Blog | Chris Beckett's Fiction

What you seem to be saying is….

I read an interview with Steven Spielberg once in which he said making movies was a bit like having therapy, only better: you get to go on at length about things that preoccupy you, but instead of having to pay someone to listen to you, they paid you. You could say the same about writing books.

What’s more you don’t just get to lie on the couch and go on at length, you also, if you’re lucky, hear a thoughtful voice that speaks from across the room when you pause for breath:

‘What you seem to be saying is…’

Here, for instance, are Steven Shaviro’s comments on Dark Eden as ‘speculative anthropology’ (a description of what I was trying to do which I really like.)

And here, from a few days previously, are the comments of Andrew Dunlop who, as an Anglican minister, naturally enough picks up on the Biblical themes that the book draws upon.

I’m grateful to both for their interest.

The L’Aquila Six

I know worse things happen in the world, but I feel very angry about the six Italian seismologists who’ve just been sentenced to six years in jail for manslaughter, for failing to predict the L’Aquila Earthquake. Six years. My father was a scientist. Such a thing would have utterly broken him.

(a) There was obviously no malicious intent on their part (what possible motive could they have for failing to warn of an earthquake if they thought it was going to happen?)

(b) Seismologists around the world confirm that earthquakes are impossible to predict. (Yes, you can identify areas where they are likely to happen, no, you can’t say when.) According to this article here, one of the six did say something that wasn’t accurate, which is bad, but this doesn’t mean that he would have predicted the earthquake if he’d got that particular fact right.

What this story seems to me to highlight is the deeply immature attitude – adolescent even – that our society has towards science. These men are criminalised for failing to warn about a danger that they judged, not to be impossible, but pretty unlikely. But when climate scientists warn about a danger that they judge to be not absolutely certain, but very likely, they are dismissed as alarmists and asked to present incontrovertible proof.

It surely isn’t that hard to grasp that many things in life cannot be predicted with absolute certainty, but may still be more or less likely.

About climate (and a free story)

An article here bemoans the fact that writers of fiction are not writing about climate change. The point is well made. Fiction can’t change the world, but it is a part of culture, and culture, in a way, is a set of priorities, a set of pointers as to what is worth paying attention to.

It’s a bit irritating, though, that Daniel Kramb (the author of this article) didn’t even mention science fiction. Surely this is the obvious fictional mode for writing about future threats to humanity? And science fiction writers do regularly write, one way or the other, about climate change. (See, for example, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Wind-Up Girl.).

I should write more about it myself – I have an idea for a novel on the back burner – but so far my rather modest contribution has been the short stories ‘Greenland’, and ‘Rat Island’. Prompted by this article, I’ll make ‘Rat Island’ available here.

How to write about climate change in a useful way is another question. Appallingly bleak scenarios probably just encourage fatalism, while heartwarming stories of people in the future rebuilding civilisation from scratch after a catastrophe can seem positively appealing (Aldiss spoke of ‘cosy apocalypses’: books like Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids).

One thing writers could do would be to think about the words we use. ‘Global warming’ is misleading, because an average global increase in temperature will result in colder weather in some places, including perhaps the UK. ‘Climate change’ is a bit bland, and invites the thought that the climate has changed many times in the past, from ice ages to warm wet periods when there were no polar ice caps at all, so what’s the big deal? What’s different here is the speed of change, too fast for ecosystems to adapt.

‘Climate collapse’, perhaps, or ‘climate breakdown’?

Für deutsche Leser

Ich freue mich sagen zu können dass ich am DORT.con 2015 als internationaler Ehrengast teilnehmen werde. Weitere Details hier.

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Den ersten Entwurf von „Die Messias Maschine“ verfasste ich vor langer Zeit, 1994, unter dem Schatten eines sich aufbauenden Konfliktes, dessen Angelpunkt – wenigstens aus der Sicht des Westens – die Zerstörung des World Trade Centers in 2001 sein würde. (ein erster Versuch dazu wurde bereits 1993 gemacht)

Diesen Konflikt, oft dargestellt als der zwischen dem Westen und radikalem Islam, habe ich immer als Kampf der Säkularisierung gegen religiöse Autorität gesehen. (Die protestantischen Fanatiker in den USA die den Koran verbrennen und Plakate mit „Gott hasst die Schwulen“ mit sich herumtragen haben sicherlich mehr mit dem Taliban gemein als mit der säkulariserten und wissenschaftsorientierten Gesellschaft in der sie leben.) Ich habe mir versucht auszumalen wie unter dieser Bedrohung, quasi im Gegenzug, die säkularisierte Moderne sich wiederum in einen fundamentalischen, intoleranten Materialismus verwandeln könnte.

Die Geschichte handelt von (a) einem jungen Mann (George), geplagt von einer lähmenden Schüchternheit, der versucht sich zu überzeugen, dass es sich bei seinen Gefühlen zu einem Sexroboter um echte Liebe handelt, (b) dem Sexroboter selbst (Lucy) auf dem Weg zur Selberkenntnis und (c) Georges traumatisierte Mutter, die sich in der virtuellen Realität versteckt um sich nicht dem Leben stellen zu müssen. Die Handlungen im Vordergrund und der schwelenden Konflikt im Hintergrund werden verbunden durch einer Reihe verwandter Dichotomien wie Religion/Wissenschaft, Geist/Materie, Körper/Seele, Anschein/Realität und Sex/Liebe.

Obwohl das Buch in seiner heutigen Form schon 1997 fertig war, hat es eine lange Zeit zum Druck gebraucht. Die Erstveröffentlichung erfolgte 2004 in den USA, durch Wildside Small Press mit einem markantem Titelbild von Wilhelm Steiner. 2012 wurde es von Corvus in in Grossbritannien veröffentlicht.

Holy Machine cover — *Das Titelbild der Ausgaben von Wildside und Cosmos von Wilhelm Steiner*

Auch wenn es in einem anderen Abschnitt meines Lebens geschrieben wurde, ist mir „Die Messias Maschine“ ans Herz gewachsen. Es ist nicht ein Buch für alle – der Hauptdarsteller ist kein Held und bei vielem was er tut kann einem grausen – aber manchen gefällts, manchem sogar sehr. „Das beste Buch dass ich je gelesen habe…,“ schrieb ein enthusiastischer Leser auf Amazon, und „Pflichtlektüre für alle menschlichen Wesen.

P.S. Ich kann kein Deutsch und dieser Text wurde freundlicherweise von Thure Etzold übersetzt. Wenn man aber meiner Mutter Glauben schenken darf, gab es eine Zeit in meiner Kindheit in der ich genau so viel Deutsch wie Englisch sprach. Ich habe es von einer deutschen Au pair gelernt die angestellt war um auf mich aufzupassen.

Als also diese Au pair – der Name war Anke – ihre Zeit in England beendet hatte und zurück nach Deutschland aufmachte, so geht die Geschichte, sah ich vom Fenster zu wie sie das Haus verlies und da habe ich geschriehen,

„Anke sagt, ich hab dich lieb, aber jetzt geht sie!“

Diese rührselige Geschichte, immer wieder von meiner Mutter erzählt, wurde von Anke persönlich zerstört als ich sie vor ein paar Jahren traf.

“Da warst du nur achtzehn Monate alt,” sagte sie, “Einen so komplizierten Satz hättest du nie zustande gebracht, nicht auf Deutsch und nicht auf Englisch.”

Even wimps have a story

I mentioned in a previous post that some people like The Holy Machine a lot, while others don’t take to it.

My guess is that this has a lot to do with the story’s narrator and main protagonist, George Simling. He’s not exactly your stereotypical SF hero. At the beginning of the book, he lives with his mum, has almost no friends, has never kissed a girl, and is so isolated by his paralysing shyness that he tries to persuade himself that advertising signs are speaking personally to him.

What’s more his shyness is not, like many people’s, simply a nervousness about initial contact. It goes deeper than that. He is afraid of being with people. Even when an attractive woman, who he has fancied for some time, shows every sign of interest in him*, he panics and runs off to take comfort with a synthetic woman, rather than deal with the anxiety involved in being with an actual human being with needs and feelings of her own. Yuk. Creepy. Not very appealing at all.

I suspect that whether readers find the the book engaging depends a lot on whether they are able or willing to identify themselves with George, or whether they are inclined to dismiss him, as one reviewer did, as ‘a spineless wimp.’ I guess there are those who quite genuinely don’t get people like him, and others who might get it, but are made uncomfortable by the prospect of having to recognise something of themselves in a man like this, and would prefer to have such people firmly ‘othered’ , by making them into bad guys, serial killers and the like (as not infrequently happens in movies to odd, isolated men who live with their mums).

A spineless wimp is what he is, at least at the beginning of the book. But he’s surely not the only person ever to have found the human world so scary that they find refuges of one kind or another to hide away in**. (George’s mother Ruth is, in a way, even more radically in flight, spending most of her time in a sugary virtual world, and flirting with her own substitute for a real relationship, a construct called Solomon Gladheim.) Whole industries exist to provide such refuges.

I’ve certainly often been guilty of hiding from the world, and retreating into fantasy. (Really retreating, I mean, and not just taking respite.) When I was a child of nine or ten I would spend hours on my own building imaginary worlds inside my head, when other kids were playing together outside. And there have been times in my life when I’ve been almost as isolated as George himself. I’m not proud of that, I’m not saying it’s a good or admirable thing, but it happens to people. And anything that happens to people should be fair game to write a story about.

In fact I’m a bit suspicious of apparently fearless heroes. I know such people really do exist. (Look, to choose just one instance, at the case of Nancy Wake.) And I know some people are largely untroubled by the fears and doubts that beset the rest of us***. But still, most of us experience a lot of fear, and it does us good to face up to and think about that, rather than hide in our rooms and daydream about being the intrepid heroes that we’re not, confidently taking on the world.

* ‘Why on earth?’ you might ask. Well, he’s not bad-looking, and shyness, seen from the outside, can be mistaken for an interesting reserve. Trust me, I know!

** I hardly like to say it, but isn’t this sometimes one of the reasons for SF’s appeal (and one of the reasons why it makes many non-SF readers uncomfortable)? That it can provide just such a refuge?

*** Or perhaps are troubled by different kinds of fears. See for example, John Redlantern.

The innocence of bad guys

I was thinking about this article by Howard Jacobson, in which he talks about the enduring appeal of bad guys in fiction. And I was thinking about our dogs and cat.

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People often describe other people as behaving like animals (i.e. like non-human animals) when they behave badly. This has always struck me as a bit unfair to animals. Animals don’t rape or commit genocide or engage in torture.

But living in a house with animals it strikes me that certain kinds of crime really are very animal indeed: crimes like shoplifting, burglary, picking pockets, mugging, looting, opportunistic, amoral crimes, crimes motivated by nothing more complicated than ‘I’ll have that.’ The hitmen in films like Looper or Pulp Fiction, who kill for a living, without malice or anger, and without regret, strike me as being quite animal. When Amundsen was travelling to the South Pole, he killed dogs that were no longer needed and fed them to the others. I’m sure they tucked in without worry or remorse.

Animals (or at least the ones I’m acquainted with) take things opportunistically and without compunction, and they defend what they’ve taken as long as they think they can win the fight. They are capable of being delightfully and genuinely friendly, but incapable of being kind. They are capable of being horribly aggressive, but incapable of being cruel. If one of them picks up a thorny twig to play with, he’ll bash it against your legs without a thought as he runs by, not out of inconsiderateness, but because he simply doesn’t do that kind of consideration.

They’ve never eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

* * *

Sometimes morality is portrayed as being the opposite to the pleasure principle, but that’s just silly. What point does life have without pleasure? (To help others? To help them to do what?) Pleasure is simply the sum total of things that make life worthwhile, and it just doesn’t make any sense to say that life could have an additional purpose.

Genuine morality is the pleasure principle, but with the rest of the world factored in: other people, other creatures, our future selves. It doesn’t tell us to forego pleasure per se, but it might tell us to forego pleasures that will lead to harm elsewhere, or later on. It doesn’t tell us to pursue suffering, but it might tell us to be willing to suffer here and now for the sake of pleasure elsewhere, or later on.

It’s morally wrong to behave as if you were the centre of the universe, because it’s factually wrong. As a matter of fact, you’re not.

Animals don’t know that, though. They act as if they themselves at this moment were all that mattered. And this works perfectly well for them, because evolution has provided them with appetites and drives that will allow the simple pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain to address longer term or wider needs without them having to even think about it.

But we do know it, and so we do have to think about it. We can only not think about it by lying to ourselves. And that does damage to us, because it requires us to build partitions across our minds.

* * *

And yet there’s a huge price to pay for this knowledge. This awareness that we should think about things beyond our immediate selves and our present impulses, adds layers of calculation and anxiety to every choice we make. It takes away spontaneity.

I think that’s why bad guys are fun to watch. They appeal to us not because they are wicked and knowing per se, but, oddly enough, because of their innocence. They remind us of a kind of innocence and simplicity that animals have and we have lost for good. They remind us of what we had to give up when we ate that bloody fruit.

I haven’t told mine yet

“My kind of storytelling has to add its voice to this universal storytelling before we can say, ‘Now we’ve heard it all.’ I worry when somebody from one particular tradition stands up and says, ‘The novel is dead, the story is dead.’ I find this to be unfair, to put it mildly. You told your own story, and now you’re announcing the novel is dead. Well, I haven’t told mine yet.”

Chinua Achebe, cited by Chimamanda Adiche in LRB.

The drugs don’t work

I was struck by this recent Guardian article, in which Ben Goldacre showed how pharmaceutical companies systematically manipulate the evidence that reaches doctors and the general public about the efficacy or otherwise of their products, cherry-picking good results, suppressing bad or neutral ones.

It tells you something about the immense power of these companies that they can get away with this even in a country like the UK, where their dominant customer is single giant nationwide organisation, with a £100bn budget, and the power of the state behind it. (The English NHS is said to be the fifth largest organisation on Earth, but even so it apparently lacks the clout to say to its suppliers, ‘Either you’re transparent with us or we won’t buy your drugs.’)

For many years now, we have been fed a neo-liberal orthodoxy about the virtues of the unfettered market in which the free choices of consumers will reward efficiency and drive out mediocrity, and for years we have been told that state intervention is stifling and bad. But what stories like this one seem to demonstrate is that big companies actually work very hard to stop consumers making rational choices, and they work pretty hard too to avoid free competition (as the recent LIBOR scandal illustrated). Far from being the enemy of a free marketplace, heavy state intervention looks to me the only possible means of maintaining such a fragile, delicate and deeply artifical entity as a free and fair marketplace.

Without it, ultimately, you don’t get Adam Smith’s Utopian hidden hand. You get the Mafia.

The Long Journey of Frozen Heart

Although the first draft of The Holy Machine was completed in 1994, its origins actually go back to two short stories, both published in Interzone in 1991. One was ‘La Macchina’, which I included in my collection The Turing Test. The story was about two brothers on a trip to Florence, but it included many of the key elements of the book, including the idea of syntecs (robots covered in living flesh), syntec brothels, robots ‘going rogue’ by becoming sentient, and the Holy Machine itself.

The other was ‘The Long Journey of Frozen Heart’. I lifted this entire story to provide the subplot about Ruth Simling and, for this reason, I didn’t include it in The Turing Test collection, feeling that readers of both books might feel a little cheated when they recognised the same storyline unfolding. But I like the story and I’ve decided to make the full text of it available here. (I’ve tidied it up a bit. I seem to have become a better editor over these 21 years!*)

I was standing in a queue in the now-defunct Magnet furniture store, when I came up with this story. Dreamy, melancholy muzak was maundering away in the background, melancholy yet at the same time loveless and mechanical, and the phrase came into my head: The Long Sad Journey of Frozen Heart. (I later dropped the ‘Sad’: I felt that was over-egging it). Within a very short time, the entire story had written itself in my mind, with very little in the way of conscious direction on my part.

Thinking about it now, I wonder if I was thinking about ‘Frozen Journey’, the title given, when it was first published, to Philip Dick’s short story ‘I Hope We Shall Arrive Soon’, on which I was some time later to write an entire dissertation. This has never actually occurred to me before, but there are certainly thematic similarities between the two stories, since both deal with a protagonist trapped in virtual reality, and both include a disembodied and powerful helper. In the Dick story, the protagonist has to be kept in virtual reality if he is to remain sane, though this results in long-term damage to his ability to believe in the real world. In ‘The Long Journey of Frozen Heart’, the protagonist, Mary Louisa Ann (aka Frozen Heart), chooses to leave virtual reality to reclaim her authentic self, even though this will result in her death.

I wanted the story to have a slightly fairytale-like feeling. In the back of my mind was the Hans Andersen story about the little mermaid who chooses to be given human legs and live on land, even though every step she makes there will be agony. And perhaps there’s something of Andersen’s Snow Queen here also (a story which I found wonderful and terrifying when it was read to me as a small child): Gerda’s heroic journey; Kai, with the mirror splinter in his heart, playing with jigsaw pieces made of ice. (There’s a bit of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ in here too, and just a pinch of the Irish legend, ‘The Voyage of Bran’.)

This story, and ‘La Macchina’, and indeed The Holy Machine, all deal with the way in which human beings escape from reality into imaginary worlds, shutting out things that they find unpleasant or difficult or frightening, something that becomes ever more tempting as technology makes possible ever more convincing simulacra: battle without danger, sex without meeting anyone, empire-building without taking risks and without achieving anything real at all. It is the emptiness of these constructs, which can be built and discarded in a moment, that Frozen Heart chooses to leave behind in order to recover her own real beating heart.

The Long Journey of Frozen Heart.

* I’ve also updated it a little. In the 1991 version, the Otherverse was simply ‘the Net’, and it only contained 99 worlds. Which seems a bit retro now.

About Dark Eden

‘Dark Eden’ was originally the title of a short story, published in Asimov’s in 2006 (it’s also collected in The Turing Test). In it four men and a woman find themselves, as a result of an act of disobedience by three of the men, on the sunless planet Eden, lit and kept warm by its own geothermal life. Their ship is badly damaged and the chances of returning successfully to Earth are very slim. The woman Angela offers to stay on Eden with one of the men, so that human life can carry on there if the ship doesn’t manage to get through. T0mmy (a womanising astronaut who she doesn’t like much) offers to be the one to stay with her.

My youngest daughter Nancy (a great writer herself) first got me started on writing this novel, when she noticed the title of the short story and told me it was a good name for a book. (It is: and in fact there are at least two other books with the same name!) She was also very helpful when I and my characters found ourselves stuck up on Snowy Dark.

The original prototype of the novel was a much earlier story, ‘The Circle of Stones’, published in Interzone back in 1992, when Nancy was two months old. It too described the sunless planet, and included one of the central events of the book, John’s original transgressive act, as well as early versions (with slightly different names) of the characters John, Tina, Gerry and Jeff, plus the three ‘Oldest’. But the story had a more violent, amoral and feral feel, and the characters that were to become John, Tina and Jeff were very different from what they would later grow into: Teema, the Tina of the story, was a ruthless Lady MacBeth figure, while Jerf was much more childlike and defenceless than the odd but self-reliant Jeff of the book.

As people sometimes point out, I tend to use well-tested SF themes. The Holy Machine was hardly the first book in which a robot comes alive, and Dark Eden wasn’t the first ‘Adam and Eve in space’ story. C.S.Lewis’s Perelandra is another that comes to mind, but I’m sure there are many more, and of course the Adam and Eve story itself has been around for a good few millenia.

But then again, Shakespeare wasn’t the first person to tell the story of King Lear. I think it’s what you do with these themes that’s important, not whether they’re new or not.