All posts | Chris Beckett's Fiction

The secret sea

‘The Caramel Forest’ and ‘Day 29’ are both set in the forests of the planet Lutania.

This imagined place owes a lot to the Strugatsky brothers’ The Snail on the Slope, which also describes a strange forest where human inhabitants live among strange alien life forms, while a scientific agency sits on a cliff above. Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris has a similar set-up of human scientists hovering above a weird, utterly inscrutable, living ocean, and the ‘castle’ in ‘The Caramel Forest’ was suggested to me by the inexplicable structures that emerged from time to time from the seething surface of Solaris.

Both Solaris and Snail on the Slope are books that refuse to resolve themselves. One way of looking at this is to say that such books deny the reader the pleasure of tied-up loose ends. But you could equally well say that they refuse to snatch back from the reader an encounter with the alien. Tidy endings can be acts of vandalism.

‘Hansel and Gretel’ is in the mix here too of course, along with all the other sinister/enticing forests in fairy tales. (Laura Diehl, who did the illustration of ‘The Caramel Forest’ for the Asimov’s cover is primarily a children’s book illustrator. A great choice.) So, I think, is a stoned and dreamy LP by a jazz-tinged 1970s prog-rock band called Caravan, whose title track began:

In the land of grey and pink where only boy-scouts stop to think
They’ll be coming back again, those nasty grumbly grimblies
And they’re climbing down your chimney, yes they’re trying to get in
Come to take your money – isn’t it a sin, they’re so thin?

* * *

The ‘goblins’ in Lutania are able to stir things up in people’s minds. For most people, this is unwelcome. They are forced to think about painful or scary things that they’ve tried to bury. They feel invaded. But for Cassie in ‘The Caramel Forest’ it’s actually a relief to hear the voices in her head confirming what she already knows about her parents’ unhappy marriage and her mother’s lack of interest in being a mum. Better to have it confirmed than to leave it unspoken.

Odd, solitary Stephen in ‘Day 29’ is a different case. His secrets are so deeply buried that even the goblins can’t winkle them out. But they can still taunt him with the fact that he’s hiding things.

(This post refers to two stories, both originally published in Asimov’s, which are included in the Peacock Cloak collection.)

SF novel of the year, 2012!

I’ve just found out, two days late, that Dark Eden was The Sunday Times’ SF novel of the year for 2012. I’m very pleased.

Alison Flood, the Sunday Times’ SF reviewer wrote:

“…Written in an extraordinary vernacular, this is a stunning novel and a beautiful evocation of a truly alien world. I have thrust it on countless people this year and they’ve all loved it.

Space, time, identity

(This post relates to ‘The Famous Cave Paintings on Isolus 9’ in the Peacock Cloak collection. It was first published in Postscripts).

Perhaps there really is only one soul in the world, looking out through the eyes of every living thing in turn? Perhaps the difference between one person and another is like the difference between a person and their own self at a time they don’t remember.

When I’m walking along a road, I sometimes fix my attention on some landmark up ahead (a lamp post, say), and think about the me that will shortly be walking past it. Even though that other me will exist in only a few minutes, he seems to me to be a stranger, because I don’t have any recollection of being him: as much of a stranger, in a way, as a completely different person would be.

* * *

Clancy and Com appeared in my previous short story collection, The Turing Test. (So in fact, did three other characters in this book.) This means that, although Clancy doesn’t know it, one of the reasons why things can’t possibly work out with for him and Elena, is the existence of another story, already written, about a time in the future when he will set out on his travels again, and will still be on his own.

Tardigrades

(This post refers to the story ‘The Desiccated Man’, in the Peacock Cloak collection. It was first published in Postscripts).

Tardigrades were the starting point of this story. They really do exist, and really are able to come alive again after complete dehydration, but they are actually terrestrial animals. We don’t notice them because they’re absolutely tiny, but they are very common, living in places which are alternately dry and wet, such as puddles and gutters. They’re fat little things whose chubby legs have little claws on the ends of them, and they’re sometimes called ‘water bears’. Here’s a youtube clip.

If tardigrades were intelligent, they would make perfect space travellers. No need for food or air. No need to worry about the length of the journey.

I first encountered them when I was a student in the 1970s and did a subsidiary course in zoology. The lecturer demonstrated that, if you cut a dried-out tardigrade in half and then rehydrated the pieces, they would first come alive, and then die.

Scientists, eh? What are they like?

Outside of the chain

(This post is about the story ‘Day 29’, in the Peacock Cloak collection.)

‘Day 29’ was the first to be written of my two stories about Lutania. In fact Lutania evolved initially as mere background to the original idea behind this story which was the one about loss of memory and loss of inhibition.

But the secret of a good story, I think, is that nothing in it should stay ‘mere’ anything. As far as possible, every detail should be interesting in its own right. The details of Lutania eventually engrossed me to the point where I realised I still hadn’t done with the place after one story, and wrote ‘The Caramel Forest’ as well.

‘Day 29’ owes a debt to Philip Palmer’s novel Version 43, not only for the obvious similarity of the titles, but also for the idea of using the process of teleportation itself as a plot device. In Version 43, you could travel from planet to planet by teleportation, but only at a 50% risk of being horribly mangled in transit. Here teleportation involves the certainty of a lacuna in your memory going back at least 29 days before making the crossing.

When I submitted this story to Sheila Williams at Asimov’s SF, she responded that she’d take the story ‘even though we don’t normally take horror’. Funnily enough, up to that point, I hadn’t quite understood that what I’d written was a horror story. But so it is. (So, perhaps, is ‘The Desiccated Man’?)

It really would be very disturbing, I think, to be outside of the chain that ties past and future together, and to know for certain that your own future self would not remember you.

A deadly mismatch

There’s a kind of mismatch – it could prove deadly – between the way we are and the way we need to be at this moment in history.

In our daily lives, we are less and less closely involved with the material universe, as newer and more flexible matrices unfold around us in which to live and work and play.

And yet more than ever before, the material world around us is shaped by our own choices.

It’s as if, at the precise moment of moving from the back of the car to the driver’s seat, we grew bored of looking at the road.

(This post refers to the story ‘Rat Island’, included in the Peacock Cloak collection. It was first published in Interzone.)

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.

Croeso i Loegr

(This post is about the story ‘Our Land’ in the Peacock Cloak collection. It was originally published in the anthology Conflicts, edited by Ian Whates.)

Some centuries after the Jews were expelled from Jerusalem by the Romans, the Britons – ancestors of the Welsh, Cornish and Bretons – were driven from what is now England by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. You might think of Logres as a purely mythical lost kingdom of Arthurian romance, but if you drive from Wales into England along the M4, you will see a bilingual sign that welcomes you both to England and to Loegr*.

In this alternate history story, in which the Britons have come to reclaim their ancestral homeland, I’ve tinkered with the past to make the British situation a little more like the Middle Eastern one: I’ve had the Britons expelled by the Romans before the Saxons arrived, and given them a religion which tells them that Logres was bequeathed to them by God.

The language they speak is Welsh, which I studied for a brief period when I lived near Bangor. If there are mistakes, let’s put it down to the fact this is a parallel timeline.

Here’s an interesting programme about an Israeli journalist covering the real-life experience of being occupied.

*The Welsh word for England is actually Lloegr, but it becomes Loegr if you’re travelling to it. In the same way Bangor becomes Fangor if you’re going to it, and Mangor if you’re in it. Languages are so gratuitously complicated!

A watery city

Port Meadow Sunset — Port Meadow sunset, taken by OxOx from Oxford, UK*

(This post is about the story ‘Greenland’, in the Peacock Cloak collection. It was first published in Interzone.)

Walton St is in North Oxford where I grew up. To the west of it is the Oxford Canal, and a little way beyond that is the great expanse of Port Meadow (above), into which the river Thames overspills every winter. I used to play there as a child, and swim in the river with my friends and sisters.

Oxford is a watery city, and North Oxford’s odd elongated shape, in particular, is determined by the Thames and its flood plain on one side, and on the other side, the river Cherwell, where people go punting and canoeing.

* * *

Both this story and ‘Day 29’ are partly thought experiments about the boundaries of our moral universe. Who do we feel obliged to care about? What is it that allows us not to care?

These are fairly salient questions when it comes to climate change, since collectively we seem to be having difficulty caring very much at all about our own descendants.

*Details here.

The golden apples of the sun

(Post about the story ‘Poppyfields’, included in the Peacock Cloak collection. It was first published in Interzone.)

As I have said before, I find landfill sites and waste ground oddly fascinating.

With landfill sites it is the processes taking place beneath the ground that I find absorbing to think about, the slow breakdown of human refuse as it gradually finds its way back into mineral form. We tend to think of human rubbish as the enemy of nature, but of course in another sense it is part of nature. Plastic bags or linnets. Nature, like Poppyfields, doesn’t care.

* * *

I named Angus Wendering after the poem by W.B.Yeats, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’. (There is a musical setting of it by Christy Moore, which is actually where I encountered it).

I went down to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
I cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And hooked a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
When something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded in the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and hold her hand;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

Beautiful in a way, but it’s a dangerous dream, that dream of a magical, glimmering girl, a dream that can lead to cruel, dark places.

It’s interesting how the poem both delivers and does not deliver a resolution in its final lines. The poem itself reaches those golden and silver apples, plucks them and gathers them in, but it leaves Aengus still searching for them. He’ll never find them of course.