All posts | Chris Beckett's Fiction

The Emperor’s Last Laugh

Because of my new-found interest in drawing, my wife gave me a book recently called A Short Book about Drawing, by Andrew Marr, the TV journalist, who turns out to be a pretty good drawer. It’s a charming book, and much of it is simply about the pleasure to be obtained from the act of drawing itself, but at one point Marr speaks with some regret about the influence of Marcel Duchamp on our conception of art, and about all that has since emerged ‘like a vast glittery spout of magma from Duchamp’s urinal.’

He’s referring to the urinal which, in 1917, Duchamp signed with the name ‘R.Mutt’ and decreed to be a work of art called ‘Fountain’. A work of art from then on wasn’t necessarily a painting or a sculpture. It didn’t even have to be something that the artist had made. It could be anything that an artist chose to designate as such. Indeed, from what I’ve read, Duchamp deliberately chose objects for this purpose which had no meaning or significance to him at all. What a strange, violent, mocking thing to do! It’s as if I were to reprint a telephone directory, call it ‘Contact’ and declare it to be my next novel – and people were to accept it as such, and make themselves read it and think about it as if it meant something!

If anything can be a work of art if an artist says it is (including an object that means nothing even to the artist!) this raises the question of who gets to be an artist. Who gets this strange fetishistic power? In the past artists would have been identifiable to most people, at least to some extent, by the skill evident in their work. Some artists were doubtless much better than others at acquiring wealthy patrons, but some degree of skill in the creation of images would have been a necessary prerequisite also. Now this was no longer the case. An artist could be created by patronage alone. With beauty and meaning set aside, the wealthy could create artists out of whomever they chose, and those artists could then return the favour by taking trivial objects and turning them, for the wealthy, into a kind of gold.

The emperor gets the last laugh, after all. Who cares if the clothes are real or not, as long as they can be bought and sold?

The Moon’s a Harsh Mistress

I was looking at writing a little thing about the Robert Heinlein novel, a favourite of my teens, when I came across a song with the same title: ‘The Moon’s a Harsh Mistress’ by Jimmy Webb, who also wrote the lovely ‘Wichita Lineman’.

It seems that Webb did consciously borrow the title from the book, and wrote to Heinlein for permission to use it, though I don’t believe you can actually copyright a title.

Apart from the title, the song has nothing to do with Heinlein’s book, but it’s a very beautiful song.

There actually is a song that uses one of my titles – The Holy Machine – and that pleased me very much. I would love to be a songwriter – there is something wonderfully perfect and self-contained about a good song which very little else can match – but I think this is about as near to it as I’m going to get.

For reading groups…

Dark Eden has been quite popular with reading groups in the UK, and the US publishers of Dark Eden, have produced this reading group guide in advance of the book’s publication there in April.

Drawing

I’ve started going to drawing classes, one of my better ideas. Drawing turns out to be a wonderfully engrossing and calming activity.

I particular enjoy drawing electric-lit scenes in charcoal, a medium that allows you to create a sense of luminousness by covering the paper in layers of grey and then removing it in patches with a putty rubber to create areas of brightness.

This is one of my better efforts so far: a glass ball in front of a lamp.

I’m hoping that in due course I might be able to use this sort of technique to draw some of the creatures and trees of Eden, lit by their own luminosity or the luminosity of other organisms nearby. That’s going to be a while though, because it is hard enough drawing what is actually in front of me.

In fact the exact thing that’s hard about this kind of drawing is that you must draw what’s in front of you, and forget what’s in your head. The only way I could do the glass ball in the picture above (and, let’s be honest, I’m pretty damn pleased with it) is by stopping thinking about it as a glass ball and just noticing the various different shades of light and darkness and the shapes they made.

Happiness

I was reading a book in a warm conservatory when a splash of water fell on me. I looked up, thinking the roof was leaking and that I might need to move. But the water had come from a drop of condensation that was rolling down the underside of the glass roof, collecting more moisture as it went along. It had become too heavy for its own surface tension to be able to hold it up against the pull of gravity.

It dripped a second time and a third, and then equilibrium was restored. The droplet was no longer too heavy to hold itself up, and it carried on down the roof, leaving behind it a kind of snail trail as it passed through steamed up patches. There were a whole lot of these snail trails up there, descending the roof at various angles, and each one was lined with a series of small static droplets like glass beads, which the larger rolling droplets seemed to leave behind themselves at more or less regular intervals.

I spent some time looking up at this little system powered by heat and gravity, lazily mulling over the physics of it all, when I noticed that, beyond the glass, a series of ragged clouds were passing rapidly across the blue sky above me, one after another.

I suddenly felt entirely at peace.

Colts

My wife Maggie owns a male colt. He was in a paddock with two other male colts, one of which was a little Shetland pony, but the two bigger colts bullied the small one and their owners had to separate them.

‘But they’re all going to be gelded next week,’ Maggie said, ‘so they should settle down after that.’

It struck me as funny the way that owners of animals calmly accept that the ownership of testicles makes a difference to behaviour, in a way that would be highly controversial in the human world:

‘Bit of a power struggle has broken out in X, but the leaders are being castrated next week so it should all blow over soon.’

Writing about Eden

People who read Dark Eden usually comment on the language. I included some (actually quite small small) variations from modern English by way of acknowledging the fact that language would develop differently in a community that had been isolated for that length of time: adjectives are doubled up for emphasis rather than using ‘very’, the direct article is quite often dropped… Some people really like this, some tolerate it and some hate it, finding it maddening and childish. (It’s meant to sound a bit childish, by the way: my idea was that the first generation on Eden would have slipped into baby talk a little, when there were only two adults in the world, just as young parents tend to slip into baby talk during the phase of life when they are preoccupied with small children. In Eden there would be no adult world to provide a corrective.)

As I rework my second Eden novel (Mother of Eden), though, the thing about the language of Eden folk that I find most challenging is the fact that almost their only reference points are, naturally enough, inside their own world. This creates two difficulties. The first one is that, if we are describing an unfamiliar environment, we normally do it by the use of metaphors and similes with things we already know. If I was describing the forest of Eden from the point of view of a visitor from Earth, for instance, I might say it bore a certain resemblance to a terrestrial forest at night that had been hung with Chinese lanterns. But, apart from stories of Earth to which they sometimes refer (when I think I can get away with it without stretching plausibility too far!), Eden people have only Eden itself to use as a source of metaphors and similes. I have to try and describe something that is unfamiliar to the reader, either by reference to very basic things like fire and rock that exist on both Earth and Eden, or by reference to other things that are themselves unfamiliar to the reader. It’s quite a restriction to work with, though a common one of course, both in SF and in historical fiction.

The second difficulty is that Eden people would not have retained words for which they had no use. In Dark Eden, for instance, when John and his followers come to an ocean, they no longer have the words ‘ocean’ or ‘sea’ because the people of Eden have been living for generations in a valley surrounded by mountains. The nearest thing they still have is the word ‘pool’ so they call their ocean ‘Worldpool’.

When the story shifts to Worldpool itself (as it does in Mother of Eden), I also have to do without words like ‘coast’, ‘bay’, ‘island’, ‘inlet’, and to find some way of referring to these things which is plausible and not too cumbersome. Even the word ‘land’, it seemed to me, would no longer be available, because why would you ever refer to land if there was no sea? The nearest Eden English gets to ‘land’ is ‘ground’ and this is the word they use.

Gravity

I see so many films and read so many books that don’t really touch me and leave no lasting trace at all, but this film really got into me. For a long time afterwards, I kept coming back to it, turning it over in my mind. (There’s a clip here if you didn’t see it.)

It’s a pretty rare thing, actually: a satisfying work of art.

But what was so good about it? The effects of course are wonderful, and space is of course the obvious subject matter for a 3D film, but the plot is almost laughably simple, and, in spite of the realism of those effects, it does require you to accept some fairly chunky implausibilities. So what made this film so special?

I think the secret lay in what in itself was a very simple and commonplace story-telling move. Quite early on it’s established the main, and soon to be sole, protagonist, played by Sandra Bullock, has suffered a devastating loss: her own child, dead at the age of four in a freak playground accident. This isn’t laboured particularly, but the events of the movie provide such a perfect parallel with that experience that it doesn’t have to be. A shower of debris that no one could have expected suddenly arrives, and the space shuttle which up to now has been an island of air and warmth becomes as empty and barren as the void outside. The only hope lies in abandoning it altogether and venturing out across the emptiness.

3D movies achieve the illusion of depth by presenting the same scene from two slightly different angles, and story-telling works like that as well. You need more than one angle if the thing is to come alive. Here, the story in front of us and its amazing imagery combine with the story of the woman’s past to create a really wonderful meditation on the precariousness of existence.

The Holy Machine: new cover

The new edition of The Holy Machine is now available. It’s the same book inside the cover, of course, but books are objects too, and this new version seems to me a pretty desirable thing.

The contents aren’t bad either:

“A triumph.” – Paul di Filippo, Asimov’s SF.

“…the sparse prose and acute social commentary of a latter-day Orwell…” – Eric Brown, The Guardian.

“The most amazing book I have ever read…. Simply amazing. A must read for all human beings!” – Rafael from Brooklyn: enthusiastic Amazon.com reviewer!

The Holy Machine is also available as an unabridged AUDIO BOOK, read by John Banks.

More about The Holy Machine here.

Glorified

When I did an interview recently for the Pakistani station CityFM89 I got to pick 15 songs to be played on the programme. A real treat, and an honour. But I wasn’t allowed to pick any classical music, which meant leaving out some of my favourite pieces.

Here is one of them, the opening chorus of Bach’s St John Passion: ‘Herr unser Herrscher.’ Insofar as it is possible to have a single favourite piece of music, this is probably it. There is so much going on here: immense energy (feel the tension, the exhilaration!), incredibly intricate architecture that is structurally perfect and yet fluid, working through time as well as space… But running through it all is that wonderful quality of serenity, assurance, optimism that (for me) epitomises the Baroque era, back in the Age of Enlightenment, when the world was brutal and cruel, but so many many possibilities were opening up. Will there ever be another time like it?

The words in German are:

Herr, unser Herrscher,
dessen Ruhm
in allen Landen herrlich ist!
zeig uns durch deine Passion,
daß du, der wahre Gottessohn,
zu aller Zeit,
auch in der größten Niedrigkeit,
verherrlicht worden bist!

In English this is something like:

Lord, our ruler,
whose praise
is glorious in all lands,
show us by your Passion
that You, the true Son of God,
at all times,
even in the lowest state,
have been glorified.

You don’t have to agree with the theology to recognise that the music embodies the idea expressed in those final words. Even in the lowest state, it glorifies.