NewBlog – Page 53 – Chris Beckett's Fiction

Us from the future

I’ve read a couple of books lately about the Tudor era: Anna Whitlock’s book about Mary Tudor, and Chris Skidmore’s book about Edward VI (Edward and Mary being a brother and sister under whose reigns first Catholics and then Protestants were persecuted). I also recently saw the film The Other Boleyn Girl, which I enjoyed, and seemed true to what I had read about the Tudor world-view, though I gather its not that strong on historical accuracy., and which prompted me to think more that time in history.

I’m struck – as I always am when I see Shakespeare plays – with how different people’s world view was. The acceptance of extraordinarily cruel punishments. The killing of political opponents as more or less standard procedure. The way that family duties flow upwards (children to parents) rather than downwards, and the way that the needs of a family’s ‘head’ trump the wishes of individual members. The strange mix of a very frank and earthy way of talking about sex with strict rules about marriage and inheritance. The massive double standards about chastity and sexual fidelity. The seemingly cynical manipulation of religion oddly combined with a faith so intense that people are willing to die horribly for it…

The Tudor world-view seems strange and even perverse from the perspective of now, and I wonder what about our own present western world view will seem equally strange and perverse from the future. My guess is that we will be seen as having elevated the human individual to an odd degree: with individual freedom of choice as the supreme good, or in any case held up as such. (For of course just like the Tudors we are capable of holding something up as supremely important but not necessarily treating it consistently as such in practice) .

I’m not very well-read in these matters but I guess this sanctification of individual choice is a product of capitalism. The customer is always right. (Again, as a matter of theory and rhetoric, though not necessarily in practice). In the modern UK, even the citizens of the state are constructed as its customers, always justifiably aggrieved by the poor service, and always deserving of a better one. In Tudor times, from what I can see, the idea of ‘citizens’ as customers of the state would have simply seemed bizarre. Rather they would have been component elements within it, each one supposed to play a part, like cells in the body politic.

I guess there are other ways of seeing this relationship between individual and society, perhaps as yet inconceivable.

Christopher Priest: Inverted World

Feeling that I would like to steep myself a little more in the history of the genre in which I write, I’ve been buying books in Gollancz’s SF Masterworks series, and have just finished this one which I had never come across before. The cover sold it to me, and more than most covers do, sums up what the book is about.

Priest’s own website includes a scathing review of this book by Martin Amis (complete with a spitefully gratuitous spoiler), pointing out the wild implausibility of the story. Amis also suggests that a ‘courteous editor’ would have reduced the first 100-odd pages to more like 20.

It’s true that there are a lot of holes in the story. It isn’t plausible and, even looked at within its own terms, there are obvious questions left unanswered (why, when the inhabitants of the city are constantly interacting with the people around them, has no one in the past 200 years ever thought of asking the locals where they actually are?)

But the central image is incredibly compelling. A city is perpetually being very slowly hauled along railway tracks that must be laid ahead of it, and then taken up again after it has passed. It must keep moving forward to escape annihilation which is never far behind it. Surveyors go out ahead of it (or ‘up future’ as the characters in the story call it, for they conflate distance and time and measure their lives in miles) to try and work out the best route to follow. Others ride out from the city to recruit locals to labour for them… and to bear them children, for the city does not produce enough girls of its own.

Amis’ comment about the length of the first 100 pages misses the point. The joy of this book is this central image. It’s very rich in metaphorical possibilities and we need time and the accumulation of detail to let us savour it, let it soak in, allow us to inhabit it. One Amazon reviewer mentions that the book prompted a very vivid dream. Yes, this city on rails does have a feel that is like the odd places we come back to again and again in our dreams, full of meaning, yet not amenable to simply being decoded into a single, simple message.

New story: ‘Day 29’

I have just sold this new story to Asimov’s. It is about a man cut loose from the scrutiny not only of people around him but even of his own future self. Asimov’s editor, Sheila Williams, described the story as ‘horror’. Though I have never thought of myself as writing in the horror genre, I suppose it is. In her Locus review, Lois Tilton also described my recent story ‘The Desiccated Man’ as horror. No guts and gore in either of them, no screaming or cowering behind battered doors, but they do both deal with evil and where it comes from. It seems to be something I am thinking about more.

The Space Merchants

It can be disappointing rereading a book that impressed you years ago. When I attempted to reread Kerouac’s On the Road, which at 19 I thought was wonderful, I couldn’t get more than a few pages into it. It was sentimental, baggy, misogynistic, and I couldn’t get past that to see the energy that had first impressed me.

But, though I must have read The Space Merchants by Pohl & Kornbluth at at even earlier age, I was just as impressed with it on recently rereading it as I was first time round the better part of four decades ago.

Like all SF of its era, it depicts a ‘future’ that falls very wide of the mark technologically (daily passenger shuttles to the moon, but no computers or mobile phones), but considering it was written in 1952, it is impressively relevant. The global struggle between Capitalism and Communism that was occurring at that the time the book was written, has long since passed. The adversary of rampant global capitalism is not communism but conservationism. Consies not commies, are the pariahs. Advertising agencies, and their huge networks of interlocking sales campaigns, rule.

I’d forgotten (or more likely did not notice aged 16) how funny the book is. Told from the viewpoint of Mitchell Courtenay who as a star class copysmith with the Fowler Schocken advertising agency (vastly superior in his eyes to the sleazy Taunton agency), is a member of the elite who (for much of the book) accepts the rules of his own society without question, a society in which sales are everything and even to mention a concern about the environment is to mark oneself out as a consie sympathiser.

“She’d been bought up in a deeply moral, sales-fearing home…”

“…the basic drive of the human race is sex. And what is, essentially, more important in life than to mould and channel the deepest torrential flow of human emotion into its proper directions? (I am not apologizing for those renegades who talk fancifully about some imagined ‘Death-Wish’ to hook their sales appeals to. I leave that sort of thing to the Tauntons of our profession: it’s dirty, it’s immoral, I want nothing to do with it. Besides, it leads to fewer consumers in the long run, if only they’d think the thing through.)”

“The Crunchies kicked off withdrawal symptoms that could be quelled only by another two squirts of Popsie from the fountain. And Popsie kicked off withdrawal symptoms that could only be quelled by smoking Starr cigarettes, which made you hungry for Crunchies… ”

You have to read the book and read these things in context to get the full effect. It’s brilliant satire. Still sharp after almost half a century.

Sunless worlds

My imaginary planet Eden has no sun. It is not even in a galaxy, and the entire Milky Way galaxy can be seen from it as an immense starry swirl in the sky. However like the earth it has a hot core, and this heat has provided the energy for life.

When I originally dreamed up this planet (for the short story ‘The Circle of Stones’) I had no idea whether such a thing actually existed, but I have since discovered that, yes, it is a serious possibility (see: ‘Sunless but livable planets may be detectable‘). And after all, even on Earth, there are life forms that do not derive their energy from the sun.

Eden (I envisage) originally had a rocky surface entirely covered by ice. Life evolved in pools of meltwater under the ice. (Sub-glacial lakes, such as Lake Vostok in Antartica, are a phenomenon on Earth: the ice above provides insulation for the geothermal heat). One large life form that emerged was able to pump sap down into hot rocks underground in order to heat it up, and then pump it out through a network of roots or branches extending upwards and outwards through the ice, melting it for oxygen and nutrients, and so creating spaces for other life-forms to exploit.

Eventually considerable areas of the surface of Eden were completely cleared of ice and these large life-forms emerged into the newly formed atmosphere, and began to exploit the potential of this new open environment. Animal-like life forms emerged into the open with them, along with parasitic plant-like forms.

By the time humans arrived on Eden, huge areas of the surface were covered with forests of ‘trees’, which hummed constantly with the sound of sap being pumped up and down from hot rocks far below the surface. Like deep sea life-forms on earth, animals and plant-like forms made use of bioluminescence. The trees have luminous flowers known to the human settlers as ‘lanterns’, which attract the flying creatures they know as ‘bats’, ‘birds’ and ‘flutterbyes’. Streams and pools are also full of luminous life, as is the ocean which its human discoverers call Worldpool, for they have lost the word for ‘ocean’ through lack of use.

The True Deceiver, by Tove Jansson

As a child I loved the Moomintroll books by Tove Jansson. She created (both in words and in pictures) an utterly absorbing and intricate world that was comforting, yet mysterious and not without sadness. They were like nothing else and I found them completely enchanting.

It’s nice to have one’s childhood judgements confirmed. I recently read one of her adult novels – published in English as The True Deceiver – and I found it just as absorbing and fascinating as I had found her children’s books, and just as original (I have never read anything like it).

The main protagonist, Katri, is a strange solitary woman with yellow eyes who despises friendliness and the ordinary pleasantries of life as being fake and dishonest. She doesn’t even give a name to her dog. The book deals with Katri’s relationship with an elderly and wealthy writer of children’s books who likes to be seen as likeable and nice. Slowly they change one another.

It is much darker than the children’s books, and yet has a lot in common with them too: its creation of an absorbing world, evoked in a wonderfully concrete and quite sensual way, its evocation of a Nordic spring, emerging from under ice and snow, its interest in solitude and integrity… (The Moomin books include many proud and solitary characters too).

Quite brilliant! The Summer Book is great too.

About ‘Two Thieves’

I have just sold a new story to Asimov’s called ‘Two Thieves’. The only revision requested was could I please reduce the number of times I used the word ‘fuck’ or ‘fucking’. Well the story concerns two rough characters, who would swear a lot, and that’s why I had sprinkled their talk with these words, words which I also feel free to use myself fairly frequently in speech. But I ended up not just cutting them down but taking them out altogether and was actually quite pleased to do so.

I remember David Pringle of Interzone once said in a similar situation that swearing carries a different weight on the page than it does in speech. In writing dialogue we can’t simply recreate speech as it is spoken. I think that is true. We don’t for example reproduce the number of unfinished sentences, grammatical errors, and mis-speakings of words that actually occur in spontaneous speech. To create the impression of ordinary speech we actually have to do something other than simply mimic it. (In the same way, perhaps, that to create the impression of ordinary hands, cartoon animators have to draw hands with less than five fingers. Or so I have heard.)

The ending of stories

It’s occurred to me lately that our biggest problem with life is not the amount of suffering in it, but the fact that suffering doesn’t come in the right place.

Imagine a story in which the protagonist experiences trouble and pain all the way through. Finally, at the very end, he finds happiness and peace. That is, by common consent, a happy story. But a story in which he has happiness at the beginning, but then has trouble and pain all the way to the end, would be a sad story. So would a story where he is sad at the beginning, happy in the middle, but sad again at the end. Even if the sadness and happiness are in the same proportions as in the happy story. I guess it is because we tend to think of the end as the resting place, the place where life will settle down when the story is over.

If the trouble with life is not the existence of suffering, but the fact that suffering is all mixed up with the other stuff, then this is something that the traditional fairy-tale type story corrects for us. (So does traditional religion, where the good guys end up in heaven, and the bad guys get their due).

Literary short fiction, aware of the over-neatness of the ‘happy ending’, tends these days to end on an ambiguous or unresolved note. The wooden shutter bangs in the wind. Life doesn’t reach a resolution. It just goes on…

But since a story does actually have to stop, this final unresolved note does not actually sound quite like life just going on. It has a particular wistful, slightly plaintive ring of its own, which in its way is as artificial as a fairy tale happy ending, and can get a bit tedious. Life isn’t always wistful, and wistfulness certainly isn’t its natural resting place. Sometimes, for instance, we can feel completely at peace, even to the point of being entirely reconciled to the fact that the feeling of peace won’t go on forever.

Maybe to reflect the full diversity of available ending moments, it would be good to try and get away a bit from that plaintive, wistful and unresolved note, and try and end on as many different notes as possible, including cheerful ones.