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Rats, wolves, bears

Someone told me recently that rats pair off for life and that male rats are closely involved in the care of their young. The term ‘love-rat’ turns out to be poorly chosen. Rats are faithful husbands and conscientious dads.

Another animal I’ve always thought we’ve got wrong is the wolf. Countless fairytales have encouraged us to think of wolves as dark, sinister, uncontrollably violent. We use the words wolfish, vulpine. And when we imagine wolves in human form they are savage and murderous.

But why? On what evidence?

I’ve sometimes thought of writing a story in which a real wolf-man is created with the body and intelligence of a human, but the instincts and drives of a wild wolf. To everyone’s disappointment, he turns out to be a mild-mannered, comformist creature, anxious to please, concerned about his social standing and willing to do what he’s told.

Wolves are social, hierarchical creatures, after all. Their desires and priorities are like our own. It’s not a coincidence that they’re the ancestors of our best-loved pet. With added intelligence and a human body, wolf-man is pretty much an average bloke.

But in my story there’s also a bear-man, and he’s another thing entirely. Having the instincts of a solitary hunter, he has no need for company of any kind, except for occasional sex, and cares nothing at all for what people think of him. In my story, bear-man is capable of calculation and learning, and so assumes some sort of veneer of human-ness because he perceives it to be in his interests to do so, but beneath it he remains utterly unreachable and entirely cold. A truly scary being.

Oddly enough, though, the bear is much more positive figure in human culture than the wolf. Think of Winnie the Pooh, Paddington, Baloo, Yogi, and try and find even one wolf equivalent. Bears are seldom the villain in stories, in spite of the fact that killings of humans by bears, unlike killings by wolves, really do quite regularly occur.

Is it their very similarity to us that makes wolves our animal of choice when we want to project our violent impulses onto some other creature?

(We’ve got more than a little in common with rats too: versatile omnivores which have managed to spread themselves across most of the planet.)

Blakeney: a seaside postcard

You couldn’t capture this in photographs. It’s one of those places that demonstrate how different our perceptual system is from a camera. Our eyes don’t take discrete pictures. Our brains assemble, not a picture, but a 3D model, drawing on memories and associations as well as what is literally in front of our eyes.

The hinterland of this coast is undulating rather than truly hilly, a green rolling landscape of fields, hedges, dark woods and pretty Norfolk villages with houses faced with flints and prosperous square-towered churches. The village of Blakeney descends from this gently undulating terrain to a quay where there are sailing boats and ice creams and people fishing for crabs.

But this is not the edge of the sea. The boats and crabs are in a tidal creek and the sea itself is another mile away. You can’t even see it from the quay, only the ridge of shingle behind which the beach lies.

Between the village and the sea is a marsh. To the right of the village, looking out, the marsh has been enclosed in a dyke and drained to make pasture on which cattle graze, to the left it is still undrained, a salty place of grass and shrubs and flowers that is intermediate between land and sea. Crabs crawl and bees buzz a few feet away from each other; the cries of seabirds mingle with the song of larks. A couple of dilapidated-looking houseboats lie stranded on the grey-green grass.

Because of the creeks, you have to go a long way round to stand on that shingle ridge. But from there you can look back across at the little villages dotted along the inner coastline, the edge of the solid land. There they are with their red roofs and their flint walls and their church towers, with the woods and fields behind them: Salthouse, Cley, Blakeney, Morston. I’ve seen them in bright sunshine over there while just behind me, waves sucked and rattled at the stones, terns dive bombed for fish and a ghostly mist came rolling in from the North Sea.

You could take pretty photos here, there’s no doubt about that: a stranded houseboat, oyster catchers on the pebbly strand, a church tower rising above the trees… But photos only show what’s in front of you and they reproduce perspective with a literalness that the human brain avoids without a moment’s thought. A shot that took in the whole of that string of villages, would necessarily reduce them, and the low green land behind them, to a narrow and insignificant-looking strip between expanses of sky and marsh. It would all seem quite flat and dull.

And now I come to think of it, flat and dull was exactly my impression of this place when I first came here many years ago. With no 3D model, no associations, I was reduced to taking mental snapshots and comparing them unfavourably with pre-conceived notions of what attractive coastal scenery should look like. This is no Cornish cove. This is no sandy bay. But to my mind now it’s as beautiful as anywhere on Earth.

Fermi’s paradox solved?

The galaxy is vast, the number of planets enormous, so how come we never hear from any alien life forms?

Professor Galacticus proposes the following explanation:

There is a lot of life in the galaxy, and he surmises that all of it will be carbon-based and all of it originate in water. As a result, in every planet in which life takes root, deposits of carbon and hydrocarbons will build up over millions of years as organisms die, form sediments, and are subjected to various geological forces.

In a relatively small proportion of living planets, Galacticus suggests, the process of biological evolution will have resulted in symbol- and tool-using intelligence. This in turn brings into being a newer and much faster secondary evolutionary process, corresponding, roughly speaking, to what we call culture.

At a certain level of development, culture stumbles upon the vast reserves of chemical energy that built up millions of years before it came into being. By exploiting these reserves, culture is able to massively accelerate its own evolution – Galacticus speaks of ‘putting on seven-league boots’ – because the enormous increase in the productivity of each individual allows large numbers of individual to cease to be involved in meeting the basic physical needs of the species and thereby become available for other work.

In such a context, highly complex activities such as space travel become possible: activities which require individuals to devote themselves to doing things with no immediate practical benefit at all. And when cultures embark on the project of space travel, they naturally begin to contemplate the possibility that other cultures, on other planets, are doing likewise, and begin to develop means of searching for, and communicating with, those putative others.

However all this occurs in a very narrow window for, unknown at first to the individuals who make up these cultures, they have set in train a force that will destroy them. This force is not nuclear weapons, as some have surmised it might be, nor poisonous pollution, but something seemingly entirely innocuous: a very common substance, and one that is not merely non-toxic but actually essential to life. Carbon dioxide.

By the time the danger becomes evident, cultures are already so massively committed to fossil fuels that change is difficult. It is not technically impossible – the explosive development of technological knowledge which the ‘seven-league boots’ have made possible means that a switch to some combination of alternative energy sources is entirely feasible in purely engineering terms – but it is psychologically and sociologically very difficult indeed. Almost every one of the intelligent life forms in the galaxy has gone well past the point of no-return – or will do so – before they have fully taken on board the nature of the threat.

And then the physical world takes over, positive feedback loops of various kinds kick in, and, very rapidly, the culture, what is left of it, is reduced to a precarious existence in which the very idea of attempting to communicate with aliens, just for the sheer fun of it, is simply laughable.

‘Hence,’ says Professor Galacticus, ‘the silence from the sky.’

* * *

‘You may think,’ he adds, ‘that I am making far too many assumptions about the psychology and sociology of unknown life forms, but I don’t think I am. You see, their basic psychological equipment is always going to be the product of a biological evolutionary process. We know how creative such a process is, and we know the diversity it has achieved, but it has one deep limitation. It is reactive rather than teleological. It is not aimed at anything, but is simply based on the accumulation of a kind of trial and error knowledge, and this makes it very weak at dealing with an unpredented threat.

‘I would, however, be very pleased to be proved wrong.’

Waterloo Sunset

I very much enjoyed this programme about Ray Davies. I was struck by his comment about one of his songs (I think it was ‘Days’) that the words might seem ‘a bit naff’ on their own, but he felt that the music transformed them. Actually that is true, I think, of quite a bit of his stuff. People usually praise the words, the little observations and stories, but on their own the observations are not necessarily all that original. There are a lot of songs, for instance, about the fears and longings of suburban life (‘Mr Pleasant’ or ‘Shangri-la’) which, taken just as stories and observations, are amusing but quite commonplace. But the music really does transform them into something else.

In fact I’d say his musical inventiveness is, if anything, rather underrated, or at any rate not so often remarked on. His back catalogue of songs (imagine having written ‘You really got me’, ‘Days’, ‘Sunny Afternoon’, ‘Autumn Almanac’, ‘Lola’ and ‘Waterloo Sunset’!) is quite exceptionally varied in terms of moods, rhythms and musical colours, and is full of lovely details and surprises. Listen, for instance, to the way that the strange and melancholy song ‘See my friends’ changes its feel and rhythm in the middle of each verse, opening up, and then drawing back again.

For various reasons, although I grew up in the 60s and 70s, I didn’t encounter ‘Waterloo Sunset’ at all until about 5 years after it came out. But when I did finally come across it I was really blown away, and I still am. It really is the most amazing marriage of words and music. There is actually not one single word of description of the sunset itself, yet when I listen to this song, the harmonies rising up over the melody instantly evoke to me an enormous brightly coloured sky, towering up over the little figures of Terry and Julie, and the people swarming out of the underground, and the song’s narrator, watching the whole scene from his window.

(As I’ve observed before, vivid descriptive writing isn’t so much a matter of providing detailed instructions of a scene, as of giving readers/listeners permission to construct the scene for themselves. This is a perfect example. We all know what sunsets look like, and don’t need to be told, but we do need something to trigger off the whole set of associations, something to allow us to pretend that a sunset is happening right now.)

The Glastonbury version of the song here is performed with the Crouch End Chorus, which includes my good friend Clive among its tenors. Lucky man.

(Clive lives in North London, where Davies grew up and still lives, very much in the surroundings in which the programme is filmed. The programme reminded a bit too of an odd but interesting book by another North Londoner that I wrote about here.)

How empty and worthless is the power of kings

At first glance, it is hardly surprising that oil companies and the like fund efforts to debunk the science on climate change. It’s in their interests to do so, right? Just as it was in the interests of tobacco companies to try to debunk the evidence of links between smoking and cancer.

But then you think, hang on, don’t oil executives have children and grandchildren, the same as the rest of us?

This is something more complex than cynical self-interest. It’s a deep category error. Climate change is being seen as an essentially political threat, a thing to be outmanoeuvred, fobbed off, discredited, or managed through spin and symbolic placation. There’s a failure to understand that this isn’t about interest groups, it isn’t about the politics of left versus right. It’s about air, and water, and ice.

“Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings,” Canute is supposed to have said, when the tide refused to obey his command to stop, and began to wash around his feet.

It’s not nature that’s fragile, it’s us

I think we’ve got it all wrong about our relationship with nature. For years we’ve been presented with the idea of nature as something precious and fragile and vulnerable, which is threatened by us crass and oafish humans. This invites a hard-nosed, macho, ‘realist’ response: ‘Tough!’, ‘Too bad!’, ‘Nature’s going to have to look after itself.’

But nature isn’t fragile. (What hubris!) Nature is exploding supernovae. It’s the eruption of Krakatoa. It’s Hurricane Katrina. It’s the tsunami that devastated Japan. It’s the force that created the dinosaurs, and the asteroid that destroyed them. It’s the electric storms that can been seen from space flashing continuously across the surface of this violent violent planet.

The question isn’t how to protect nature. Nature doesn’t give a damn what we do. The question is whether we want to go on being part of nature, or whether we’re just going to chuck in the towel and let it sweep us away.

(Thoughts prompted by this rather hard-hitting post about impending climate catastrophe.)

(NASA photo of Hurricane Katrina).

The Ice Cat Oojus

(This post is about the story ‘Atomic Truth’, in the Peacock Cloak collection. It was first published in Asimov’s SF.)

‘Atomic Truth’ is particularly dear to me personally, but it was literally years in the making.

The original idea came from watching the changed behaviour of people following the invention of mobile phones: the way that people who are ostensibly together in one place, are often, for all practical purposes much closer to other people who are physically remote. As a matrix in which to live, it seemed to me, physical space and the material universe were gradually declining in importance.

We’ve never been confined to literal space and time of course. We’ve always used the ideas of nearness and distance to refer to many other dimensions (‘a close likeness’, ‘we’ve grown apart’, ‘a distant cousin’, ‘Sorry, I was miles away.’) But now for the first time in history, everyone can literally see and hear things that are not physically present, even when they’re just walking down the street, or riding on a train.

‘Atomic truth’ is Richard’s name for the world in which foxes and deer still live, even if humans don’t.

I wrote the first version of this story long ago, before smartphones and iPads and all of that. But it stubbornly refused to come completely to life. The breakthrough was when I rewrote the character Richard as suffering from schizophrenia, so that, even though he didn’t wear bug eyes, he too was visited by things that were not physically present. And when I gave Jenny an autistic brother, so that she was unfazed by, and sympathetic to, people who were in some way odd, that made possible the little encounter at the end of the story that up to then had eluded me.

* * *

All the people in my stories are quite distinct in my mind from anyone real, but some of Richard’s characteristics are based a friend of ours who died some years ago. His name was Brod Spiiers and he shared a flat with my wife and I for a year or so in Bristol. If you were a student in Bristol in the 1970s, or lived near the University, you might remember him. He used to sit on a wall outside the Wills Building on Queens Road and sort of beg, though it was done in the most dignified way.

Brod was a lot older than Richard when we knew him, but like Richard, he had his own set of mythological beings that he used to talk about and draw pictures of, inscribed with his own unique language. (I remember, for instance, ‘the Ice Cat Oojus’). And he had a rather delightful explosive laugh which would erupt at completely unexpected moments, as if his sense of humour was somehow at right-angles to everyone else’s.

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, by James Tiptree, Jr.

[This piece contains many spoilers!]

James Tiptree, jr built a reputation in the 60s and 70s before revealing that ‘he’ was in fact a woman called Alice Bradley Sheldon. I really don’t know why I’ve not explored ‘his’/her work before.

These are subtle stories that demand intelligence and attention on the reader’s part (I had to read the story ‘The last flight of Doctor Ain’ twice, for example, before I got it). Many of the stories deal, in some way, with gender – a preoccupation of mine also – and quite a lot of them deal with male abuse of women. Interestingly, this is often done from a male perspective. Sexual desire, frequently and often quite graphically depicted (there are a surprisingly large number of erections in this book), is almost always shown from a male view.

In ‘Houston, Houston, Do You Read?’ the main protagonist is a scientist, male but liberal-minded and not exactly hyper-masculine, who is sharing a spaceship with two macho astronauts. The story captures beautifully captures his male insecurity in their presence, his (well-founded) anxiety that they feel contempt for men like him ‘who can manipulate only symbols, who have no mastery of matter’ –I know that feeling! – and his grudging admiration for them:

‘And for the thousandth time he is obscurely moved by the rightness of them. The authentic ones, the alphas. Their bond. The awe he had felt first for the absurd jocks of his school ball team.’

And here – a woman, writing as a man, looking at her own gender from the viewpoint of a male character – is the male scientist’s take on how woman relate to one another:

‘Like ants, he thinks. They twiddle their antennae together every time they meet. Where did you go, what did you do? Twiddle-twiddle. How do you feel?’

It does look that sometimes. It really does! (But I remember, from way back when I was a little child, envying the closeness and intensity of it.)

These are feminist stories, I suppose, but it has to be said that Sheldon’s feminism is of a fairly dark and fatalistic kind. When you learn that poor Alice was to end up killing both her husband and herself with a shotgun – they were found side by side in bed – it certainly fits. Of the 18 stories in this collection, two depict worlds in which men have died out, one a world in which men are killing all the women, and two have female astronauts kill off the men on board their ships. One – a wonderfully sensuous piece – has a female creature devouring her male mate. Three, not counting the men-killing-women one, go the whole hog and wipe out the entire human race.

Part of the reason for the pessimism – part of the intellectual reason at any rate: there are surely much more personal ones – would seem to be a view that we can’t escape biology, and that male aggression and the male drive towards dominance are simply biologically determined. In ‘The Women Men Don’t See’, the main female character observes:

‘Women have no rights… except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish… We’ll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You’ll see.’

In ‘The Screwfly Solution’* (the only Alice Sheldon story I’d previously read) the close relationship between male sexuality and male aggression is subtly altered by biochemical means so that men begin to systematically kill every woman and girl they meet. It ends up with the feel of a zombie movie, except that, instead of zombies, the apocalyptic killers are the male half of the human race. In the world of this story, a religious ideology has emerged to justify the slaughter (woman are evil and must be destroyed to fulfill God’s will), but Sheldon is clear that this isn’t the real cause of the killing at all. It is simply a cultural rationalisation of what has become, for biochemical reasons, a simple biological imperative. Cultural beliefs are only the clothes we put on over drives and needs which we can’t choose or control. Since it’s the biological aspect of gender which is the bit that can’t be changed, it’s not surprising the most positive worlds depicted in this book (or at least the most positive human ones) are the ones in which men have died out.

We are the puppets and playthings of biology: that seems to be a fairly constant theme. ‘Love is the Plan the Plan is Death’ (a beautiful piece of writing, and one of the best stories in the collection) is told from the viewpoint of Moggadeet, a spider-like creature, attempting to break out of the biological program: the Plan. But the Plan wins. Even the attempt to escape the Plan was part of the Plan itself.

In some of the stories, it is not so much the sexes that are pitted against one another by nature, as two principles: the gentle nurturing principle, the urge to care, versus the ruthless thrusting one, the drive to dominate. The latter is necessary to survival, and is even sometimes seemingly admired, though it cruelly crushes the former again and again. In ‘We who Stole the Dream’, a gentle race of aliens, the Joilani, are horribly and brutally oppressed by humans (in many ways, including sexually: this story includes some of the book’s many ugly scenes of sexual violation.) But, in different circumstances, the Joilani too turn out to be more than capable of embodying the ruthless principle of domination. (Would a world of only woman really be a gentler place? Or would some of the women simply step into the roles vacated by men?)

One of the most ambitious accounts here of human beings as simply the puppets of biology is ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’. Seventy-five pages long, this is about first contact with extraterrestrial life, and is one of the stories in the book where gender relations are not the main theme. (Or not exactly: Dr Aaron Faye’s intense and incestuous relationship with his idealistic younger sister is fairly central, and the whole story is ultimately about sexual reproduction on an interstellar scale.) A star ship on a ten year exploratory voyage to Alpha Centaurus has identified a planet with organic life some years travelling time ahead of it, and a scout ship has brought back a specimen of alien life. ‘Here we are,’ thinks Aaron Faye, as the moment approaches to come face to face with it:

‘Here we are, he thinks, tiny blobs of life, millions and millions of miles from the speck that spawned us, hanging out here in the dark wastes, preparing with such complex pains to encounter a different mode of life. All of us, peculiar, wretchedly imperfect – somehow we have done this thing. Incredible, really, the ludicrous tangle of equipment, the awkward suited men, the precautions, the labor, the solemnity – Jan, Bruce, Yellaston, Tim Bron, Bustamente, Alice Berryman, Coby, Kabawata, my own saintly sister, poor Frank Foy, stupid Aaron Faye – a stream of faces pours through his mind, hostile or smiling, suffering each in his separate flawed reality: all of us. Somehow we have brought ourselves to this amazement. Perhaps we really are saving our race, perhaps there really is a new earth and heaven ahead…’

It’s that feelgood moment towards the end of a movie when something wonderful has been accomplished, and the camera pans round the faces of the motley crew of characters who have somehow, between them, made it happen against all the odds. But this movie doesn’t end here, for Faye couldn’t be more wrong. What’s really brought them there is a biological system in which the whole of Earth’s evolutionary history is simply a necessary component. Having come out into space and performed their function, human beings, like the threshing tails of sperms, cease to have a purpose at all.

(Biology does not always come out so badly here, though. In several stories, the two principles locked in struggle are simply life and death, with death, however destructive, however frightening, the necessary and inevitable driver for life. In two of these stories -‘On the Last Afternoon’ and ‘Slow Music’- characters have a choice between staying with the cycle of death, sex and suffering, or escaping to a sexless, disembodied, eternal life among the stars. The former seems the braver choice.)

One of the most poignant stories for me – and also one of the most beautifully accomplished – was ‘Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!’* It begins by presenting two overlapping but incompatible reality frames, whose relationship with one another is initially unclear. In one frame, a wonderfully cheerful young woman makes her way on foot across an America that is entirely peaceful and safe. ‘Heyo, sister!’ she greets everyone she meets, entirely confident that they will be benign and interesting and fun to be with, ‘Any mail, any messages? Des Moines and going west!’ In the other frame, the inhabitants of ordinary 1970s America go about their own dull suspicious lives, puzzled, irritated or concerned by an odd young woman who talks to them in a funny way, and calls everyone ‘sister’ whether they are men or women. The link between the two frames gradually becomes apparent, until eventually they violently collide in a sickening scene which I found really heartwrenching.

That said, a close rival for it, for sheer painfulness, was ‘With Delicate Mad Hands’. This is a much less accomplished story in technical terms (one problem being that a large chunk of back story is dumped down into the middle of it which is very much ‘told’ rather than ‘shown’ – a fault that’s present in one or two other stories here – and there’s none of the clever scientific plausibility of ‘The Screwfly Solution’). A woman astronaut, born with a repulsive pig-like nose, has been abused and rejected throughout her life: male astronauts routinely shove her underpants over her head while they rape her, so they don’t have to look at her face. She became an astronaut because of a drive she has had since childhood to find her way to a ‘pig world’, somewhere in space, where she’ll belong. And, after she’s murdered her male colleagues, she finally finds it. It is a hidden sunless planet with lavender skies, inhabited by cute unthreatening aliens, but unfortunately deadly to humans due to high radiation levels. Here she finds her true soulmate in a piglike alien who has loved her, and been calling telepathically to her, all her life. They die in each other’s arms, she because of the radiation, it (or ‘he’ as she decides to say), because, in its love, it draws all her pain telepathically onto itself: Liebestod in My Little Pony land.

I found this clumsy, agonised story very uncomfortable. It was the escapist fantasy of a horribly abused and lonely little girl, and reading it was like watching the author stripping naked, much as its protagonist, Carol, actually does strip naked, to satisfy their curiosity, in front of the aliens peering in through the windows of her ship.

It’s funny (both in the sense of a joke, and in the sense of ‘strange’) to think that when these stories first came out, they would have been read by a predominantly male audience, and that most of them would have been believed to have been written by a man. Tiptree was like an undercover agent, operating behind enemy lines.

A strange, disturbing and brilliant collection. The author is fascinating too. I have already ordered her biography.

Her smoke rose up forever, on Amazon UK

* These two stories were actually published under Alice Sheldon’s other, female, pseudonym of Raccoona Sheldon.

The innocence of bad guys

I was thinking about this article by Howard Jacobson, in which he talks about the enduring appeal of bad guys in fiction. And I was thinking about our dogs and cat.

* * *

People often describe other people as behaving like animals (i.e. like non-human animals) when they behave badly. This has always struck me as a bit unfair to animals. Animals don’t rape or commit genocide or engage in torture.

But living in a house with animals it strikes me that certain kinds of crime really are very animal indeed: crimes like shoplifting, burglary, picking pockets, mugging, looting, opportunistic, amoral crimes, crimes motivated by nothing more complicated than ‘I’ll have that.’ The hitmen in films like Looper or Pulp Fiction, who kill for a living, without malice or anger, and without regret, strike me as being quite animal. When Amundsen was travelling to the South Pole, he killed dogs that were no longer needed and fed them to the others. I’m sure they tucked in without worry or remorse.

Animals (or at least the ones I’m acquainted with) take things opportunistically and without compunction, and they defend what they’ve taken as long as they think they can win the fight. They are capable of being delightfully and genuinely friendly, but incapable of being kind. They are capable of being horribly aggressive, but incapable of being cruel. If one of them picks up a thorny twig to play with, he’ll bash it against your legs without a thought as he runs by, not out of inconsiderateness, but because he simply doesn’t do that kind of consideration.

They’ve never eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

* * *

Sometimes morality is portrayed as being the opposite to the pleasure principle, but that’s just silly. What point does life have without pleasure? (To help others? To help them to do what?) Pleasure is simply the sum total of things that make life worthwhile, and it just doesn’t make any sense to say that life could have an additional purpose.

Genuine morality is the pleasure principle, but with the rest of the world factored in: other people, other creatures, our future selves. It doesn’t tell us to forego pleasure per se, but it might tell us to forego pleasures that will lead to harm elsewhere, or later on. It doesn’t tell us to pursue suffering, but it might tell us to be willing to suffer here and now for the sake of pleasure elsewhere, or later on.

It’s morally wrong to behave as if you were the centre of the universe, because it’s factually wrong. As a matter of fact, you’re not.

Animals don’t know that, though. They act as if they themselves at this moment were all that mattered. And this works perfectly well for them, because evolution has provided them with appetites and drives that will allow the simple pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain to address longer term or wider needs without them having to even think about it.

But we do know it, and so we do have to think about it. We can only not think about it by lying to ourselves. And that does damage to us, because it requires us to build partitions across our minds.

* * *

And yet there’s a huge price to pay for this knowledge. This awareness that we should think about things beyond our immediate selves and our present impulses, adds layers of calculation and anxiety to every choice we make. It takes away spontaneity.

I think that’s why bad guys are fun to watch. They appeal to us not because they are wicked and knowing per se, but, oddly enough, because of their innocence. They remind us of a kind of innocence and simplicity that animals have and we have lost for good. They remind us of what we had to give up when we ate that bloody fruit.

The Long Journey of Frozen Heart

Although the first draft of The Holy Machine was completed in 1994, its origins actually go back to two short stories, both published in Interzone in 1991. One was ‘La Macchina’, which I included in my collection The Turing Test. The story was about two brothers on a trip to Florence, but it included many of the key elements of the book, including the idea of syntecs (robots covered in living flesh), syntec brothels, robots ‘going rogue’ by becoming sentient, and the Holy Machine itself.

The other was ‘The Long Journey of Frozen Heart’. I lifted this entire story to provide the subplot about Ruth Simling and, for this reason, I didn’t include it in The Turing Test collection, feeling that readers of both books might feel a little cheated when they recognised the same storyline unfolding. But I like the story and I’ve decided to make the full text of it available here. (I’ve tidied it up a bit. I seem to have become a better editor over these 21 years!*)

I was standing in a queue in the now-defunct Magnet furniture store, when I came up with this story. Dreamy, melancholy muzak was maundering away in the background, melancholy yet at the same time loveless and mechanical, and the phrase came into my head: The Long Sad Journey of Frozen Heart. (I later dropped the ‘Sad’: I felt that was over-egging it). Within a very short time, the entire story had written itself in my mind, with very little in the way of conscious direction on my part.

Thinking about it now, I wonder if I was thinking about ‘Frozen Journey’, the title given, when it was first published, to Philip Dick’s short story ‘I Hope We Shall Arrive Soon’, on which I was some time later to write an entire dissertation. This has never actually occurred to me before, but there are certainly thematic similarities between the two stories, since both deal with a protagonist trapped in virtual reality, and both include a disembodied and powerful helper. In the Dick story, the protagonist has to be kept in virtual reality if he is to remain sane, though this results in long-term damage to his ability to believe in the real world. In ‘The Long Journey of Frozen Heart’, the protagonist, Mary Louisa Ann (aka Frozen Heart), chooses to leave virtual reality to reclaim her authentic self, even though this will result in her death.

I wanted the story to have a slightly fairytale-like feeling. In the back of my mind was the Hans Andersen story about the little mermaid who chooses to be given human legs and live on land, even though every step she makes there will be agony. And perhaps there’s something of Andersen’s Snow Queen here also (a story which I found wonderful and terrifying when it was read to me as a small child): Gerda’s heroic journey; Kai, with the mirror splinter in his heart, playing with jigsaw pieces made of ice. (There’s a bit of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ in here too, and just a pinch of the Irish legend, ‘The Voyage of Bran’.)

This story, and ‘La Macchina’, and indeed The Holy Machine, all deal with the way in which human beings escape from reality into imaginary worlds, shutting out things that they find unpleasant or difficult or frightening, something that becomes ever more tempting as technology makes possible ever more convincing simulacra: battle without danger, sex without meeting anyone, empire-building without taking risks and without achieving anything real at all. It is the emptiness of these constructs, which can be built and discarded in a moment, that Frozen Heart chooses to leave behind in order to recover her own real beating heart.

The Long Journey of Frozen Heart.

* I’ve also updated it a little. In the 1991 version, the Otherverse was simply ‘the Net’, and it only contained 99 worlds. Which seems a bit retro now.