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.

8 thoughts on “Imaginary/real”

  1. I really enjoyed Dark Eden – the ending was a bit of a surprise. I half thought they were going to discover the planet was tidally locked as they explored. I loved their longing for an imagined Earth and the perspectives of each character. Excellent read.

  2. Hi Chris

    I wrote you just after finishing DE, in the full afterglow. The glow did diminish over the ensuing weeks.
    Strangely, this week, it returned.
    With the Solstice nearing I have become very aware of living inside the radiance of our Sun, even on dreary, wet days as this.
    I never really felt that before, kinda feeling inside it.
    Is that a bit weird?
    Anyway, the experience reminded me of the part where one character described living on sunlit Earth as like looking inside a luminescent lantern.
    It is heart breaking to imagine anything different, and amazing to realise where we are.
    I sort of compare Eden to a dark psychological state, one that is inescapable, but also has new and creative possibilities maybe like Blakes Adam.
    I’ll toast you come June 21st!
    R

  3. A dark place that’s inescapable but has creative possibilities. Absolutely. That’s how the world seems to me, and I guess that was what the legend of the Fall was invented for.

  4. I really thought Eden was going to turn out to be some sort of experiment contained within an artificial biosphere. I couldn’t tell whether the experiment was still being monitored or whether the observer(s) were long gone and the system continued to run in a self-sustained way, exceeding its intended limits. But as it transpired, the point was obviously moot!

  5. Hello, Mark. You visualised a surprise ending a bit like Aldiss’s Non-Stop. I felt that an ending like that would wreck the world I’d made.

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