Blog, books, stories.
I just received a copy of the new Marcher today from Ian Whates at NewCon press. It’s always a lovely feeling, that first time you put your hands on the actual physical book. And I love the cover image by Ben Baldwin, loosely based on the famous painting by Magritte: ‘Not to be reproduced’.
The book won’t be available for sale until the August launch at Loncon.
Another good evening at Sferakon yesterday.
Here’s a further extract from the Croatian scene in The Holy Machine:
Help came in the form of a solitary figure in black hurrying across the square. It was an elderly widow, tightly clutching an enormous brown cockerel in both arms.
‘What kind of monastery is this?’ I asked her. ‘Who is it dedicated to?’
I must have spoken something that at least approximated to her own language. She stopped and looked at me.
‘You poor boy! You must go in! The monks are good. They will give you help.’
‘But what kind of monks? Who do they believe in?’
‘They are kind and holy. They’ll help you.’
‘Please,’ I grabbed her arm. ‘Please tell me. What do they believe in?’
She stared at me. Something in my face shocked her. She released the cockerel’s neck, so as to free her right hand to cross herself.
‘It is a monastery of the Roman Church,’ she said, ‘but now that it is given over to the Holy Machine, may the Lord bless his name, who knows what church it belongs to.’
The cockerel, red wattles quivering, had twisted his neck round to stare at me with a fierce yellow eye. It suddenly emitted a loud, cold shriek.
‘The Holy… Machine?’ I mumbled.
‘Yes.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘A great miracle. He is a kind of robot, but God has given him a soul – and not an ordinary human soul either, but the soul of a saint or an angel!’
‘But… I thought robots were… bad…’
‘Yes, of course, and Mary Magdalene was a whore. To God, all things are possible.’
The woman smiled and patted me on the arm.
‘Go in, young man. You’ve got a fever. They’ll get you dry and give you something to eat.’
A sudden eruption of activity and noise made me cower and cry out with fear. But it was just the cockerel. It had worked one of its wings free and was beating it frantically.
‘No you don’t!’ snapped the old woman, grabbing it grimly by the throat.
‘Go in,’ she urged me over her shoulder as she dealt with the offending bird. ‘Go in!’
The rain was starting up again. She hurried on.
* * *
Even just the time I had spent standing and talking with the widow had left my body stiff. I hobbled very slowly across the square, only to quail in front of the blue double door. Here was food, warmth, rest. Here more importantly than anything was the possibility of forgiveness that had been the whole purpose of this journey. Somewhere within was that bright, silver being that I so longed to meet. But now I dreaded that encounter.
Very reluctantly I lifted my hand to the knocker. A stab of pain ran through my body. I let the knocker fall.
Thud!
Silence.
Silence.
A cold gust of wind blew the rain across the empty square.
I give up, I thought. Let me just crawl away to some hole in the ground and sink peacefully into oblivion.
I had already turned away from the door when from within came the sound of sliding bolts. The left half of the big door slowly opened to reveal a small, fat, balding monk.
‘I am…’ I hesitated for a moment before I could recall my own name. ‘I am George Simling, an Illyrian. I wondered… I need food, somewhere to sleep. I want to see the Holy Machine.’
‘Come in then, come in.’
* * *
And then I found that the closed door was already behind me and I was in a pale, stone-flagged corridor. The monk took my arm. There were many small blue doors down one side. I caught a glimpse of a bright tree glistening in an empty courtyard. Then many more doors.
I felt myself coming to from a labyrinthine dream of mountains, wars and roads… I woke up and remembered that reality was simply this: moving slowly along a corridor with calm blue doors. On and on. That was life. Why bother to open the doors? Why bother? Why not just carry on along here? It would be fine if it wasn’t so cold. It would be just fine.
I came to again. There were voices. Another monk had appeared, this one tall and sandy-haired. The two men were conferring about me. I couldn’t understand the words at first. I think I was trying to listen to them in the wrong language.
A blue door opened. I was a little afraid. But I went up into the sky and looked down from above, as if into a doll’s house.
In a small bare room with a single chair and a single bed, a monk was talking to a pale young man with bleeding feet. (‘Not him again!’ I thought. ‘Why is it always him?’)
‘Take off your wet clothes,’ the monk coaxed gently, ‘We’ll get you some dry things and something to eat, and we’ll dress these feet. Then you must rest. You have a very high temperature indeed.’
Another monk arrived. Another little monk down there in the doll’s house with miniature dressings and a tiny bowl of water.
‘We’ll have to undress him,’ said the first one. ‘I don’t think he can do it for himself.’
‘Are you sure he speaks Croatian?’
‘Yes. Well he spoke it clearly enough when he arrived. His name is George. He’s from the City.’
I’m currently attending the Sferakon 2014 convention in Zagreb as a guest of honour. I’m being made most welcome and am having a great time. (I’m also amazed by the fluency in English of everyone here: I have no conception of what it might be like to speak another language to that level). Zagreb is a very attractive city too, even though currently somewhat grey and rainy.
I’ve never been to Croatia before, other than a single bus journey, back in the 70s, when I crossed what was then Yugoslavia from one end to the other, on my way back from Greece to England. However, the Balkans have always had a strong hold on my imagination, and my first novel, The Holy Machine, was entirely set in this part of the world. The novel deals with a conflict between atheism and various resurgent religions, and the Balkans seemed a natural setting for that because it is a region where religions and empires meet like tectonic plates: Rome/Byzantium, Catholicism/Orthodoxy/Islam, Austria-Hungary/Venice/Turkey. (And when I formed the idea the book, in the early 90s, there was of course a terrible conflict taking place along some of those ancient fault-lines.)
Croatia itself appears in the book in a rather crucial scene, when the book’s protagonist, confused, traumatised and feverish, arrives in a village where there is a large monastery:
Very slowly I made my way down the hill, dragging one leg like an old man. There was a lull in the rain, but water was everywhere. Streams gurgled and tinkled all around me. Muddy water ran in rivulets across the road. I remember I saw a lizard on the stony ground. Because of the cold, it moved away from me not with the normal darting motion of lizards, but in slow motion, one leg at a time.
At the outskirts of the village I met a young man with a long, wet moustache.
‘Excuse me,’ I murmured, ‘excuse me…’
I reached out to him and touched his sleeve. He pulled his arm away indignantly, then dived into a house and slammed the door.
The clouds were breaking up overhead into rags of grey and white and the sun shone through in patches: a tree illuminated here, a ruined house there… The mountainside which I had just descended was now blazing with brilliant, yellow light.
I passed closed doors and shuttered windows. A thin dog came trotting past. It paused to sniff at me, as if wondering whether there was any flesh left on me worth eating.
At the centre of the village there was a square with single shop and a police station, both of them closed and shuttered up. There was a ruined building and some deserted-looking houses. The long, white wall of the monastery formed one whole side of the square. It had barred windows with pale blue stonework around them, and a single, large ornate door.
I hesitated. Where was this? Bosnia? Montenegro? Dalmatia? Istria? Venetia? What alphabet was that above the door of the police station? What language did they speak? I swayed and tottered and nearly fell.
And what religion was it here, I wondered (for I had noticed that geography was the main determinant of religious belief)? Which God did they follow? Should I ask for alms in the name of Allah, or Jesus Christ, or Bogomil, or… who? Some Slavonic god of plenty? To my confused, feverish mind, the question seemed both insoluble and frighteningly important. That dull, persistent aching feeling was pressing heavily against the inside of my eyes.
Which God? Couldn’t I at least know which God?
My personal Ballard retrospective has continued with me reading two of his short story collections on the trot: The Voices of Time (aka The Four Dimensional Nightmare) and The Terminal Beach, both of which I first read as a teenager in the 70s when they were part of my father’s smallish but (for me) very influential SF collection. I loved them both on re-reading as much as I did first time round. Indeed I’ve been engrossed by them in a way that I haven’t been engrossed by any work of fiction for a very long time. Sad to say it, but true.
I read The Crystal World immediately before these two collections and enjoyed it very much too, but reading the stories convinces me that the short form was Ballard’s natural medium. The Crystal World, gorgeous as it is, doesn’t really have any more to say than the short story on which it’s based (‘The Illuminated Man’, included in Terminal Beach). I remember throwing aside High Rise unfinished when I realised that the characters had accepted from the very beginning the collapse of civilized norms that the whole book was supposedly about and were going to simply watch the whole thing amusedly from the off. My son made a very similar observation about Empire of the Sun. Events happen, vivid scenes are shown, but there is no real progression. Jim is already reconciled to darkness and violence before it even begins; he doesn’t change, but simply watches. The novel is not the obvious form for an artist who is interested in inner states rather than relationships or external events. The short story is much better suited for that (as is painting, to which Ballard frequently refers).
These stories are full of characters whose inner life is much more important to them than human relationships or the external world. One rips out his own eyes, like Oedipus, the better to immerse himself in his inner world. Another, with an injured foot going septic, refuses to move from the spot where he is communing nightly with legions of snakes (and feels grateful to the colleague who is meanwhile having an affair with his wife because it gets her out of his way). Not all of the stories fall into the same mould, but the typical character is assertively passive – see also ‘The Overloaded Man’, ‘The Giaconda of the Twilight Noon’, ‘The Terminal Beach’, ‘The Voices of Time’ – insisting on his right to sink into his obsessions and dreams and deeply sceptical of rational modernity, with its busy projects of mastery and control. Several of the stories read like re-writes of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in which apparent darkness turns out to be the true light, and western civilization merely a futile neurosis:
…there was a deeper reason for his scepticism, underlined by Ryker’s reference to the ‘real’ reasons for the space-flights. The implication was that the entire space programme was a symptom of some inner unconscious malaise afflicting mankind, and in particular the western technocracies, and that the space craft and satellites had been launched because their flights satisfied certain buried compulsions and desires. By contrast, in the jungle, where the unconscious was manifest and exposed, there was no need for these insane projections… (From ‘A Question of Re-entry’ in Terminal Beach)
At least there was a passive repose about the Indians, a sense of the still intact integrity of flesh and spirit… It was this paradigm of fatalism which Gifford would have liked to achieve – even the most wretched native, identifying himself with the irrevocable flux of nature, had bridged a greater span of years than the longest-lived European or American with his obsessive time-consciousness, cramming so-called significant experiences into his life like a glutton. (From ‘The Delta at Sunset’ in Terminal Beach)
It’s a strange thing, sort of like Benjamin Button, even though not actually in reverse. Our dog Plum used to be youngest of all of us, but now her legs are stiff and she’s deaf and nearly blind, older than any of us by far.
My short story Poppyfields began in a patch of waste ground. The ground had been cleared for a new housing estate, but a legal dispute had broken out, leading to a delay. In the interim, plants and animals colonised the place, so that it became its own little world, cut off from the rest of the world behind a high fence and padlocked gates. Of course in due course the legal dispute would be resolved, the bulldozers would come in, and the ground would be covered in houses and roads, but neither Poppyfields nor its creatures knew or cared about that one bit. Death and extinction are purely human concerns.
* * *
A real-life Poppyfields has now appeared, only a few streets away from where I live. The old site of the Cambridge Water Company was cleared some years ago for development but, for whatever reason, nothing yet has happened. Buddleia, birch and other plants have taken root, and have grown to become a small forest with trees two or three times my height, minding their own business, and separated from the human world by a high fence. It’s just a small patch of ground, surrounded by residential streets, a Leisure Park and an industrial estate, but it doesn’t know how old it is, or how big it is, or how briefly it will exist. It’s as green and alive as the most ancient of ancient woods.
Yesterday, cycling to the railway station, I looked through the padlocked gate, and there was a deer standing there, looking away from me at something among the trees.
I compiled this list of fictional languages for Huffington Post. There must be lots of others I could have included. One I thought of including was the imaginary dialect of the ‘tell‘ from the movie Mad Max: beyond the Thunderdome, but as it’s the only part of the movie I’ve actually seen, I thought perhaps not.
After this was posted I also remembered the imaginary words, supposedly from the Republic of San Lorenzo, introduced by Kurt Vonnegut in his novel Cat’s Cradle. The words are part of the San Lorenzo religion known as Bokononism. Some of them are rather useful. The word granfalloon, for instance: ‘a proud and meaningless association of human beings.’ (Vonnegut suggests nations, among other examples.)
Some people say that 3D movies are a superficial gimmick that won’t last. Certainly, it’s hard to imagine any script for which three-dimensionality would be essential, but then this true of colour also. What isn’t so often noted is that 3Dness, like colour, is a pure pleasure, a pleasure in its own right, regardless of the purpose to which its put. It’s the pleasure of space itself. Hence the long history of stereo viewers, which apparently go back to 1838. The View-Master, for instance, has been a popular toy since 1939, yet there aren’t really games you can play with it, other than admire the 3Dness of the little scenes.
I’ve always loved 3Dness, but I’ve been struck again by it’s importance since I’ve been thinking about drawing and, specifically, since I’ve been thinking how drawing or painting could capture something of what is lovely about Spring. Lots of artists have already tried this of course , and some with great success (see the famous picture by Sisley below), but they are nevertheless limited by the flat surface on which they work. Look up through the branches of a tree on one of these sunny days – it’s another pure pleasure – then shut one eye. It’s still lovely of course, it’s still the same scene, but one of the things that was most enchanting has gone, the sense of depth, the actual sensory experience of it: the layers, the bounded yet open spaces between the twigs and leaves.
Drawing and painting can hint at this, just as black-and-white can hint at colour, but it can’t directly capture it, while sculpture, though it is 3D, deals with solid masses rather than open spaces. Someone needs to invent a drawing app, to be used with goggles and a 3D screen, which would allow artists to reach into a virtual space and lay down lines and colours not on a flat surface but at different depths, and at whatever angle they liked. Think of the possibilities not only for capturing real scenes but for abstract images. It could be a whole new art form!
“Spearheaded by two biologists and a former Bain & Company management consultant, the Glowing Plant Project has at least two goals. Long-term: creating trees that glow so powerfully through bioluminescence that they can function as street lights. Short-term: promoting grassroots innovation within the realm of synthetic biology…” [Full article here.]
I’m looking forward to Sferakon 2014 in Zagreb, Croatia, which takes place from 16th to 18th May. I’ve been invited as a guest of honour. Which is an honour. Hvala lijepa!
