All posts | Chris Beckett's Fiction

About The Holy Machine

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).

HMcover — The original Wildside cover had no writing at all, only this striking image by Wilhelm Steiner

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!’

Imaginary/real

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.

Living in Omelas

I worked for 18 years of my life, as a social worker and social work manager, in the field of children and families. I now work part-time as a lecturer in social work. In the course of my work I recently came across this interesting book, by Mark Drakeford and Ian Butler, which looks at the Maria Colwell child abuse inquiry and its legacy. I guess this, to most people, will seem a topic of rather specialist interest, but it occurs to me that it is, or ought to be, of more general concern.

Maria Colwell died in Brighton in 1973, at the age of 7, as a result of physical abuse by her stepfather, Mr Kepple. Social workers had placed Maria in the care of her mother and stepfather after she had been fostered for several years by an aunt. When Maria died, two social workers from two different agencies had been visiting the family, as had an Education Welfare Officer, and concerns had been expressed for some time about Maria’s care by neighbours and others. Why had she been returned home? Why had warning signs not been acted on? The Inquiry resulted in the child protection system which still, broadly speaking, continues to exist, but it also laid down the pattern for a succession of similar public inquiries that were to follow, at regular intervals, up to the present time, Victoria Climbié and Peter Connelly (Baby P) being famous and relatively recent examples. They have become an odd kind of ritual (whose atavistic nature I tried to capture in my story ‘Johnny’s New Job’). Public acts of contrition are performed. New procedures and guidelines are introduced. Individuals are named, sacked and subjected to media lynching.

(The savagery of the latter has grown steadily more extreme since the Colwell case. Not only social workers and other professionals, but their children and family members, have been subjected to harassment and abuse. When the Baby P scandal was blowing up, The Sun newspaper printed photographs of some of the professionals involved, with a phone number under each, so that readers could call and dish the dirt.)

Curiously – and I tried to capture this in Johnny’s New Job – public interest in these occasional high-profile scandals is not matched by an interest in the roughly 2 children a week who die in the UK as a result of maltreatment by their carers, or interest in the social conditions in which abuse and neglect tends to occur (for child abusers, believe or not, do not just spring spontaneously into being).

As for the critique of the professionals involved, and particularly of my own profession of social work, it remains pretty consistent. The charges are incompetence, negligence, naïvity (and of course I don’t deny that these things can be present) but also that the social workers are motivated by ideology rather than common sense. However the nature of the ideology that social workers are charged with being wedded to has an odd habit of suddenly switching from one thing to its opposite, like the identity of the enemy in Orwell’s 1984. (Remember the Great Hate, when the enemy started out being Eastasia, and switched halfway through to being Eurasia, with Eastasia as the trusted ally?) In the Colwell Inquiry, as Butler and Drakeford remind us, social workers were charged with being obsessed with blood ties, which had resulted in them taking Maria from loving foster-carers and returning her to her neglectful mother. But the exact opposite charge is also laid from time to time. This, for example, is from a Daily Mail article written in 2005 which alleged that children were being removed unnecessarily from loving parents:

Today in the Daily Mail we reveal the profoundly disturbing details of how decent people can be caught up in a nightmare they don’t understand, how happy, cared-for children can be torn from their mothers and given to strangers and how a remorseless administrative machine insists it’s all for the best.

Of course it is entirely possible to err in both directions, and I’ve no doubt that this occurs, but the fact remains that, if children are not to be removed from their parents at the first whiff of the possibility of their coming to harm, this means leaving children with parents in situations which might turn out to be harmful. Wherever the threshold is drawn for draconian interventions, there will be false positives and false negatives. Failure to accept this can lead to a system that becomes preoccupied with the pursuit of information, of unattainable certainty, at the expense of its wider brief of providing help and support.

But again, these more nuanced arguments are of very little general interest, as compared to the interest that is aroused by the great set piece of the ‘child abuse scandal’, the calls for sackings and so on. There’s something much more primitive going on here than the rational activity of trying to understand why a tragedy has occurred.

As is often the case, a great SF writer has something to say on all this. Ursula Le Guin, in her superlative story ‘The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas’ (along with her ‘Semley’s Necklace’ it is one of the best short stories I have ever read), spends most of the word-count conjuring up a utopian society called Omelas, full of pleasures and delights of every kind. Only towards the end, do we learn that the price to be paid for all of this is paid by a single wretched child, held captive and abused in a squalid cellar.

Unfortunately, the real world is like this. Those of us who live secure and comfortable lives, must do so in the knowledge that, hidden away from us, but probably not far away, are others, children, who cannot conceivably be to blame for the situations they find themselves in, living with violence and hatred and horror. If we are to enjoy our pleasures, our meals in restaurants, our holidays, our interesting jobs, then we have to find a way of doing this in the knowledge of these others who are, figuratively if not literally, imprisoned in their cellars nearby. We want to put them out of our mind, but, more than that, we want to feel justified in doing so, and one excellent way of achieving this is by telling ourselves that something ought to be done about those children, but it is someone else’s job . That way, if we find ourselves confronted with direct evidence of those children down in their cellars, we are released from guilt, and can feel instead a righteous and indignant rage.

This isn’t to say that professionals involved in these scandals are necessarily blameless, but only to point out that by heaping blame on them, we don’t magically exonerate ourselves.

Plastic life

My friend Mark drew my attention to these amazing beach-dwelling creatures built by Theo Jansen out of plastic tubing and plastic bottles (see also here). They are powered entirely by the wind, and they even possess rudimentary senses: Jansen shows how some of them are able to detect water and so avoid walking into the sea. But no electronics are involved at all. There’s no ‘black box’. It’s all there to see.

Watch these for a bit, and you really do get some sense of what is going on when life first starts to emerge from inanimate matter.

Parsifal

Another random musical treat. The prelude to Wagner’s Parsifal.

When I was a child I had a book by Roger Lancelyn Green called ‘King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table’. It was one of several books that I read so often that it fell apart. Actually, looking back, some pretty weird ideas were smuggled into my mind by that book, as they were by the books of Green’s teacher and friend C.S.Lewis. (What exactly is a small boy to make of a scene, for instance, where some knights stop in the nick of time from getting off with some pretty and delightful women, and the women promptly turn into hellish fiends? It probably scarred me for life.) But it’s quite a story, and a great example of a story that itself has a story, travelling from Britain across Europe and back again, acquiring new themes, settings, characters and subplots as it went. Even as a child I enjoyed that idea, of the story itself having a story.

The roots of it all seem to lie in the period after the Romans abandoned Britain (in 410 CE), when the Romanised and Christianised Celtic population (linguistic forebears of the Welsh, Cornish and Bretons) were attempting to fight off invasion by the pagan Germanic peoples- Angles, Saxons and Jutes – who were to become the English. Hence the lost kingdom of Logres, which Arthur’s order of knights was formed to defend. (Travel out of Wales along the M4, and you will see on the bilingual sign, ‘Welcome to England. Croeso i Loegr’. It’s still Logres in Welsh, and the English are still Saxons*, though, in one of those shifts that occur with these organic stories over time, the English came to think of Arthur as a mythical king of England, rather than a king who tried to prevent England from coming into being.)

But this only forms one element even in the main narrative arc of the Arthurian story. Another introduces a kind of original sin: Arthur’s incestuous liaison with his sister, Morgan La Fey, which resulted in the birth of his son Mordred who was eventually to betray him. Another deals with a different sexual sin that tainted the honour of the Round Table and also ultimately played a key part in its destruction: the famous adulterous affair between Lancelot and Guinevere (which is echoed by the similar story of Tristram and Iseult). Another is the quest for the Grail. And of course there are countless other stories within the main arc. There are layers and layers to be mined here.

Wagner’s Parsifal isn’t even set in Britain, and it doesn’t deal with King Arthur’s knights, but it is based (from a medieval German source) on one of the most well-known stories within the Arthurian cycle (also drawn upon by T.S.Eliot in The Wasteland), the story of the Fisher King, the maimed guardian of the Grail, who lives in perpetual agony as a result of a wound inflicted on him by the sacred spear which pierced Christ’s side on the cross, the Dolorous Stroke of Arthurian legend. Only a ‘pure fool, enlightened by pity’ – Parsifal himself – can heal it.

The same themes, uncomfortable to modern ears, of sexual guilt and sexual pollution, run as obsessively through the opera as they run through the Arthurian stories in general, and, at some 5 hours long, the opera itself is quite a challenge just to get through – ‘I’ll think I’ll scream if that king tells us one more time about how he longs to die’, my son observed in the interval of a recent performance – but it contains some really exquisite music, including this famous prelude, which apart from being one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written, seems to me to distill the particular mood or gestalt that has given this particular cycle of stories such extraordinary longevity.

* Relics of this ancient struggle are to be found all over England. Outside Cambridge, a few miles from where I live, is Fleam Dyke, a massive earthwork built by an East Anglian king to defend his lands against Celtic British forces.

Thief relief

I just spotted a site offering pirated e-books, which, rather wonderfully, asks its users to support it with donations. “As you see,” it points out, “all of our books are completely free so we really need some funds to keep our service alive.”

Unlike writers, apparently.

It’s good, Jim, but is it SF?

In a previous post – in fact in more than one, if I’m honest – I bemoaned the fact that a large number of general readers of intelligent fiction will never look at my stuff simply because it’s science fiction. The odd thing is that, more than once, I’ve seen reviews by people who do read SF saying that my books aren’t really SF at all.

Here’s an example. I’m not complaining in any way about this kind and wonderfully positive review of Dark Eden (which I very much hope will tempt some of those non-SF readers to give the book a try.) I’m also not saying the reviewer is wrong: there is no single straightforward definition, after all, of what is SF and what is not. But I am genuinely curious to know why he/she thinks that Dark Eden ‘isn’t really science-fiction, although it is set on an alien planet’.

It is set on an alien planet, a planet with no sun, with an entire ecology of animal and plant-like lifeforms which have evolved to generate their own light and derive their energy from the planet’s own hot core. And it deals with the descendants of two marooned astronauts, trying to come to terms with this world. This is easily science-fictional enough, I’m pretty certain, to exclude the majority of non-SF readers, so I wonder in what sense might the book be described as not really being SF?

I’m honestly not sure, but I think possibly what this and one or two other reviewers may mean is that, having established this world, I let it become the background to a human story, rather than the source, in itself, of the plot. The story is about the lives of the people in Eden, their society, their emerging politics, rather than being based on a series of revelations about the nature of Eden itself. Is that it, I wonder?

My personal feeling about those revelation-type plots is that they tend to spoil the fictional world. Although in a way it is background, in another way the planet Eden is, to me, absolutely the core and heart of the book. And I wanted the reader to experience Eden as we experience our own planet, as the foundation of the characters’ lives, rather than as a puzzle or a riddle to be unpicked and solved. It’s a matter of personal taste, but, with one or two great exceptions, I’ve never been that keen on ‘mystery’ plots in general. (I’ve never really taken to whodunits, for instance.) I don’t feel that solving puzzles is fundamentally what life is about.

Does this way of using my science fictional backdrop means that the book as a whole ‘isn’t really SF’? It’s not for me to say. I aim to write a book that it would please me to read, and don’t consciously seek either to celebrate or to challenge the traditions and conventions of any particular genre. I simply go with what seems to work. And since what works for me always seems to involve alien planets, or robots, or time travel, or virtual reality, or parallel timelines, I’ve always assumed that it was SF.

The dream of the hidden hand

I was interested in this article by James Meek (in LRB) about electricity privatisation. Mrs Thatcher spoke of privatising nationalised industries as ‘giving power back to the people’, by allowing people across the country to buy their own shares. But what has actually happened, following the bargain basement sale, is that much of our electricity industry is now owned by foreign corporations. The biggest irony of all is that the largest of those foreign proprietors is EDF, which itself is a nationalised industry, albeit French. As Meek observes, ‘In Thatcherite terms, EDF was a public sector mammoth that would inevitably be hunted to extinction by the hungry and agile competitors of post-privatisation countries like Britain.’

What does this tell us? You could argue that all the talk about shareholder democracy, and giving power back to the people was a cynical trick. But I think Mrs Thatcher was a conviction politician, and in her own way a revolutionary, and my guess is that she really believed in all that stuff. What I take from this kind of story is that the dream of the pure unfettered market is, in its own way as utopian and impractical as some of the dreams of the left. As the left-wing rhetoric of worker’s power ended up under Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, as cover for tyranny, so talk of the unfettered market and free competition and the hidden hand, ends up as a cover for giant monopolist corporations. (See Thomas Frank for more on this). The ideology that sells itself above all as practical common sense, is perhaps a starry-eyed dream, like most overly simple ideas.

Recording of my Greenbelt talk

Dark Eden was selected as the ‘Big Read’ for the 2012 Green Belt festival (quite an honour, I thought), and I was invited to give a talk there. The talk is available here, though I’m afraid you have to pay for it (as an MP3 or a CD) .

I say ‘talk’. Much of it is actually more of a conversation in which I get to speak the most. As I’ve mentioned before, there were some interesting and original questions asked.

Recognition / estrangement

I complained yesterday about the fact that many people will dismiss a book simply because it is science fiction. One explanation for this offered by China Miéville is that our literary establishment has for some time* valued story-telling that presents the familiar to us, over story-telling that presents us with the unfamiliar. It values ‘the literature of recognition’, over ‘the literature of estrangement’.

It is certainly the case that for a long time literature has been dominated by the realist novel, characterised by Miéville as ‘limpidly observed interiority, decodable metaphors, strained middle-class relationships and eternal truths of the human condition’, and I guess that does explain snootiness about novels set in imagined worlds, but, that said, I’m not sure that it’s really helpful to place recognition and estrangement at opposite ends of a spectrum.

It seems to me that, far from being opposites, recognition and estrangement are two sides of the same coin. True recognition requires estrangement first, in order to shake off the numbing that comes with familiarity. (That’s how metaphor works: that’s why Homer’s ‘wine-dark sea’ is striking, because you don’t expect sea to be compared with something red.) I’ve noticed that when film-makers want to achieve a sense of heightened reality, they use both slow motion and speeded up motion. It’s not that there is something intrinsically less exciting about the actual speed at which life is lived. It’s just that unfamiliarity sheds a new and different light which makes us notice things. You have to step away from a thing to see it.

As T.S.Eliot wrote (though I’m sure he wasn’t the first or last):

…the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

A novel that showed us only familiar things from an entirely familiar perspective would be dull to the point of unreadability, and no decent realist novel ever really does this. But a novel which offered strangeness with no point of connection with our own experience, would be equally unreadable. Even (for instance) the famous Star Gate sequence in the film 2001, which might at first sight be a good example of completely baffling weirdness, works (or works for me) because it makes a connection with something inside ourselves. We are star-dust, after all, we are billion-year old carbon, as Joni Mitchell said. Middle class relationships, limpid interiority and all the rest it, are a very very temporary phase.

It’s not so much a case of choosing estrangement over recognition, as allowing the interplay of estrangement and recognition to take us a bit further from our taken-for-granted selves.

*I say ‘for some time’ because it hasn’t always been this way. Most of the famous early works of literature are fantastical rather than realist.