Category: Story-telling

Feeling pleased about the prospect of my new short story collection coming out, I’ve posted a little background to each of the stories: there’s links to each of them here.

Amazing the jobs you find to do rather than get on with writing a book.

(Background to the story ‘Two Thieves’, in the Peacock Cloak collection.  It was first published in Asimov’s SF.)

It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes, both awake and in dreams, I have experienced a moment or two of complete peace.  I’m often beside water when it happens.   My worries no longer worry me.  Even the knowledge that the moment won’t last doesn’t trouble me in the slightest.

It seems to me that we should notice these moments more, because really that state is the end of all striving.   Why do we crave things and pursue them so desperately – love, sex, money, possessions, recognition, life everlasting – except in the hope that they will give us some peace?

It’s as if we were all in fast cars, roaring along hungrily in search of peace, with eyes fixed so grimly on the road ahead that we keep missing the very thing we’re looking for lying there quietly on the roadside.

*  *  *

Dismas and Gestas are the apocryphal names of the two thieves who were crucified alongside Jesus, one of them repentant, the other a sinner to the last.

‘You just can’t leave that stuff alone, can you?’ my friend Rowlie observed, when he noticed this.

It’s quite true.  But, even though my work has been called ‘theologically nuanced science fiction’, I’m not a religious person.  I don’t subscribe to any beliefs whatever about supernatural beings, or supernatural events.

(Post about the title story of the Peacock Cloak collection.  It was first published in Asimov’s SF.)

The original idea for this story came from an account I read somewhere about a piece of music theatre by Carl Orff called De Temporum Fine Comoedia or ‘Play for the End of Time.’   I’ve never seen the piece performed, or heard the music, or read the libretto, and I don’t know if the following account is even accurate, but this is what I took from what I read.   The Day of Judgement is far in the past.  All the souls in hell have finally repented and been forgiven except for Satan, and finally Satan himself has come to kneel and seek forgiveness from God.

I liked this idea.  The Day of Judgement has always seemed to me, to be perfectly frank, to be a pretty crap ending of the story.  (Countless souls have been brought into being out of nothing, and then the story ends with most of them frying away in an eternal torture chamber!  What kind of resolution is that?)  This idea of Orff’s, or whoever Orff got it from, struck me as much more satisfying: the cycle ends, the universe is complete.  The Big Crunch at the other end of time from the Big Bang.

I’m a jackdaw.  I love bright little titbits of knowledge.  The second mythological titbit that went into this story comes from Kurdistan. Most Kurds are Muslims, but a small minority of them belong to the Yazidi religion.  Again, no big research was involved here, but what little I happened to come across told me that in this obscure and secretive religion, the world is in the care of seven angels, whose leader is Tawus Melek, or Taus Melek, the Peacock Angel.  Yes, the Peacock Angel!   Like Lucifer, or like Iblis in Islam, Tawus disobeyed God, but unlike these other fallen angels, Tawus was forgiven and placed in charge of the whole world.

The cistus flowers and the children with the lamb came from a week I spent with my good friend Jonathan in Oued Laou in Morocco.  We also met some other little children – I think they were on their way back from school – who seemed very awed by us, and came to kiss our hands, one by one.

The mood comes from this period of my life, when I seem to be letting go of some things, and learning to accept the world as it is.

As to the cloak with its restless eyes and its whispering voice… well, there are various magical feather cloaks in fairytale and mythology, and I think there is something here too of the imagery of Miyazaki’s wonderful Spirited Away (one of my favourite films), but basically I made it up. Every story I write waits for some little detail, some little trick, to bring the whole thing alive.   And in this story the thing that did it for me was the cloak.

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.