to know if other writers have these dream stories (as opposed to dreams which become stories, which is another whole thing!)

Voices from Eden

There is already a British audio book version of Dark Eden (read by Oliver Hembrough and Jessica Martin), but I’m very much looking forward to hearing the new US audio book from Random House Audio which is still under development. This will involve 8 actors, so that the book’s various narrators can all have different voices, but what is particularly intriguing about it is that the producer Janet Stark and her cast of actors are attempting to develop a whole new Eden accent for the recording.

What will this sound like? Everyone in Eden is descended from just two people – a white man from Brooklyn, New York, and a black woman from Peckham in South London – so one thing that we can be sure of is that the accent will bear traces of both those different sources. During the early years too, the entire human population of Eden consisted of a single family – mum, dad, kids – and some of the characteristics of Eden English derive from that fact. Parents with little kids tend to simplify their speech, even when speaking to one another, and this effect would be even more pronounced in the absence of other adults (or the written word) to pull the speech of family members back in the direction of adult norms. This is the source of the use of double adjectives for emphasis – something that little children often do – and the tendency to drop direct articles, but it will have had an effect too on pronunciation and on the rhythms of Eden speech.

But all that is only part of the story. The accent of Eden would not just be a blend of its two sources. People play with language, change it like clothes. They get bored with saying things one way, and try another. New things appear and become cool, others fade out of use. Who could have predicted the trend towards a rising inflection at the end of a sentence in spoken English here on Earth, or the more recent fashion of beginning sentences with the word ‘So’? The people of Eden have lived in isolation for 160 years. Less than 160 years after white settlers first arrived in Australia, Australian English had developed its own distinct and instantly recognisable accent, and that was in spite of continuing contact with the mother country, and continuing large scale migration (even today more than 10% of Australians were born in the UK).

I think the spoken language of Eden would be slow. Both the source accents are fast, clipped and urban, but Eden folk are as rustic as it is possible to be, and rustic people tend to speak slowly (think Somerset, Queensland or Alabama). I think too that it would be more musical, more singsong. These are people with no TV, no books, no video games, no movies. The repetition of oral traditions is much more important to them than it is to us. I think they would savour language and linger over it in a way that we don’t.

As to those double adjectives which everyone notices (and some people hate!), I hear them with the first adjective emphasised and drawn out, with a slight fall at the end towards the lower, shorter repetition: B-I-I-I-G big.

But then again, sometimes Eden folk do it the other way round. They just feel like it. That’s what humans are like.

The blog tour continued

Following on from my post in this series, Tony Ballantyne and Una McCormack were the next links in the chain. Links to their posts are below. There are lots of things they say that apply equally well to me. (I guess you expect that with friends!)

Here’s Una’s post. ‘…What the trappings of science fiction allow me to do,’ she writes, ‘is move from the particularities of specific real-world situations in order to think abstractly about… well, everything really…’ Exactly so!

And here’s Tony’s. ‘…I get ideas all the time,’ he writes, ‘and I write them down to be used later, but every so often one idea collides with another and I suddenly get really excited and I just have to begin writing.’ Precisely, and without that collision, there’s no story. It’s the lightning bolt that brings it to life.

Short hairs

Speaking of my expensive education brings to mind a memory from my school days. This would have been in the late sixties, when I was 12 or 13, and I was in a morning maths class. The teacher wrote something on the board and asked me a question which I failed to answer to his satisfaction. So he came over to me, took hold of me by the short hairs in front of my left ear and lifted me by them from my seat. As I dangled there with my eyes watering, he repeated the question until I had answered him correctly

After the class, I remember a boy who didn’t normally have much time for me, gruffly asking me if I was okay, which was nice. It didn’t occur to me to mention this incident to my parents. We were used to these capricious manifestations of adult power, and we accepted them as we accepted bad weather or a toothache. I would have been surprised to learn that I would still be thinking about it after more than forty years.

This isn’t a sob story. I think most people of my generation could come up with something similar or worse (and many younger people too of course) but actually I do think about that incident surprisingly often, and every time I find myself indulging in a fantasy. In my fantasy, I refuse to anwer him, just hang there till he releases me and then pick up my books and walk out.

I wasn’t even close to doing anything of the sort – it was still some years before I became defiant of authority, and even then my defiance to be of a furtive, scatter-gun, self-defeating kind – but I’m quite sure would have learned much more from performing such an act, than from all the maths classes I ever attended.

The blog tour (Q & A)

Thanks to Iain Maloney – his debut novel, First Time Solo is out this year – I’m a link in a chain. The idea is that writers answer four questions on their blog – What am I working on? How does my work differ from others in its genre? Why do I write what I do? How does my writing process work? – and then nominate one or two other writers to do the same. You can see Iain’s answers here. And here are mine:

What am I working on?

I’ve just finished a short story for an anthology edited by Ian Whates (Solaris 3). It’s called ‘The Goblin Hunter’. I’m currently working on another short story.

I’ve recently completed a new draft of Mother of Eden, which will be published by Corvus later this year, and another draft of the new, and quite substantially rewritten, edition of Marcher, also to be published later this year (by NewCon Press). I’m waiting for some editorial feedback on Mother of Eden, and a friend is kindly having a look at Marcher for me. Hence the opportunity for a story-writing interlude.

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

Genre’s a slippery concept. It’s one of those words that we use as if we all mean the same thing by it, but in fact it can mean a number of different things.

Leaving that aside, though, every single bit of fiction that I’ve published has been categorizable as science fiction, in so far as (a) there’s always something in the world of the story that’s different from the world we live in, and (b) that something is always, at least nominally, explainable by science, rather than being supernatural. (I did write one story – ‘The Warrior Half-and-Half’ – where there was a dispute between two characters about whether the latter was the case.)

I couldn’t possibly claim my work to be different from everything else in the science fiction arena, but there are some things quite commonly found in science fiction that I tend to avoid:

I’m not keen on thriller-style protagonists or a thriller-like stance on life: hard-boiled, supercompetent, nonchalantly violent, effortlessly at home with technology. This may partly be because such people are so utterly unlike myself that I find it hard to imagine myself inside their heads, but I suspect that they are equally alien to a lot of people who write about them, and that this is why they often seem rather wooden, as characters tend to be if the author hasn’t been able to sit behind their eyes. I try to give my characters real emotions. Indeed their emotional lives are often what I start with.

I try to avoid overdoing the pyrotechnics. I get quickly bored by books or films in which one fantastic, amazing, stupendous, utterly gigantic thing follows another. I yawn at the idea of yet another incredibly vast spaceship, for instance, or yet another incredibly narrow bridge over yet another bottomless abyss. I’m all for ‘sense of wonder’ – it’s one of the incredients that drew me to SF in the first place, another being the limitless potential for thought experiments of every kind – but if you want to elicit a sense of wonder from your readers, I think it’s often a case of ‘less is more.’

I’m also not that keen on the space opera convention of the galactic empire (though I’ve occasionally toyed with it in short stories). This is partly because (to me) such settings tend to be classic cases of ‘more’ ending up as ‘less’ – if you present a galaxy in which each planet is basically a single nation, and people go back and forth between them in days or weeks, what you have really done is reduced the galaxy to the size of the Earth! – and partly because it just so isn’t ever going to happen. Not that there’s nothing wrong with writing about things that couldn’t really happen, of course – I’ll cheerfully admit that this is true of nearly all of my stuff – but I regret the fact that this particular not-going-to-happen has become so dominant within SF.

Why do I write what I do?

I don’t think I would find it easy to get involved in writing something if there wasn’t at least some sort of personal catharsis involved in doing so. And I think that feeling of catharsis, that sense of getting something out of the darkness of myself and into the daylight of the world, has a lot to do with why I write.

Another reason for writing is to do with my jackdaw-like tendency to collect interesting titbits in my mind, and then spend a lot of time ruminating over them. The things I find interesting – language, evolution, religion, bats, gender, childhood, irresolvable conflicts, octopuses… etc etc – are way too diverse for me to be a specialist in any of them, and in any case (I’m not sure why!) my whole nature shies away from specialising in anything. So writing fiction is a way of connecting all this stuff together into some sort of harmonious whole. Maybe a bit like the glass bead game in that novel by Herman Hesse, if anyone reads his stuff any more.

How does my writing process work?

I came across a quote from Mozart once, in which he said that the development of his musical ideas was something that he was consciously aware of, but the ideas themselves came to him in a way that was outside of his control, as if they’d been given to him by someone else (he may well have mentioned God). I can relate to that. In the past, I could go for long periods, maybe a year or more, without writing anything at all. There just didn’t seem to be anything there, and when I tried to force it, nothing came. But eventually it always did come, apparently from nowhere, and I was off.

Now that writing is my main job (I still have a day job also for two days a week), I obviously can’t take the position that if something isn’t there, I won’t even try. But since I’m writing mainly full-length stuff these days, and since, too, I’ve been writing now for several decades, I always have plenty of material to revise and rework if new stuff won’t come, and I find that if I go back a bit and go over what I’ve already done, I can often build up enough momentum to keep on forward into new territory.

I’ve also learned that sometimes you just have to hack stuff out, even if it feels like there’s nothing there. A project which refused to comes to life at the first attempt, will often, when I revisit it, spring to life at once, as if my mind has been quietly working away at it in the intervening time. This means it’s always worth building up a stock of raw material to come back to and work on later.

Actually, the process is a bit like surfing. You keep paddling back out into the sea over and over again, waiting for the right wave, and trying to stand up at just the right moment. Most times it doesn’t work – you paddle fast, you jump up on the board, but the wave leaves you behind – and then, suddenly and unexpectedly, you’re there.

* * *

Now for the next links in the chain, two friends of mine, and excellent writers both.

Una McCormack has written three Star Trek: Deep Space Nine novels, two Doctor Who novels, and numerous short stories. Her short story, “Sea Change”, was selected to appear in Gardner Dozois’ Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology in 2008.

Una is a fan fiction writer whose writing was so good that she was headhunted by publishers of Star Trek novels. (Yes, I know what I said about space opera above, but I don’t expect everyone to agree with me!) You have to understand the sheer volume of fan fiction that’s out there to get a sense of Una’s achievement in being noticed. There are millions of instances of it on the internet (that’s to say: original pieces of writing, set in fictional worlds known to all of us: Star Trek, Harry Potter, Dr Who, Narnia, Middle Earth). What struck me about her Star Trek novel, The Never Ending Sacrifice, was that its vivid depiction of a brutally hierarchical society read more like Ursula Le Guin than a spin-off from someone else’s TV show.

Tony Ballantyne is the author of the Penrose and Recursion series of novels as well as many acclaimed short stories that have appeared in magazines and anthologies around the world. He has been nominated for the BSFA and Philip K Dick awards. His latest novel, Dream London, was published in October 2013. He is currently working on Cosmopolitan Predators! for Aethernet Magazine.

His shortlisting for the Philip K Dick award seems to me particularly appropriate. The combination of deep darkness and cheerful playfulness in Tony’s writing is reminiscent of Dick, though Tony’s work has a flavour all of its own. In Dream London, dark, nightmarish forces have taken over the city and no one knows what’s happening, or even what’s real.

A new short story

I’ve just completed a new short story (for a forthcoming anthology edited by Ian Whates): it’s called ‘The Goblin Hunter’. It’s good to be writing some short fiction again. I haven’t written any for more than a year.

‘The Goblin Hunter’ has the same setting as two of the stories that appeared in my collection, The Peacock Cloak: ‘Day 29’ and ‘The Caramel Forest’*. On the planet Lutania there’s is an ocean hidden away beneath a forest. Creatures emerge from it every night to play among the mushroom-like trees, including the telepathic ‘goblins’, which disturb the peace of the human settlers by stirring things up inside them they’d rather not think about.

I enjoy writing about this blatantly Freudian place, which was partly inspired by the work of Stanislaw Lem and the Strugatsky brothers, and I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a novel beginning to take shape, down there in the subterranean ocean of my own head.

* ‘The Caramel Forest’ was the basis for this Asimov’s cover by Laura Diehl. I love seeing pictures of my own worlds!

The Goblin Hunter

Published in Solaris Rising 3, edited by Ian Whates. (August, 2014)

A ridiculous comparison

When Michael Gove, The Education Secretary, states his ambition to make state schools indistinguishable from private ones, he is of course saying that they’re not as good. Politicians sometimes say some fatuous things, but this pretty much hits the jackpot.

What he’s doing in fact is pointing at the teachers who take on the harder job and unfavourably comparing them with the teachers who have it easy. It’s as if someone set up a hospital which only ever admitted patients who had an excellent chance of recovery, and its higher recovery rates were then held up as evidence that other hospitals were failing.

I went to private schools. I got good A levels. My kids went to state schools. They got good A levels too. I dare say my old school gets better overall results than their school , but so it bloody well should, seeing as it has an admission process that allows it to pick and choose which pupils it takes, and, except for a few exceptionally able kids who win scholarships, it can only take pupils anyway from the kinds of family who can pay.

I do worry about young Michael’s thinking skills.

The Emperor’s Last Laugh

Because of my new-found interest in drawing, my wife gave me a book recently called A Short Book about Drawing, by Andrew Marr, the TV journalist, who turns out to be a pretty good drawer. It’s a charming book, and much of it is simply about the pleasure to be obtained from the act of drawing itself, but at one point Marr speaks with some regret about the influence of Marcel Duchamp on our conception of art, and about all that has since emerged ‘like a vast glittery spout of magma from Duchamp’s urinal.’

He’s referring to the urinal which, in 1917, Duchamp signed with the name ‘R.Mutt’ and decreed to be a work of art called ‘Fountain’. A work of art from then on wasn’t necessarily a painting or a sculpture. It didn’t even have to be something that the artist had made. It could be anything that an artist chose to designate as such. Indeed, from what I’ve read, Duchamp deliberately chose objects for this purpose which had no meaning or significance to him at all. What a strange, violent, mocking thing to do! It’s as if I were to reprint a telephone directory, call it ‘Contact’ and declare it to be my next novel – and people were to accept it as such, and make themselves read it and think about it as if it meant something!

If anything can be a work of art if an artist says it is (including an object that means nothing even to the artist!) this raises the question of who gets to be an artist. Who gets this strange fetishistic power? In the past artists would have been identifiable to most people, at least to some extent, by the skill evident in their work. Some artists were doubtless much better than others at acquiring wealthy patrons, but some degree of skill in the creation of images would have been a necessary prerequisite also. Now this was no longer the case. An artist could be created by patronage alone. With beauty and meaning set aside, the wealthy could create artists out of whomever they chose, and those artists could then return the favour by taking trivial objects and turning them, for the wealthy, into a kind of gold.

The emperor gets the last laugh, after all. Who cares if the clothes are real or not, as long as they can be bought and sold?