Alien Life

Astronomers believe they may have discovered signs of life on the exoplanet K2-18b. The planet itself is only known to them because of the slight flicker that occurs each time it passes between its sun (K2-18) and us, and the indicators of life are the tiny changes in the colour composition of that light that occur at the same time, assumed to be the result of light passing through the planet’s atmosphere. Spectroscopy suggests that these changes indicate the presence of dimethyl sulphide and/or dimethyl disulphide, both of them gases which on Earth are produced by marine algae and bacteria. The planet is so far away that the light being analysed has been travelling towards us for 124 years.

There have been claims like this before which haven’t stood up to further examination -claims, for instance, that the imprints of bacteria had been found found in meteorites of Martian origin – so too much excitement is premature. Also, even supposing that the biological origin of these chemicals is somehow confirmed, this doesn’t mean that K2-18b is populated by organisms like our animals and plants. On Earth, as I understand it, these chemicals are produced by simple prokaryote organisms, and there is a really huge evolutionary leap involved in getting from prokaryotes to the much more complex eukaryotes that are the basis for all large multicellular organisms on Earth.

Nevertheless, even the discovery of something resembling bacteria or algae on another planet would represent an enormous change in our knowledge of the universe. As far as we’ve known up to now, life could be unique to our own planet -the result perhaps of a set of coincidences so unlikely as to literally never have occurred anywhere else. But if we know that life also exists on another planet only 124 lightyears away (‘only’ is an odd word to use for such an immense distance, but bear in mind that our galaxy, itself one of billions, is some 90,000 lightyears wide, and 1,000 lightyears deep), it becomes clear that life must be present all over the place. Like the Copernican revolution, proof that this was the case would represent a futher radical decentring of our place in the universe. Or at least it would do so, if it wasn’t for the fact that it doesn’t feel all that surprising. We have been familiar for a long time, after all, with the idea of life on other planets, which has been a staple of science fiction for a century and more.

This, for me, is a reminder that science fiction, dismissed by many as a rather lowly form of writing -escapist entertainment and no more- is a modern form of fantastical literature that burgeoned in the wake of the incredibly rapid scientific and technological changes of the past two centuries, and perhaps serves a rather important cultural function for such a constantly changing world. Interplanetary travel, robots, artificial intelligence… all were explored in fiction long before they actually existed. (Social media admittedly, not so much!) And, just as children’s play helps prepare them for adulthood, science fiction helps us deal with the fact that, unlike people in earlier ages, we live in a time where, within a single lifespan, things will be discovered that will turn upside-down the way we see and interact with the world.

And science fiction also provides a way of visiting, if only in our imaginations, the places in the universe which we know might well exist, but which we know we will never actually see. I mean, how could we bear knowing that there is, or may be, other life out there, without at least speculating about the forms that life might take? And isn’t it the function of all fiction, in fact, to take us to places where we couldn’t otherwise go?

Value added (2)

So, just as branding can add value to a manufactured product, so can the ‘brand’ resulting from fame and adulation add value to a cultural artifact: a book, a film, a painting, a piece of music… (I’m avoiding the term ‘work of art’ because that tends to imply something highbrow, and this is equally true for works at every level of ‘brow’)

But it’s possible to flip the comparison right over and argue that these cultural products themselves function as a kind of branding that adds value to everyday life.

For instance, I sometimes like to listen to music when I’m driving. Get the music right and it works with the passing scene like the soundtrack of a movie. Life feels that little bit more interesting and intense, and I feel a bit like I’m a character in a story and not just – you know- little inconsequent me.

There was a time once, I remember, when certain young men would put speakers on the outside of their cars with the idea, or so I imagine, that the rest of us, too, would see them as being like characters in movies, and that this in turn would enhance their own sense of being so – their sense of being someone, in other words, and not just anyone, which is an important thing to have, even if putting speakers outside your car is rather narcissistic.

So a cultural artifact, music, is adding richness to a car journey, and therefore adding value to life itself, in the same way that music, words and images can be used to add value to a product advertised on TV.

It may do this just by being pleasurable to listen to, and evoking various moods and feelings which we find engaging, but it may also function by making us feel like we are inside another cultural artifact, a movie, a story-world, a place where life is more vivid and intense. Advertising does this too. Look at car ads on TV, or perfume ads, and, in pretty much every case, you are being invited to think of the product as something that will admit you to a story world. And this is not even a con, exactly.

We’ve got sales targets

While on the subject of ads, let me admit that there is a copywriter inside me, crying to be let out. I once whiled away an hour on a train by devising in my mind an entire advertising campaign for McCoy’s crisps, including TV ads, posters and merchandise.

I did actually think about being a copywriter when I was a kid, inspired, as I said before, by The Space Merchants – in spite of (or, to be honest, probably because of) that book being about the dangerous power of advertising. Unfortunately for my advertising career, I did also internalise the book’s political message, and by the time I was old enough to need a job, I didn’t feel able to give over my life to helping giant corporations sell harmful things.

But I think I would have been good at copywriting. It certainly would have been a better fit with my skills than being a social worker, and an excellent training for being a writer, at least in the narrow sense of honing my skill with words, because the best advertising copy has something in common with poetry – it has to be as succinct as possible and make every word count – but with the added twist that, unlike poetry, it has to work even when its readers have barely noticed that it’s there.

This ad from a while back seems very simple, but is a small masterpiece of compression.

Oasis soft drink ad: ‘It’s summer. You’re thirsty. We’ve got sales targets.’

The final sentence – ‘We’ve got sales targets’ – is disarming and funny because it frankly admits the real purpose of the ad, and yet it doesn’t in any way reduce the impact of the sequence set up by the previous sentences and the picture of the drink: summer (hot), thirsty (unpleasant), and Oasis (a cool and refreshing release from heat and thirst – and, speaking of release, isn’t that image quite blatantly orgasmic?)

In fact, far from reducing its overall impact – the ‘sales target’ sentence allows the rest of the ad to slide gently into your consciousness (and, more importantly, into your unconscious), like the smooth coating on a pill, without seeming too bald and shouty.

And notice how ‘You’re thirsty’ is in a larger font. So often when we’re busy, we don’t notice our bodily sensations until something draws them to our attention. (When I was a social worker, I would often notice right at the end of the afternoon that I felt quite light-headed, and realise that I’d forgotten to eat my lunch.) Also, though I don’t really know why this should be, ‘thirsty’ is a particularly powerful word with lots of bite. Much more so than, say, ‘hungry’ or ‘tired’.

Brilliantly effective writing. And all done in eight words – or nine including the bottle. I can’t stand those kinds of drinks as it happens, but it would have worked on me otherwise, no question about it. And, if only it wasn’t for my political scruples, I would have loved to have worked on ads like that.

Value added

I once heard an advertising professional making the case that advertising doesn’t just sell products, it adds value to them – we enjoy products more because of the associations that advertising has added to them. I’m quite certain this is true (and not just because, ever since I read The Space Merchants as a kid, I have had a fascination with advertising’s dark arts).

For instance, my youngest daughter and I used to love Hobgoblin Ale’s ‘What’s the matter lager boy?’ ads, and bought the beer accordingly. I have no doubt the ads made the drink seem more fun than it would have been if we had drunk it from an unmarked glass without knowing what it was. We would still have liked it it, no doubt, but it would just have been a beer.

What’s the matter, Lagerboy?

This podcast discusses the possibility that Stradivarius instruments might be a spectacular example of this effect. Many people are convinced that these centuries-old violins and violas, which can sell for tens of millions, make a uniquely beautiful sound. And yet, as the podcast shows, musicians involved in blind tests did not favour the Strads over modern violins, or even correctly identify them more often than you’d expect them to do by chance. In the podcast, a professional musician who actually owns a Strad refuses to accept the validity of this finding, but it is very difficult to separate a product from its branding unless you do a blind test (especially if you’ve spent a fortune on it). And, as that advertising man might ask, why would you even want to separate a product from its branding, when the branding really does make you enjoy the product more?

How much does this branding effect apply in the cultural sphere generally? There can’t be much doubt, for instance, that a simple sketch attributed to Picasso will be worth far more, and receive far more attention and praise, than would be the case if that exact same sketch had been made by an artist no one has heard of. (Duchamp famously showed that, just by signing it, he could turn a urinal into a work of art.) I’m pretty sure that I have often given films, books, paintings etc a much more sympathetic hearing when I’ve known in advance that they are considered to be masterpieces, than I might otherwise have done. In fact, it’s hard to see how our appreciation of books and films could not be affected by their reputations, given that books and films only work at all by triggering associations in our mind, and their reputation will inevitably play a part in those associations. (Being perverse and prone to jealousy, I sometimes dislike books and films more than I otherwise would have done, precisely because of the kind of praise they’ve been given – but that’s still a branding effect. It’s still me being influenced by the book or film’s reputation.)

Nevertheless it is still meaningful to ask if it’s the reputation of a work of art, or the associations that would be set up anyway by the work itself, that is the main contributor to the value that’s attributed to it. Watching a particularly good episode of Succession, my wife asked ‘Is Shakespeare really so much better than this?’ I think it’s a good question. If you make up your mind that something’s wonderful, whether it’s Shakespeare or the Beatles, Ulysses or the Bible, then you will find wonderful things in it, and you are much more likely to make up your mind that something’s wonderful if everyone keeps telling you so. In the case of those four examples, there are whole industries devoted to celebrating their wonderfulness.

Life isn’t like a novel

I turn 70 at the end of this year. It’s an interesting time of life. In some ways I feel more myself than I ever did. This is perhaps in part because of not having a day job of any kind – I haven’t had one for 9 years- so I don’t have to play a role, or fit into a system in the way I once did, and I have a lot of time when I can think, or write, or see people, or do whatever I want.

(I’ve sometimes noticed in the past when I’ve met up with people who still work in a place I used to work, how intensely involved they are in the politics of that world, the machinery of it. It seems to be so BIG for them, just as it once did to me, yet now, from outside, it seems so small, like an ants nest on the floor of a forest, and it seems almost comical that they should take it so very seriously.)

Another thing is that a lot of options are closed to me. For instance, I’m not going to begin a whole new career at this point, or start a whole new family. I have had most of my life (I’d have to live to 140 for that not to be true!), and I have to recognise that in many ways, this is it – I’ve got as far with this thing or that thing as I’m ever going to get, whether or not I’d hoped to get further. So I’m sort of stuck with being me.

One thing I do a lot of, though it can be painful, is review my life so far, almost as I might look back at a novel when I’ve reached the end: So those were the main characters! So this was the story arc!

But when I do this, I realise that life doesn’t really work like a novel. For example, if, in a novel, there was a character who met with the protagonist regularly for a chat, but didn’t advance the plot in any way – didn’t have an affair with the protagonist, or set up a business with him, or say some wise or devastating thing that changed the course of his life…- you’d either cut that character out, or give them something to do. I think this is true even in a literary novel which likes to think it’s above the vulgarity of plot, but still has to show the protagonist progressing.

This is why characters in novels often seem to have a rather limited number of friends, and we seldom hear much about the conversations they have with their children or grandchildren, even though friends, family, children are probably for most people the main thing that give their life meaning.

Thoughts on America City

I’m thinking about this book because I’ve been asked to join a book club in Alaska by Zoom next month to talk about it. Several things about this are rather out of the ordinary.

First, it’s in Alaska!

Second, the book is set in America, and Alaska is in America, a country where I’ve spent a total of one week, and that week nowhere near any of the places that are the setting of the book. Americans might quite understandably feel I’m writing about something I know very little about. (Luckily I’ve met this book club before, and I know they are very nice).

Thirdly, both I and the members of the book club will be aware that many of the events in the book seem to be beginning to unfold right now, e.g, (a) President Trump making extraordinarily hostile and aggressive statements about his neighbour and ally, Canada, while also stating that the border is an artificial one (which is what Putin says about Ukraine) and that Canada ought to join America as its 51st state. (There is something particularly insulting, I feel, about suggesting that Canada, which is slightly bigger than the whole of America, and has more than 10% of its population, should join as a single state!) (b) Trump threatening the use of military force if another ally, Denmark, does not hand Greenland over to America. I’m not going to spell out exactly how close these things are to what happens in the book, but suffice to say the parallels are striking (and alarming), and I think Trump’s motivation for these threats are quite similar to Slaymaker’s. If you want to get elected you have to give your voters something, and one of the things you can give them is an enemy.

I wrote about the origins of this book here, and also here, but here are a few more thoughts.

Continue reading “Thoughts on America City”

Words

Looking back at the time in 2023 when I receiving chemotherapy, I can remember it felt horrible. I have a sense of what that horribleness felt like, and I’d know the feeling instantly if I felt it again, but I can’t describe it in words, because it was unlike any other sensation I have experienced. To myself I call it the ‘chemo feeling’, and I know what I mean by it, but there are many different kinds of chemo, and people react to each kind in many different ways, so what I call the chemo feeling is not necessarily the same as anyone else’s, and most people haven’t experienced chemo at all. At the time I sometimes said that it was a bit like nausea, but only in the sense that they were both sensations that, while not painful, were nevertheless pervasive, unpleasant, debilitating, poisonous. The ‘chemo feeling’ was actually something quite distinct from nausea. (Sometimes I felt nausea as well, but that’s another story.)

There is a school of thought which says that reality is entirely mediated by language, that a thing is brought into existence by words. But actually surprisingly little of our experience can be named. Take actual nausea for instance. If you say ‘I feel nauseous’ people know what you mean because everyone has felt nauseous at some point. But suppose you had to describe the sensation of nausea to someone who’d never experienced it. It would be impossible, like describing the colour red to a person born blind. Words only work by pointing at things that our listener or reader already knows about. (This is presumably why we tend to talk about character traits and internal states, which can’t be pointed at, by analogy with things that can be: I feel trapped, he couldn’t contain himself, she was a bottled-up sort of person…) Trying to describe the ‘chemo feeling’, I had nothing to point to.

This can be true also of pleasant feelings. Sometimes I wake from a vivid dream. I remember the dream’s events and characters, but I also remember a powerful mood or feeling, which was different from anything I’ve experienced in real life. If I try to tell others about the dream, I can describe the events and characters, but the mood is impossible to name because there is absolutely nothing I can point to which is comparable. I think this is why other people’s accounts of dreams usually seem so tedious. They can’t tell you the one thing that made it powerful to them.

This limitation of language makes being a writer difficult. It’s one of the reasons you are always being forced to compromise, giving up what you ideally wanted to convey, and settling for a rough approximation. (This post, for instance, will end up saying something rather simpler than I had in my mind when I started writing it.) But I love the process, the challenge of capturing as much as possible of what I meant to say, in spite of the constraints. (Describing the planet Eden through the eyes of people who’d never seen Earth was a particularly interesting challenge, because I’d forbidden myself all sorts of obvious reference points that would be familiar to the reader.)

Visual images do sometimes seem to convey more than words, I think. You can pack a lot of things into an image which it would be too cumbersome to put into words. I discussed a picture by Tintoretto in a post here once, but I couldn’t begin to name the mood that picture was able to almost instantly evoke in me, any more than I can pin down the feeling of a dream. (Whether that mood was the one that Tintoretto intended to evoke, is of course another question.)

Below is an image I generated some time ago, when I was playing with the Wombo Dream art app and gave it the prompt word ‘nausea’. Weirdly, seeing as it is made by a machine, it really does seem to capture something of the feeling (I suppose it has adapted a human-made image from somewhere). But I don’t know if it would do so for a person who had never experienced nausea themselves.

‘Nausea’ generated by Wombo Dream AI.

Things Unsaid

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.

A very early work

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.

What comes first?

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.

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