Category: Story-telling

People who read Dark Eden usually comment on the language.  I included some (actually quite small small) variations from modern English by way of acknowledging the fact that language would develop differently in a community that had been isolated for that length of time: adjectives are doubled up for emphasis rather than using ‘very’, the direct article is quite often dropped…   Some people really like this, some tolerate it and some hate it, finding it maddening and childish.   (It’s meant to sound a bit childish, by the way: my idea was that the first generation on Eden would have slipped into baby talk a little, when there were only two adults in the world, just as young parents tend to slip into baby talk during the phase of life when they are preoccupied with small children.  In Eden there would be no adult world to provide a corrective.)

As I rework my second Eden novel (Mother of Eden), though, the thing about the language of Eden folk that I find most challenging is the fact that almost their only reference points are, naturally enough, inside their own world.   This creates two difficulties.  The first one is that, if we are describing an unfamiliar environment, we normally do it by the use of metaphors and similes with things we already know.   If I was describing the forest of Eden from the point of view of a visitor from Earth, for instance, I might say it bore a certain resemblance to a terrestrial forest at night that had been hung with Chinese lanterns.   But, apart from stories of Earth to which they sometimes refer (when I think I can get away with it without stretching plausibility too far!), Eden people have only Eden itself to use as a source of metaphors and similes. I have to try and describe something that is unfamiliar to the reader, either by reference to very basic things like fire and rock that exist on both Earth and Eden, or by reference to other things that are themselves unfamiliar to the reader.  It’s quite a restriction to work with, though a common one of course, both in SF and in historical fiction.

The second difficulty is that Eden people would not have retained words for which they had no use.  In Dark Eden, for instance, when John and his followers come to an ocean, they no longer have the words ‘ocean’ or ‘sea’ because the people of Eden have been living for generations in a valley surrounded by mountains.  The nearest thing they still have is the word ‘pool’ so they call their ocean ‘Worldpool’.

When the story shifts to Worldpool itself (as it does in Mother of Eden), I also have to do without words like ‘coast’, ‘bay’, ‘island’, ‘inlet’, and to find some way of referring to these things which is plausible and not too cumbersome.  Even the word ‘land’, it seemed to me, would no longer be available, because why would you ever refer to land if there was no sea?  The nearest Eden English gets to ‘land’ is ‘ground’ and this is the word they  use.

I very much enjoyed the documentary film Searching for Sugar Man.  It’s about a Detroit singer-songwriter called called Sixto Rodriguez who records a couple of albums which fail to sell, and moves onto other things, completely unaware that within a strange cultural bubble on another continent, young white liberalish apartheid-era South Africans have come to regard him as an iconic musical figure.

Within that bubble everyone has his records, everyone plays his music at parties, everyone knows his name, and, just as he is unaware of them, they themselves are unaware that their enthusiasm is a purely local thing and assume that he is up there with Bob Dylan, James Taylor or Joni Mitchell.   As to why he only made two records, his South African fans  believe that he committed suicide in a very spectacular way, in front of a concert audience.

Assuming it’s true that he really had no idea of his South African following, Rodriguez must have been badly ripped off.   I sometimes find out that my stories have been translated and printed without my permission in various small magazines, and that’s annoying, but I’d be very angry indeed if I discovered that my actual books were selling well in a country where I didn’t even know they’d been published.   Rodriguez, however, came over as untroubled by this side of things and seemed unwilling to express any regret at all about the life that he’d actually lived, not as a famous musician but a worker in the construction industry.

When finally put in touch with his South African fans, he was clearly pleased to have large audiences filling up concert halls for him across South Africa, but what came over was pleasure that people wanted to listen to him, rather than excitement at stardom and fame.   As a writer I know that need to be heard – I think it’s quite distinct from the  desire to be lauded – and I found this part of the film extremely moving.

But I found it interesting too to think about what this movie told us, partly intentionally and partly not, about how ‘true stories’ are made.   One ‘true story’, the lurid story about Rodrigues’ on-stage suicide, was clearly completely false – the man is alive to this day – but why did it gain currency in the first place?  A Darwinian process must surely occur in which many rumours are generated and a few take root and become accepted as true when they meet some kind of need – in this case a need to resolve a puzzle – rather as some new variant of finch might find itself occupying some as-yet unfilled niche.

The other ‘true story’ is the film itself.  I see (from Wikipedia, which will probably prevent  a story quite like this from ever happening again) that some quite important facts were missed out of it.  Rodriguez was actually also popular in Australia and he did two tours of the country in 1979 and 1981.  I can see why this wasn’t included.  Something must be left out in order to make a 2 hour movie out of a life, and to fit that life into some more universal story (in this case the one where we imagine we are alone and then find we are loved and cared about) which a movie audience will enjoy and relate to.

But justifiable though it may be, its ommission represents another manifestation of the same Darwinian process whereby stories are shaped and changed to meet the needs of their listeners and their tellers.

A reader (John) disliked my recent post about the Trayvon Martin case, saying that my summaries are missing some key points.  ‘Ugh,’ he begins!  He says he enjoyed Dark Eden but doubts if he’ll read any of my other books, and he advises me to keep my opinions to myself:

I have never understand why athletes, public figures and those that depend on the support of a broad audience interject their political/cultural opinions into the public arena.  They just anger 50% of people who may otherwise purchase their product.

Two things about this I found a bit depressing.

Firstly, the idea that I should conceal my views on politics and culture in order to get people to ‘purchase my product’, particularly since my ‘product’ itself deals with politics and culture.  I find that a bit ‘ugh.’

Secondly, the idea that we should avoid the work of writers whose political or cultural views we disagree with.  A book that hugely impressed me when I first read it as a teenager was Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the book about a libertarian lunar society whose motto was TANSTAAFL (There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch).  I didn’t agree then, and I don’t now, with Heinlein’s Tea Partyish politics, but it didn’t stop me appreciating, and wanting to emulate, the brilliance of the world-building.

One of the first accolades I received for Dark Eden was the book being selected as the ‘Big Read’ for the Greenbelt festival, and being asked to go there and give a talk about it.  This is a Christian festival, and I made no secret of the fact that I am not a Christian, but people were still interested in what I had to say about the Eden story, even though it obviously meant very different things to them than it does to me.  And God bless them for it!

*   *   *

In fairness to John, though, when I look back at my post, I can see it is unbalanced.   Clearly there was some kind of fight or scuffle between Trayvon and the man who shot him, and I can see that, given the bizarre context of a country where it is okay to carry a gun, it is possible to argue that self-defence was a factor in the shooting.

But why not also, then, in the case of Marissa Alexander, who fired a shot which didn’t even hit anyone?  Of course I don’t know the detail of the cases, but I find it hard to imagine any additional detail that would justify a twenty year sentence in the latter case, if a complete acquittal was justified in the former.

There are many studies that show how, in predominantly white societies, the behaviour of black people is much more negatively connoted than the same behaviour by white people.  Look at this video which compares the reactions of passers-by to a young white man who appears to be stealing a bike, and then to a young black man doing exactly the same.

I’ve just completed the first draft of the first short chapter of my new novel Slaymaker.  It’s only a couple of thousand words, which probably doesn’t sound much, but it’s the result of several frustrating unfocussed inspirationless days of faffing around.

And here’s the best thing.  It’s finally coming alive.  There’s energy in it.  There’s the beginnings of a new way of telling the story, a new kind of narrative voice, that’s unique to and necessary to this particular book.  And then there’s Slaymaker himself, appearing for the first time at the end of the chapter, rather as  a singer walks out onto the stage at the very end of the warm-up number played by his backing group.

Of course this energy will go again, of course they’ll be many more days when it feels like nothing will come alive at all.   But now I’ve found it once, I know I’ll find it again

I spent the week before last in a place on the coast of Morocco called Oued Laou with two old friends, Clive and Jonathan.  Jonathan has a small house there and speaks Moroccan Arabic, which earns him huge respect.

The last time I visited him there, the trip inspired my story The Peacock Cloak.  On the hills around the town, cistus flowers, admired by Tawus at the beginning of the story, grow in great profusion.

Much of the ground, though, is intensively cultivated by small subsistence farmers who grow wheat, barley, peas, lentils, onions and figs, all packed in tightly together, and keep goats, sheep, cows and chickens.

They live in very small and simple single-storey houses consisting of a brick wall, topped with flat layers layer of branches and twigs, and then a covering of loose earth (though some of them now have added a polythene membrane, a solar panel, or even a power line).  As I looked out at the little hillside village below I imagined people living pretty much as they do now in houses pretty much like these for thousands of years, while successive invaders – Romans, Vandals, Arabs, Spaniards – broke over them like waves with their various projects of subjugation/improvement/religious conversion/enlightenment/ modernisation.  Just like Tawus.

And like Tawus too, we found ourselves to be the objects of fascination and even wonder.  One old woman stood with her hand over her mouth as if to stifle shrieks of incredulity, while her more confident daughter questioned us sharply about ourselves.  Where did we come from, France or Spain?  (There were only two options, I understand.)

They insisted we came in for mint tea and fried eggs.  The goat wandered in after us and settled down comfortably in a corner of the bare earth floor.   The daughter looked across at it and drew a finger over her throat to indicate the goat’s fate after Ramadan, telling us of the many uses to which its meat and skin would be put.

The tea was like polo mints dissolved in water.  The eggs were delicious too.

I attended a seminar on an  SF  module, led by my friend Prof Rowlie Wymer.   Rowlie was describing a particular SF short story.  I forget which story it was, but it had all the virtues that are the hallmarks of good SF, a certain kind of disciplined playfulness.   And the thought came to me that ‘science fiction’ is correctly named, not because it necessarily deals  with science, but because of a certain similarity between its methodology, its creative strategy, and the scientific method.  You take the world as we know it, you manipulate certain variables, you see what happens, you explore the implications. As another professor, Ian Stewart, said at the Clarke award event, science fiction is about ‘what if’.

Genre labelling can be annoying.  I have more than once moaned here about the fact that a lot of people won’t touch my books, simply because they are ‘science fiction’.   Another genre label that I’ve seen applied several times recently to Dark Eden is ‘YA’.  (According to Wikipedia: “Young-adult fiction or young adult literature (often abbreviated as YA), also juvenile fiction, is fiction written, published, or marketed to adolescents and young adults”.)

Well, the book is certainly primarily about young adults – the two main narrators/protagonists of this book are both (in Earth terms) in their teens – and I’m very pleased and proud to hear that teenagers and young adults are enjoying the book.  But I didn’t write the book for teenagers or young adults, or for middle-aged adults or indeed for any specific demographic group.   I try to write books and stories that I’d like to read.  And personally I don’t seek out stories with characters of my own age and background (how dull that would be), or stories aimed at my own age group.

The assumption behind labelling Dark Eden as YA seems to be that, because a book is about a certain type of person, it must therefore be written specifically for that type of person.  It’s an assumption you can often also see being made in the way that individual books are marketed.  (For example, ‘This is a book for anyone who has ever loved and lost’).

Well, I suppose one reason for reading a book is to look for role models and validation, people you can identify with, people who will confirm that it’s okay to be the person you are, but it would be rather limiting if that was the only reason we read books.  And unhealthy and atomising too.  (Do we want each age group and each gender to occupy its own separate little cultural bubble?)   The point of reading fiction is surely to imaginatively experience lives that are different from your own, not just to look into a mirror and see some sort of idealised version of yourself.

Dark Eden seems to appeal to a lot of different people, men, women, young, old, atheists, Christians… etc etc.   And that’s exactly what I wanted it to do.