Category: Story-telling

We had a trendy young chaplain in our school for a while.  I found myself thinking about him the other day.  It was the 1970s, and he wore a beard, jeans, sandals and woolly jumpers.  His name was Mr Gorringe, and he liked to be called Tim.  He was perhaps a little too keen on ‘getting down with the kids’ (hard not to be, I guess, when you’re not so very much older than the kids yourself) but he was an interesting teacher.  What came into my mind was an essay he once set us entitled ‘Why is there anything at all?  Why is there not just nothing?’

I suppose everyone has tried it, probably first when they were still a little child: imagining the absolute absence of anything at all.  Not just the absence of matter – anyone can imagine a space with nothing in it – but the absence of space itself, and time, and your own mind doing the imagining.  It’s impossible to imagine, and of course it’s also impossible as a matter of fact, because, while we may well be completely mistaken as to the nature of what exists, it’s indisputable that something does.

But why?

Well, cosmologists may be able to calculate what happened a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, but they can’t say why it occurred, or what it emerged from, so that, at the end of a long journey, the science bus simply stops. (‘That’s as far as we go, people, thanks for your company and don’t forget to show your appreciation to the driver.’)

At this point, the religious tour companies rush excitedly forward, claiming to be able to take you further with their notion of a being that existed before all of this.  But when someone asks how the creator got there, it turns out that this bus stops as well, for the answer is that he’s just always been there. (‘Thanks for choosing God Tours everyone.  Mind the step on the way out.’)

Science tends to present the world as a machine, with the scientist standing outside, studying it and explaining it to the rest of us.  It is an external view.  Subjectivity is not denied, but it is looked in at from the wide end of the telescope.

But religion is also an external view.  It presents the world’s mystery as a story written long ago, in which we must be instructed by those who’ve been taught to understand it correctly.  I was very amused by Ken MacLeod’s account here of a strange childhood experience, involving a mysterious sense of  ‘presence’ in a rocky glen.  He is a minister’s son who went through the entire Bible every year as a child, but here he writes that he ‘had not even the most childish spirituality. I believed what I was told, but as far I was concerned it was all facts about some reality of which I had no personal experience, like Australia.’ So he had what most people would describe as a spiritual or mystical experience, and yet it didn’t even occur to him for a moment to relate it to what he had read and been taught, even though every year he would have rehearsed all those stories about encounters with God on mountaintops!

I sort of wonder whether it’s this external view, this sense of being an outsider, a bystander, that makes ‘why is there not just nothing’ into a question that even requires an answer.  I say this because, whatever that something is that just can’t help but exist, it isn’t separate from us.  It’s not some inanimate stuff out there or some remote person-like being.  It’s what looks out of our eyes.  And perhaps the nearest thing to an answer isn’t to be found either in an old book, or by interrogating the fabric of the material universe, but simply by trying to imagine ‘just nothing’, without time or space or anything doing the imagining, realising it can’t be done, and noticing what is in fact there.

*  *  *

Schoolboy metaphysics, I know, but it was these thoughts that made me create the character Jeff Redlantern in Dark Eden, who likes to remind himself from time to time that ‘We are here.  We really are here.’

In the sequel, Mother of Eden, Jeff Redlantern is long dead, but followers of his in a little island community still remind themselves every day (or rather every waking, this being sunless Eden) that they are really here.   My protagonist, Starlight, is surprised to discover other cultures that don’t do this, and actively discourage or forbid this way of thinking.  They are more dynamic than her own, and she recognises this, but they have built into them a kind of loneliness  and alienation.  They cut people off from their essential selves.

I’m delighted to say that Ian Whates’ Newcon Press, who have already published The Peacock Cloak, will also be a publishing a new, extensively revised and in places completely rewritten version of my second novel Marcher.   I’m still working on the text, and the book won’t be out until mid-2014, but as you can see, Ben Baldwin has already designed this really beautiful new cover for it.

Marcher has been a sort of Cinderella among my three novels to date.  I  don’t mean that the others are ugly stepsisters.  What I mean is that Marcher still sits in the kitchen while the others go to the ball.

Dark Eden and The Holy Machine have benefitted from editorial advice, copy-editting, and proofreading, and have come out as handsome, professionally-produced books.  Marcher was a publishing project that didn’t quite come off.   The US small press publisher Cosmos hoped to get a deal with big chain bookstores, but that didn’t happen.  It ended up coming out as a cheap low budget paperback, sold in places like petrol stations and drugstores, with every expense spared.  There was no editorial input, no proofreading.  Even the kindest reviewers find it hard to avoid mentioning the typos and errors on every page.  Not that I can excuse myself from responsibility.  Essentially what is now available is my final draft, and it doesn’t say a lot for my own editing, let alone anyone else’s.  I suppose it was a project that petered out a bit, in my own head, as well as elsewhere. But I still think that, in its own way, Marcher has as much to offer as either of my other novels, and I feel about it a bit as you might feel about a beloved child who always manages to show you up in social situations.

I grew this novel in rather a different way from my other books.  The original idea came when I put together the ideas behind three different short stories. In ‘The Welfare Man’ (one of my most popular short stories), and its sequel ‘The Welfare Man Retires’ (whose full text is available here), I had built an alternative Britain with a new kind of welfare settlement in which the price for state support was formal exclusion from the mainstream of society: a kind of modern, sanitised version of the the Poor Law, the Poor Law with added Blairite spin.  If you lived on state benefits you were required to live in certain fenced-off estates, and to accept a special modified category of citizenship with less rights than the rest of the population. You could not vote, for instance, and if you committed a minor offence, you might be banned from leaving the estate for a specified period of time.

Both stories dealt with an ageing social worker called Cyril Burkitt (geddit? CB), who had gone into the work to try and help people overcome disadvantage, but had ended up overseeing a bureaucratic system for monitoring and managing these special category citizens.   I was a social work manager myself when I wrote it, and it reflected a worry that many social workers sometimes feel about what their job is really about.

The other story, ‘Jazamine in the Green Wood’,  was a story about gender, very much in James Tiptree country, though I didn’t know it at the time, as I had somehow missed out on Tiptree’s work.  However it included the idea of ‘shifters’, people who took a drug to travel between one parallel timeline and another.  This was not an original idea of mine of course: it had antecedents in Philip Dick, Greg Egan (I remember a brilliant Interzone story of his called ‘The Infinite Assassin’), John Wyndham, and doubtless many others.  But I saw a lot of potential in it.  A shifter was a dangerous person in that he or she could escape from the consequences of his or her actions.  If such people existed, there would have to be agencies to track them down and control them.

The short story ‘Marcher’ combined the idea of shifters with the world of ‘The Welfare Man’.  My thinking was that, if there was a drug – I called it ‘slip’ – that could take you out of this world and into another one, than it would be the excluded and marginalised who would be most drawn to it.  The story introduced a driven young immigration officer whose job was to track down shifters (essentially immigrants from another world) and a social worker called Jazamine.   It was one of my most popular stories.  It came first in Interzone’s annual reader’s poll, and was picked by Gardner Dozois for his Year’s Best anthology.

I wrote a sequel called ‘Watching the Sea’ which I have never liked, but which was also pretty popular with Interzone readers.  The reason I didn’t like it was that there was too much tell and not enough show.  It needed more space.  It needed, in fact, to be a whole novel.

I was very busy at the time – being a social work team manager is demanding and stressful – and I thought I’d build up the idea by writing some other short stories set in the same world.   One of them was ‘Tammy Pendant’, a first person story about a tough, brutalised young teenaged girl who was also to appear in ‘We Could be Sisters’ and ‘Poppyfields’.  (This story caused a bit of controversy when it came out in Asimov’s.  A woman in Winsconsin created a furore about Asimov’s being available in school libraries in the state  She’d imagined that an SF magazine would be full of nice clean-cut guys having adventures in space, I suppose, and here was a story about drugs, criminality and underaged sex.)

The other was ‘To Become a Warrior’, one of my personal favourites, told in the first person by a not-very-bright and more-or-less illiterate former client of Cyril Burkitt, who was recruited by a gang of shifters, but was just too decent at heart to pass their savage initiation test.

‘Now I’ll just have to stitch all these stories together and I’ll have a novel’, I naively thought, but in the end, though the novel includes bits of all the stories I’ve mentioned, it was much harder to write this novel than either Dark Eden or The Holy Machine.  The end result was seriously flawed (and not only in the purely presentational ways that I mentioned above), but also feels to me to be as rich in ideas as anything I’ve done: a book about the welfare system, and about boundaries and trangressions,  and a portrait of a man who loves mirrors, and lives to guard a border which he secretly longs to cross.

I’m absolutely delighted to be able to have a second crack at this book.

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.

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.

“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.

I wrote the first draft of The Holy Machine a long time ago, back in 1994, under the growing shadow of the conflict whose iconic moment – at least in the West – was to be the destruction of the World Trade Centre in 2001.  (It had also been attacked in 1993).

This conflict is often portrayed as a conflict between radical Islam and the West, but I saw it as being between secularism and traditional religious authority.  (The protestant zealots in the US who burn the Koran, and carry placards reading ‘God Hates Fags’ have much more in common with the Taliban than they do with secular modernity, or even with more modern less literal versions of Christianity.)  I went on to imagine how secular  modernity, when under threat, might itself morph into a kind of intolerant fundamentalist atheism.

The story deals with (a) a paralysingly shy young man, George, who tries to persuade himself that his feelings about a robot sex toy are really love, (b) the robot itself, Lucy, which begins to become aware of itself, and (c) George’s traumatised mother, Ruth, who hides away in virtual reality rather than go out and face the day.   The thematic link between these foreground stories and the background conflict, the thread with which I sewed them all together, comes from a series of related or analogous dichotomies: religion/science, mind/matter, body/spirit, semblance/reality (and perhaps also love/sex).

I completed the book pretty much its present form in 1997.  The small press Big Engine was going to publish it, but then went out of business (after some useful editorial input from Ben Jeapes).  The US small press Wildside then took it over and published a print-on-demand version (with a very striking cover image by Wilhelm Steiner) in 2004.  Dorchester books produced a mass market paperback US edition under the Cosmos imprint in 2009.   The new revised edition from Corvus finally came out in 2010,  following my success with The Turing Test, 16 years after I wrote the first draft of the book.  (A German translation, Messias-Maschine,  followed in 2012.)

Not everyone likes this book – the main character is not exactly the regular hero type, and some of his behaviour is pretty creepy – but some people seem to like it a lot.  ‘The most amazing book I have ever read..,’ wrote one enthusiastic reader on US Amazon, God bless him, ‘A must read for all human beings!’

I’m now well into the writing of Mother of Eden, the sequel to Dark Eden, and enjoying it very much.  The book is set over a much wider part of the surface of Eden, and my main protagonist, Starlight Brooking, is encountering communities of people who live by very different rules and with very different values and beliefs, as a result of the great break-up of the original human community that occurred in the course of Dark Eden.

I’m getting a great deal of pleasure from imagining the world that she is moving through, its physical appearance, its human and non-human inhabitants, its politics and different cultures and social mores, and I’m enjoying try to see it through the eyes of a character who is different from me not only because she grew up on a different planet, but also, more prosaically, because is female, less than half my age, and (unlike me) more of a doer than a thinker.

It’s no wonder I write the kinds of books and stories that I do.  I love building imaginary worlds, and have done since I was a child.  It comes to me much more easily than trying to evoke or reproduce the world that actually exists.  (If I were a painter, I would not be the kind that sits down in front of a landcape or a bowl of fruit, and tries to recreate it.)

I haven’t always known this about myself.   When I was young, I was hugely taken by writers who, it seemed to me, were able to evoke the deep strangeness of the ordinary everyday world.  I was greatly impressed by Virginia Woolf, for instance, and I remember thinking to myself, after reading Mrs Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse, and The Waves, that here was a writer who was able almost to photographically reproduce everyday human consciousness.  An illusion of course but a powerful one, whose trick I longed to learn.

As it turned out though, my writing didn’t really start to work until I abandoned that ambition, and began to make my worlds up, or at least include things in them that don’t really exist.

But here’s the odd thing.  When I’m making up the world of Eden, I try to do so in a way that is consistent with my understanding of how worlds actually work.  I try to make my characters act in the way that real life people would act in the same situation, drawing on what I think I know about human psychology. I try to make the society of Eden function and evolve in ways that I believe a real life human society might evolve in that context, drawing on my own direct experience and on what I have read about in history books and seen or heard in the news. And I try to make the ecology of Eden consistent with what I what I believe might actually evolve in the peculiar context of a sunless world, extrapolating from what I’ve read about life in sunless portions of Earth.  So, while I am certainly constructing a made-up world, I’m trying to make it work according to the rules that apply to the real world.   To be sure some of the characteristics of the world of Eden, its darkness, its history of loss, were partly chosen for their emotional or symbolic resonances, but even then I’m making those choices on the basis of wanting to capture some aspect of my own experience.

And what all of this means is that, actually, in my own way, I too, am trying to reproduce, as faithfully as I can, the world that actually exists.