Category: Story-telling

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.

Dear Non-SF reader,

Most of what I’ve written up to now can be categorised as science fiction (the exceptions being my short story collection, Spring Tide, and I think also my novel Tomorrow) and most of my readers (or so I would guess) are  readers of SF.  I’m very grateful to the SF readers who do read my books, and to the open-minded non-SF readers who give them a go and like them, but it frustrates the hell out of me that 90% of the reading public will be put off them by the SF label they carry.

Why don’t you read SF books?  Perhaps you anticipate gee-whiz technology and escapist fantasy: strong on phallic machines and enormous explosions, and weak on character, relevance and emotional subtlety.  Perhaps you anticipate tedious two-dimensional people with weird names, huffing and blowing about imaginary and implausible threats:  ‘We must capture the nine timestones of Xorg from the Splergs, or they will disrupt the flow of the fourth dimension, and the universe itself will die.’

To be perfectly honest, there are SF books out there that would probably confirm your expectations.  Undoubtedly the conventions of the genre offer lavish opportunities for sheer escapism, and a kind of techno-porn.  But what I want you to know is that those same conventions are also powerful tools for writing and thinking about human life and about the world we actually inhabit.

Listen, if you are a fiction reader at all, you must already be okay with the idea that sometimes making things up is helpful, yes?  All fiction involves made-up characters and/or made-up situations.  And this, don’t you agree, allows both writer and reader to gain imaginative access to aspects of life that are beyond their own direct experience, or to explore aspects of life that they are familiar with from a new and unexpected perspective?  Well, science fiction also involves made-up characters and made-up situations, and adds just one more made-up thing.  It makes up worlds.  If making up people and situations is alright, how can making up worlds suddenly be beyond the pale?

Actually making up worlds greatly extends the possibilities of fiction, by expanding the range of situations that characters can be asked to engage with and deal with.   The made-up world can be used to explore developments in present-day society by extending them into the future, or to externalise the inner demons with which we all struggle, or to estrange us from everyday experience, showing us something that seems utterly different at first from the world we inhabit, only for us to recognise it as something we already know very well but have grown so accustomed to that we’ve stopped seing it. (For an example of the latter technique, see, for instance, Miéville’s The City and The City, which I discussed here, perhaps not strictly an SF book, but near enough to make the point).

The fact that SF provides useful tools for these purposes, is illustrated by frequency with which these tools are taken up by non-SF writers.   Orwell’s 1984, for instance, probably one of the most well-known books of the 20^th Century, is not normally seen as an SF book, but it really is one.  In it Orwell warned about totalitarian tendencies he saw in the present by extrapolating forward to an imagined future in which they had become more obvious and pronounced.  (I can’t think of any book that has done better at showing how power turns words into the opposite of what they used to mean, and switches what is defined as good and bad to meet the exigencies of the moment).

Or look at the way that Kazuo Ishiguro (I wrote about him here) invented a society in which clones were bred to provide transplants, in his novel Never Let Me Go.  In this case, the SF idea is used more for metaphorical purposes and for purposes of estrangement (and when you think about it, what is a good metaphor but a way of shedding new light on a thing by comparing it with something different and unexpected, and so making it a little bit strange?) The people in the book attend school, get sent off to a place where they get to live in shared lodgings and write essays, and then begin the slow process of dying, bit by bit, as their bodies are harvested for organs.  It all feels pretty much like the life of anyone who starts out with hopes of achieving something individual and personal in their lives and ends up giving all their talents to the service of some impersonal organisational machine.

Or, here’s another of my favourite ‘non-SF’ writers, and one of the truly great writers of the 20^th century: Doris Lessing.  She’s best known for the Golden Notebook and the Martha Quest series, but she’s been using SF tools throughout her career, from Briefing for a Descent into Hell (a book that was a complete revelation to me when I first read it), to Memoirs of a Survivor, through Shikasta and the rest of her Canopus series of novels, and onwards to books like Mara and Dan.   Some of these books use SF tools to explore the way society is going, others use them to explore more visionary and metaphysical ideas, some use them for both.

I could go on.  I could mention, for example, a book group favourite like Audrey Niffenegger’s Time Traveller’s Wife, which uses the SF notion of time travel (and some good old SF hocus-pocus about genes) to explore the dynamic and temporal nature of a human relationship,  by presenting a couple who go through the events of their relationship in two different orders.  I could also go on about specifically SF writers, who have written great books that everyone should know about.  (See, to give just one example, my review here of The Space Merchants, the brilliant capitalist dystopia by Pohl & Kornbluth that ought to be up there with 1984 and Brave New World.  Or see my recent comments on Ken MacLeod’s Intrusion.)  My point is this, though.  Yes, do judge a book by its depth, its breadth, its relevance to your life, its originality, its execution, but please don’t dismiss it just because of the genre label it happens to be given by the publishing industry.

For myself, yes, I make stuff up, like all fiction writers do, but I do it to help me do the best job I can of writing about the experience of real people, and the dynamics of real societies, and the mysteries of the real universe in which we live.