All posts | Chris Beckett's Fiction

Isolation story: (16) Johnny’s New Job

Not the most subtle story I’ve ever written.

I used to be a social worker and then a manager of a team of social workers. This story poured out of me more or less in a single burst of rage, when the ‘Baby P’ tragedy was in in the news (the murder of Peter Connolly by his mothers boyfriend), and the media and the government were conducting one of their periodic carnivals of shame. During a previous such event, a fellow team manager had told me, ‘I managed to get my kids out of the house just half an hour before the TV cameras arrived on my lawn’.

My experience in that job has made me much more forgiving than most people are of the ‘mistakes’ made not only by social workers but by anyone who has to make decisions in real time, in the messiness and uncertainty of the real world. I did not feel inclined to condemn the police officer who ran towards an innocent Brazilian electrician and shot him, believing him to be a suicide bomber. And I will not be one of those calling for heads to roll in the aftermath of this Covid-19 episode. Hindsight makes all kind of things look like obvious mistakes that simply don’t look that way at all when they are happening.

This story first appeared in Interzone in 2010 and is collected in The Peacock Cloak.

Isolation story: (15) The Gates of Eden

Nothing whatever to do with my Eden books, this is a short, non-SF story from my Spring Tide story collection. The only connection is the myth of ‘the fall’ itself.

‘The Gates of Eden’ qualifies as an isolation story, I’d say, simply on the grounds that there is only one person in the whole story: a middle-aged businesswoman on her way to a difficult meeting.

Isolation story: (14) The Land of Grunts and Squeaks

Something happens which means that people can no longer relate to one another as they used to do, and have to find new ways of communicating.

The stories I’ve been collecting together here all deal with isolation of some kind or other, but this one is surely the closest analogue of the isolation we’re currently experiencing.

This story was written for a recent anthology called Once Upon a Parsec, published by Newcon Press, and edited by David Gullen, who had the brilliant idea of ‘fairytales told by aliens’ as a theme. Do check it out. There are stories by Jaine Fenn, Una McCormack, Kim Lakin-Smith, Paul Di Filippo, Adrian Tchaikovsky and many others.

My thanks to Ian Whates of Newcon Press for permission to use the story here.

Isolation story: (13) We Could Be Sisters

One of my best stories.

The character Jessica Ferne previously appeared in the story ‘The Turing Test’ which I included as the third of these ‘isolation stories’.

The artist, Julian Smart, also appears as the major character in another story of mine, ‘Creation’, which is in my collection, Spring Tide.

I like stories that link together. Tammy also appeared in two other stories. One was called ‘Tammy Pendant’ – I incorporated it into my novel Marcher. It caused a minor controversy when it was published in Asimov’s SF in 2004, and contributed to the magazine being withdrawn from school libraries in one of the Midwestern states, I forget which. The other story with Tammy in it was called ‘Poppyfields’ and is included in my Peacock Cloak collection.

‘We Could Be Sisters’ also first appeared in Asimov’s in 2004, and is included in my first short story collection, The Turing Test.

Isolation story: (12) The Famous Cave Paintings on Isolus 9

It’s got a somewhat preposterous space-opera-y setting (a writer with his own private starship!) but this story is very definitely about isolation. It’s even there in the title.

The character Clancy originally appeared in another story, collected in The Turing Test, called ‘The Marriage of Sky and Sea.’ He’s also the narrator of a story called ‘Monsters’.

This story was first published by Postscripts in 2009 (in anthology #19, Enemy of the Good), and subsequently included in my second collection, The Peacock Cloak.

Isolation story: (11) Karel’s Prayer

I can’t imagine anything that would make me feel more isolated than being completely in the power of enemies who meant me harm.

This story was first published in Interzone in 2006 and is included in my first collection, The Turing Test.

Isolation story: (10) The End of Time

What you get here is the entire history of the universe, an explanation for the Fermi paradox, and a debate about the purpose of life. Say what you like about my stories, they deal with the big questions.

You also get isolation of the most extreme kind.

This story comes from my Spring Tide collection (which I’d very much like more people to read). Most of the stories in the book are more-or-less realist stories with contemporary settings, and none is science fiction – but ‘The End of the Time’ is the one that comes closest.

Isolation story: (9) The Perimeter

The isolation in this case consists, for two of the characters, in being among the last real human beings left in London, and, for one character, in discovering that they are…

Well, read the story.

This story, another personal favourite of mine, first appeared in Asimov’s SF in 2005 and was collected in The Turing Test.

Isolation story: (8) To Become a Warrior

Finding it hard to concentrate on new work at the moment, I’m taking a ridiculous amount of care over my choice of these isolation stories, and the sequence I present them in! If you want the full effect, scroll down and start at (1) and read through them in order.

‘To Become a Warrior’ appeared in Interzone in 2002, and was included in Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best anthology for that year. I never included it in one of my own short story collections because I used it instead as an element of my novel Marcher.

Towards the turn of this century I became aware that there was a reaction on the way against liberal, secular, technocratic modernity (and I was right!) This was reflected in my first novel, The Holy Machine, as well as in the group of short stories which became Marcher.

This version of To Become a Warrior, which I posted on this site a couple of years ago, has a different ending from the one originally published. I felt that was more appropriate in the world as it now was. (In the novel, which deals with parallel time lines, there are three different endings to the story, as Carl makes three different choices.)

I am myself a former social worker. A ‘deskie’ in the terms of this story.

Isolation stories: (7) Aphrodite

This is another of my personal favourites and comes from my most recent collection, Spring Tide. Since the two characters only meet very briefly in the middle of the story I think it qualifies as an isolation story. Being alone isn’t always bad.

Like ‘The Kite’ (story 4), it contains no science fictional elements whatever, except perhaps that in both cases I try to come at familiar places on Earth as if they were on an alien planet.

My beautiful granddaughter is called Aphrodite, as it happens, but she is only one, and this was written two or three years before she was born.