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.

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